This week, the UPOU Book Club invites you to read Angelo Suárez. Here is one of his poems, written and published before he turned 20 years old:
FLOOD
We have become estranged, you and I,
as the stars no longer find the asphalt-gray
of streets, the somnolent moon your skin,
the sun the sibilance of speech. How we tremble
now at the slightest hint of touch, the latch
of our desires reopening like a woundWatch me now as I say: In September’s
resolute rains, you are water – fragments
descending as drops from Manila’s urban sky.
Thus, you are everywhere, dripping down walls
and sliding off roofs, filling every crease of road
and crevice of soil. And on the rise of floodfloats the carcass of memory, taking
the muddied form of muck, filthy plastic bags,
venomous piss of rat. In this metropolitan marsh
where nothing is left but a squalid sight of swamps,
soggy lampposts, the third-world remnants
of a storm, I dip my hands and dream of fish.
An agent of conceptualist writing (“conceptualist and performative poetics”), Angelo Suárez has some of his other stuff on Lulu (www.lulu.com) where one can toss them into a shopping cart for free. These works include Circuit: The Blurb Project, Maliit lang ‘yung sa ‘yo, itabi mo, magpadaan ka: Adventures in Parataxis, Poem of Diminishing Poeticity, and Ariane: a stock epic. He also has another poetry collection, Else It Was Purely Girls, which has been a balm to those seeking more of the wordplays of the Tomasino.
It is lovely to stalk him a few full moons a year, by checking out his FB account where, apart from posting selfies with books, he wages word wars against the MRT, the Philippine PPP program and the notion of Nora Aunor as an artist. For all his accomplishments (Palanca, UNESCO Bridges of Struga International Poetry Prize, etcetera), he tethers himself to our dusty reality by sporting a beard, bringing his kid to punk gigs and occasionally demonstrating a love for canned tuna and craft beer.
What else is there to be said? Seeing pining young poets grow up, and seeing them do so with such conviction, one finds hairy dollops of hope in the world.
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[Photo (c) Astin Palacio Beltran, as shamelessly grabbed from https://www.facebook.com/gelo.suarez/photos]
The UPOU Book Club 