It's back

shakshigishigishakshigishigiwhoooowaah...

Hullo, dear four or five friends and millions of secret readers. Just got home from a two-month trip through the time-space warp on Shaider's electric blue bike (Mighty thanks, mister space policeman! Had a blast. Don't forget to call! :p).

Now back

to regular programming:

Kraftwerk Zahl Ein

Syntax

Is the thing you first learn, twisting text,

Scrabbling words: A B.A.

Language and Literature

Student with a sure hand turning

The world quickly over, over

That semester I was inspecting the fallen

Cracked face and all

The while insisting on order

On the page.

Later you are in a cold room

Watching, world-wary sophomore,

Your country’s history dismantling on TV,

A documentary, how it was arranged

Into tricky poetry: Aguinaldo is not the hero

We were made to believe and keep

In our pockets, the precious face on five-peso bills

And they were not

Benevolent, only themselves: an empire

Expanding, but surely noble in trying

To glue back the world together

How they wanted.

At the turn of the last century,

An assembly of twenty houses.

Kafagway was discovered on a mountain

To be ten degrees cooler, igniting

In the heat-hating settlers’ heads

An idea: smooth the slopes with systems of streets,

Train trees to grow in grids, carve a city

On the mountain’s plain face, build a lake.

Commemorate the drowned. Name the creation

After the old village word for moss:

Begyiw. Open its arms to benefactors

And later, to summer

Vacationers who would take it, slowly

Apart again, like so many bachelors

Of arts. Later you leave,

Graduate, the room, mountain.

Later you are looking at the structures

Across an office window and the random

Punctuations of trees in between

So that the city is rambling on and on and on and on and on and

I still do not get it. You are ordering

The words. Be still.

Relax. What you are doing is usually starting: sorting your life through

The page. Later you will let yourself out and in

The world. For now, write

History. Make it

Scrambled and twisted like your country's. Feel free.

Only now there is a kid tearing open

A book way after classes and dreaming.

He might be yours in the future,

Which should be good. But this is getting ahead

Of yourself.


(Thanks to Sir Joel, Waps and Arkaye)