Pakisabi na lang

If
I sit here
and the words won't come
the fighting in the brain
will worry and weary
the sense

if words could be sealed
in calm finality
I could send a package
of experience

if the heart could think
in the mind's language
I would have no trouble with
the grammar of sensations

and offer you, perhaps,
a punctuated life.

but if I wait here
and the word won't come
and it's a poem you want
where do I begin

You're So Quiet
you're so quiet
my resolution wavers,
lingering, afraid to
raise your gaze
from the silence.

sprawled in that chair
evening dropped you in
like a toy forgotten after play,
what are you thinking,
what seeing in the middle distance?

you seem to have found
the equilibrium point,
the fulcrum of life,
now night can return you
to this complete unresistance.

some there are
who whistle in solitude
when their own heartbeats
pursue them like footfalls
and they are too lonely, alone.

but you are so still.
the silence contains itself
sufficient from all else,
that bent head, supine gesture
of permanence, defying.

dare I speak,
or move this one shadow
and disturb the half light?
dare I claim you back to life
with my human love?

you're so quiet
I am afraid
to tie you to time.
please look up,
when you're tired of eternity.

Because I Only Write
because I only write,
not knowing where and how to bring
these feelings to your doorstep,
my hands hold no order,
transfer no look, no grace,
cannot contain the red pulse of the heart.
only the blue throb over the page;
small, drying in ways not mine.

yet to be simple,
to mean what the leaning lines convey
is to block and defeat
what would be told.

to write is nothing.
this, only despatching
a part of me;
the rest remains, watching
for the reach of your understanding
or your despair.

if we could live
without the sentences between us,
remove the barricading speech,
we may communicate a living whole.

but I only write,
not knowing the beginning or the end.
I only write
to make simplicity an order,
courtesy a return.


It is wanting to tell someone but not wanting them to know.
-Bea Camacho, Blind Transmissions

poems by Lee Tzu Pheng from Prospect of a Drowning