Cit(e)scapes EuriCarreon

CIT(E)SCAPES POEMS

“Cit(e)scapes: Poems”

Copyright © 2024 Euri Carreon

Made for ARTS 1 for “Entry 5: My Advocacy”

Published in Quezon City

You are welcome to share, build upon, and redistribute this work.

Cover Art and Designs by Euri Carreon

… The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.

Conchitina Cruz

Notes from an Angkas Ride: Four Acts of Lingering 1

On Metro Blues and Hybridity 4

There are no stars in the city (redux) 5

Orpheus Committed Suicide on España Blvd. 7

Unlearning Terminals 10

Foreground 11

NOTES FROM AN ANGKAS RIDE:

FOUR ACTS OF LINGERING

1. Nostalgia seeps through the helmet you fumble to wear, the rider greets you like an old flame while you’re burned by the lights caressing your skin, This feels like a practiced prayer. It’s one past twelve and the people once dancing around are now filled with last night’s intoxication; It was a party, it was a long overdue shift, it was a corruptness–it was a moment.

And do not deny that this moment beckons for touch, because I know you can still feel it as you say goodbye at the beginning of your departure.

Now the anticipation begins, the seat is now the one that greets you. One leg up and you spread in an awkward position, but it’s fine because this is the exposition of an unbecoming, an exercise of liminality. It starts with a question of embrace, but exhausted by the answer that you’re no novice;

You already know that you hold at the sides of the motorcycle and discard the hands that yearned for touch.

2.

Now everything is nothing but a linger that you see in the corner of each passing, of pavements, of boulevards, of street signs. of jeepneys, of carpools, of fellow motorcycle rides. Scanning through the movement of the people, if not but an homage to a step printing technique, something he’d say–you think.

We move to the next scene, where your legs feel cramp and stoplights have engaged you enough to a sigh

And do not deny that maybe you sigh, not because of annoyance, but because of the worry, as you feel your phone through the vibrations of asking where you are.

3.

Now we move to the climax. To the passing lights, people, and phone texts, A rush was felt when we enter the tunnel: of adrenaline, of commute, of hours. The time when the lingering unbecomes, the remembrance becomes an embrace instead.

You spread your arms open, not one car around, not one stoplight ahead, It’s a tunnel, it’s a feeling, it’s cathartic

It’s the moment you waited for all night long. And do not deny that you felt no reprieve, that this is what you ask for a feeling.

4.

Now we reached the rising action, A resolution as you reach your destination: that we begin to understand further to know that moments can be short-lived.

That moments can remain unlingered.

Now you pay for this ending, the rider only accepts cash payments. We start to analyze this motorcycle melodrama, of solitude, of feeling fulfilled, of construction.

And you can now deny this catharsis to your mother.

It’s four in the morning.

ON METRO BLUES AND HYBRIDITY

Rural skies to urban stars, provincial lyricist of the heart hums hymns of trains, and act as if the worn-down transit line inhabits warped vision; towering trees substituted by billboard dreams and bliss. It is as if a third space is found between the staggering line in Araneta-Cubao station and mountain shrikes are mute in flaxen fields to meet their terminus. Correct colloquial words from dialectics, so to say I do not exist in the city, but profound in its railways. After all, it’s called metro and not crickets at three am, landslides, FM bible radios, and endemic homesickness: It’s a joke about dual citizenship. An anathema to an anthem Accept that temporary apartments transport to home, eventually. There are four more stations of the cross and a region becomes a ghost. Gravitate your chest within your palm, hear dispatch of sounds from bustling streets to foreign silence.

THERE ARE NO STARS IN THE CITY (REDUX)

Hold fast these dusts of skies now enveloped by smoke and light pollution the purpose of which was to find a satellite that bespoke trust and navigates my skin to yours— now I imagined the many ways to clean the light so we could still constellate to each other’s arms and back to necessary sparkles that unbecomes

of what is alive inside black holes which dives into the night to the hour of our death, make me grieve for Macabéa let me be consumed while I hide the body bags in the garbage can and headlights are the only thing that guides us towards elucidation of futile weeds and fickle mornings but for now I am a reverie of the Moroporo.

ORPHEUS COMMITTED

SUICIDE ON ESPAÑA BLVD.

“Be forever dead in Eurydice ” Rainer Maria Rilke

Always starts in melody, Never begins in prayer. A twisted knife carves a stone of a poetess, and the viper begs to differ. O Orpheus, the son of Calliope, may you wrestle with your guilt as you sing your lament. I told him to start his melody softly,

But his lyre was nothing but a ringing sound found in one’s tote bag filled with malice, a prayer book, a highlighter, and phantoms. River Styx is a highway leading to a basilica, The underworld reeks of piss, heat, And remembrance.

