adieu

today you came.

but this day is also your departure.

To your eighteen years, and for all the years: I hope you’re happy.

Happy birthday Edel John.

piece by piece

forgive me for the rhyming schemes. this is still my first.

we write our regrets in anger
we contemplate our lives all too slow
we drown our happiness with laughter
we complicate things a little more

emptiness comes to haunt us today
yet the presence of love fuels our hopes

the past recurring, the future uncertain
such distorted lives we lead
at long last come together piece by piece
under our gravestones with finality.

damnum

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

One art by Elizabeth Bishop

~*~

it seems like i’m losing everything and anything that’s connected to me. from persons close to me,down to my cell phone that went missing without a lucid explanation for its disappearance, and the just-recently-acquired umbrella that mama brought me. i can name more but those will do for now.

i think i have a curse for losing things, or of people. but then when i think about it, it’s true that i am partly at fault becuase i do make less efforts in building bridges with people around me, and i don’t really bother these days to at least reconnect the neglected connections. so maybe it’s just part of who i am. maybe it’s my own disorder. or maybe, it’s just a manifestation of the fact that i can’t have everything; everything has a price, and i just have to get used to it.

since we’re talking about losses, i think i’ve had enough. i’ve had enough of losing myself to my temper, to apathy, to ambitions too huge to become a reality and to mistakes that have caused the people around me so much pain. i’ve also had enough of losing my time and my esteem to certain groups of people who pretend to be someone else but are actually very egotistic.

i should try to live more carefully.

there’s this question that’s bugging me this week though:
do we distract ourselves from reality, or does reality distract us from ourselves?

yep, i’m beginning to freak myself out with all this too. but it will pass.

Anyway, Preliminary exams are finally here, so there will be less time for the net and more for torture. agh. but I’ll live. :p

August 2 is around the corner! Breaking dawn, I’ll be waiting.

recount

(All these nonsense came to me in random moments. first parts are brief intros to topics. second portions are all me yapping in my head:)

According to Plato, there are three parts to a soul: 1.reason 2.spirit and 3.appetite.
So I conclude, sometimes we have to ignore our appetites for our souls to be full.

Ideas don’t die. People do.

Do we really have souls or are they just a pigment of our imagination?
Is an idea matter? Or is matter an idea?
How can we be sure that we have the only one soul? What if like our body, we are made of many souls connected together to make a whole?
What if memories are energies that splatter everywhere the moment the body dies?
And what if those same memories find their way back to its first host and jolts the new body and causes the de javu trance?
What if time is actually pages of a book and everything that happened and will happen in the world are all in the pages? So it’d be like while I’m here typing away, another part of me in another body is trying on her balloon party dress.
What if the sky that stretches wide is actually a tick to another dimension more vast than our own?
When we finally die, what happens to our thoughts? Do they rot away with us in oblivion? Or do we never stop wondering even as we lay six feet under?
When did time begin?
Does time exist or are we just control freaks trying to make sense of the array of troubles in our trivial life?
What is it about pain that makes us wise?
If reincarnation is real, can we be in the same body more than once?
How are souls made? Does God ever run out of them, or does he have fresh supplies stored somewhere?

i think I’ll keep some distance for a while. I can’t say I’d be able to do anything useful.
i have to recharge my batteries.

July 3′08