R.Torres Pandan
Disquisition on the Various Schools of PoeticThought
Whatdo you mean schools of thought?
Ichange my mind from breakfast to bedtime,
Shiftin one direction or the other in a day,
Becomeperplexed dreaming
Ofthe forms of sparrows
Orspring that will never come,
Becomepractical or otherwise clearly rational
Asis made imperative by the next line.
Itake the objective view
Witha bit of whit for history
Andthose bamboozled by it.
Orelse, I take to my bed with a noisy confessional,
Mentioningby name my wife and children
(Asit should not be, the critics claim).
Sowhile the rest of the literary world
Getsstuck in boxes made by bores for one another,
Ican slip from one place to the other
withlittle bother.
Thus,my ars poetica depends
Onwhose elusive arse I want to please—mine, mostly.
❦
Rae Rival
How mywords got lost
My words were stuck in traffic
in the city that is my mind.
The red light,
halted their forward movement.
When it finally turned green,
a huge, speeding fear truck
cut my words off.
Stunned. My words were stunned.
And the minute they recovered,
hundreds of doubts rushed
on the road, clogging the path.
And so my words decided to board a train,
but a crowd of questions greeted them.
Side by side, one after another.
What ifs hanging on the handles
attached to the ceiling.
Old people and mothers
pregnant with uncertainty,
sat on the shiny seats.
Silly statements waited
for their unclear destinations.
Dazed and shaken,
my words alighted at a strange station,
to a city of unfamiliar streets
where my words lost their significance.
❦