Dramaturgo, Dramaturgo

Maagasan kadi ti kinadramaturgo?
Maysa a kameng ti GUMIL Hawai`i, Nov. 2007

1.
No. There is no cure to a sickness we call art,
on the stage or beyond it. We act it out,
like life, or death, or all the inbetweens:
the callousness of poets who are trying hard
to seize what metaphors can give them
to mend their broken souls
to make them live their life
die their own death, literal, poetic,
or dreamed of. We have a number of them
in our ranks, young men, old men,
vicious as viciousness can get.
They call themselves the rapacity
of similes, the virtues of hyperboles.
Some small successes getting into the head:
the small man with the stout self
the stout man with the small self
win or lose you get the cake
or its icing if you are lucky with friends
compadres patrons, those who know what fattens
your weak heart because you do not know
how to write the first dramatic lines.
We think of lies here more than truths,
or truths greater than lies: they are medals
to the seeking hand, always seeking for lost loves
on paper or from pens that do not write,
cannot write. Anywhere we go, some salving
could be quite a necessity. As if the torrents
of rain come pouring to demand of us
more poems and more poems, with their tragedies
in their titles, Ilocos poems whose endings we cannot tell
because their owners refuse decay.
They reincarnate, resurrect: they are in the commas
of complex sentences, some connectives to faulty images.


2.
It will always be this way for always from hereon.
The writer is in our midst and he writes of unrequited passion,
some tiger moons we await to resist resistance.
A period here, perhaps.
Or a conjunction somewhere
like some useless logic of a disjunct.
Either, either/or.

A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Nov 6, 2007

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