May iniisip ka?
Oo.
Ano?
Ayaw kong sabihin. Baka magkatotoo.
Dahil makulit ka
Kilala kita. Oo, ikaw 'yun: Nagkasalubong na tayo minsan, sa LRT, sa Gotohan, sa kanto ng Aurora at Katipunan. Nagkatinginan tayo. Hindi mo ako kinausap, pero alam ko, nakilala mo rin ako. Kaya ka narito, di ba? Para sabihing, Oo, oo, ikaw nga 'yun. Naaalala kita.
na, mula noong 24 Enero, 2006, ang nakitambay dito
Drunken Conversation with Nobel Laureate
Saturday, December 30, 2006
"If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition." - Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Lecture 1987
Here I am, Joseph. What a sad thing to say! All this talk about art has me shouting at the bathroom wall, “Oh, World, you son of a bitch,” has me talking to a Russian
when all I know of Russia is its whores. Earlier I was with some friends, looking at the scars on the moon’s surface, figuring out just how much cheap gin it would take
to drive a man blind. Joseph, it struck me then, what you said about the human condition. Just as I was about to puke, I caught myself staring at the bathroom mirror,
imagining myself asleep, dreaming of all the poems I could have written had I not been a drunkard. “What woman would want to leave a poet?” one would say,
and another, “I’ve learned not to say anything about things I can’t understand,” and another, “Here I am.” Well, here I am, Joseph, and each day my friends buy a bottle of gin
and each day I find it more and more difficult to get to a poem’s last line. Each day I come home wanting to touch the girl next door’s breasts, wanting to write
a poem about touching the girl next door’s breasts, and each day I write a few words about it, or things like it: sticking a pen up a Russian whore’s cunt,
gouging out a man’s eyes with a spoon, hacking away at your corpse to get to your shiny gold dentures, as if you were already dead,
as if you weren’t somewhere in America, snoring, keeping your dreams to yourself, the shingles on your roof listening in, straining, wanting to be told.
