It took me way too long to post this writer. I first read Aquino while part of a writers workshop: www.theundeniables.org.

But it was on the last day of this seasons Tuesday Night Cafe in J-Town that I met him. The Tuesday Night Cafe is a poetry and performance showcase that has survived for eleven years under the navigation of Traci Kato-Kiriyama. He dedicated this poem to her on the night I was there. I’ve wanted to post it since that day and I’m glad I finally got around to doing this.

Below is the poem he read on that night and I’ve included two other poems by Aquino.

Enjoy.

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Three peoms by Allan Arnold Gamalinda Aquino:

“the gravitas of seasons”

for traci kato-kiriyama

we are the toilers who toil
to make the starved earth a place of abundance,
who transform abundance into deathless fragrance.

- carlos bulosan, “if you want to know what we are (we are the revolution)”

your voice embraces rhyme and awe.
you speak surely as twilight reminds us of purer childhoods.

you are the wealth of compassion, the antithesis to dread.
you are the spectral glory of the world’s last rose.
you are the force that through our dark veins drives our language.
you are the canopy of stars the firmament takes for granted.
you are the secret sun in each of us, realized.

you jazz our sad fancies, making us brighter, tender, more loving.
you make us want to be angels, poets – you make us seek
ourselves and, somehow, more.

*

i will tell you why the los angeles skyline, our herald of destiny,
roiling with redeemed and quickened souls, assumes
this color, heaven’s truer tincture:

because the soul knows no other tone,
because the moonlight spreads its bluish-white splendor
to crown the city with metahuman halos,
because you trace and calculate the systems of the heart,
because your name evokes valiance and mountains,
because we become who we are because of who you are,
simply because of no-because,

*
you are the gravitas of seasons.

we owe you our reasons, our meanings.
we owe you our madness, our purpose.
we owe you our dreamscapes, our appropriations.

we can forgive ourselves for what we are.
we can love each other for who we are.

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re-tracing my exits

gray follicles now mock my scalp,
my whiskers. mid-30s: have gone,
will go, will remain nowhere.

friends, great loves: all unreliable
as god or memory; all fall far
down; before long, nobody feels

what’s left of them. though
my heart rages against its final failure,
i know i can medicate myself ‘til then.

***

as a lonesome boy, beer
was the height of disgusting:
bitter, tongue-stinging poison.

pressures. i conditioned
needed tastes. swallow, wince,
tolerate. yield again, endure.

and it came: medication.
what hurt i held hurt less;
and then, an uprush of

stupid, giggly amusements: i
honestly felt (could i believe it?)
good. so good, in fact, that

i was willing to give up something,
something important but (since,
in that mindstate, i couldn’t

put my finger on it) what the hell
– just don’t stop this
goodness. awakening

some time later, my head
panged like a chick pecking
out of my skull, and i wondered,

wordlessly, why and how
something felt not-as-right.
but at least i believed i was alive.

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sickness of secrets

my love theory rips casablanca too often:
hard-boiled problem drinker whose
romance, through sacrifice, paves paths

for paramours, now doomed in marriage.
rick always had paris.
i’ll always have my poems, recollections

of glances: warm, wonderful softnesses.
poems are more reliable than friends
or confessors. . .

: : :

i express my poisoned honesties. evoke, i,
wetness i’d sow upon your surface area,
entire. once upon moments,

i was invited into your home, your husband away,
your baby asleep; we ordered food, watched t.v.,
sat on your loveseat, and swigged away, wasting

time while the world ‘round us burned with bronze-
and mango-tinctured brush fires. you would snap-
look at me, your tender neck twisting toward my grin;

and i could smell you, incredible guava-fragrance of your
body’s attention; my fingers ached to claim and
quiver you; i wanted you to fill me, deep as fondest sighs.

: : :

i learn nothing from the heart’s deciphered
codes. boredom terrifies; the anguish of mystery
thrills: i care nothing for empathy nor forgiveness

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You can reaad more of Allan Arnold Gamalinda Aquino at his blog. Click here.