Under a convenience store light, daylight seeks in taste of vodka and ginger ale. Walking to the hounds of hell seems safer when you hold her hand; Leading the way to the path of no Eden. But the boat rocks when you fill it with uncertainty, and a few malboro reds.

In Lacson, I rode an overpriced tricycle at the eight circle where I saw Capocchio bite a man, near the intersection of Dapitan and Laong Laan.

In Dapitan, I swore a flower bloomed in Persephone’s right arm and it lit on fire. While Sisyphus greets me with a grin, and a road is still under construction.

In P. Noval, I walked into Virgil ramming his tongue down cold Hades’ throat, yet the traffic is worsened with the furies, by a stoplight, outside the street. But there lies in the core of Tartarus, Orpheus, the son of Calliope, with a lyre attached

to his fingers, humming along the honking of jeepneys. Tune of cruelties coaxed by the first turning of his eyes. Intentional adieu of the mighty songstress, she was among recent ghosts and post-beloved of his allusions— staggering pedestrians walking in the crossing, stepping over, like nymphs dancing around, fingers not touching, in a circle in a fauvist manner

With one final note, written letter to Eurydice, along the lines of regret, about miles away, about apologies.

UNLEARNING TERMINALS

In the great renounce of things, I have unlearned to share the world with the inexistence of you. Watch as I try to reassemble the city in your face. Your eyes are reflections, your hands its pavements, your lips the landmarks, and I rain. To live grounded in the city is in the absence of fluidity, but to distance is just practice this is what makes it tranquil. To linger as a form of subtle fluidity, while I make sense of how to correspond to the umlaut of your skin. Metaphysical automatons of my thoughts begin to revive nothing but memories, this is fault because memories should not resemble your face, let alone feel me touch. As tenderness: to carry soft leeway that would lead us where the historical is autobiographical, knowing rice fields were not meant to burn under harvest heat, and no one is reserved under affliction. But for now, I try not to speak of eponymous streets we named together. Letting them wash over, with the turning of care and our reservations about the state of the instants tepid breeze of the bus, temporal view of the forecast, limitations of my words. I find it easier to forget you in the transient instant.

And here, Monday morning, I am with you again.

FOREGROUND

If a room is a story, where are its keepers. If you start running around its corners, then you start to understand the meaning of exhaustion. If behind the door is a reference to history make it sing. If he starts to close his eyes, act as if you’re not there. If anito is to remember, afterward keep the talisman. If crying is mainstream, let him go.

If to touch is what’s missing, go find the nearest river.

If the monument begins to rust, then it has served its purpose. If the bus halts at a stoplight, let it mythologize.

If the actual was the surreal, and you woke up.

If you lost the key to the room.

If she calls you, proceed to the usual spot.

If not in the head, not in the stomach, not in the left or right shoulder.

If to begin is a birthright.

If you are a manifestation of desire. If desire is not a birthright.

If to hold is another word for lies.

If this is self-indulgence.

If I oscillate between Manila, Mountains, and Malolos.

If Mater reprieves no Dolorosa.

If death exists in grass and pavements.

If an affair is what keeps us together.

If you are alone, where are the whispers.

If unnaming.

If you develop an indifference to proper pronouns.

If substituting my name for yours is an act of care.

If Penelope starts to remove the threads on the loom.

If this was an analogy to our relationship.

If the world extends to no one.

If Ithaca was never a real place, he made it up.

If an adventure ends with a bird reciting an elegy.

If Balatik begins to keep us lost.

If solitude is what’s not bringing us together.

If loving is the only decision I have ever made.

If he says that writing is a wonderous myth.

If contemplating, then remain seated.

If the weight of thought succumbs, then treat it like an old friend.

If urong is homonym for cleaning plates or returning to Bulacan.

If architecture had never remained a secret.

If the palengke is closed, then the road must be flooding.

If a road is ironic, then perished fruits are anachronistic.

If waiting is a promise.

If he stops you, peel your skin and tell him this is truth.

If blue is the pain we have to endure.

If the room is deconstructed.

If subtraction is a shorthand for what’s about to happen.

If “a meadow is a parking lot” (Morton).1

If we find no gardens, and only what remains is your eyes.

1Citation from “The Second Thread” in Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology (107). The poem’s form is after Anne Carson’s ekphrastic poem “Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin.”

Euri Carreon studies Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He was born in Malolos.