The encrusted heart
The heart curls
on its own in pain
turns into a suckling,
milking on its hurts.
It darkens
in the day—what
sun could pierce
the mirror of grief?
Ghosts haunt
eyes taunting
pain, reliving loss,
birthing fresh hurts.
In the night the heart
glistens with its wounds
lapping tears–those
globules of pain.
Around the heart
in vigil, slabs of light
await for a sign to
splinter into a million
points, to pierce
the heart of the mirror,
to melt encrustations of
its own wounds.
The heart resists
locked in eyes on
the mirror of its
making, losing
the light each day
to nest its own rebirth.
Copyright © 2009 by Alegria Imperial/Posted in iluko.com
For this poem, I wrote a check of $700 for my ‘jornal’. What would you give me?
Fifth avenue: a setting
For having written this, reading it again and again, I give myself a week’s worth of daily wages $1200. If it were yours, how much is your ‘jornal’?
The sun is setting on the southwestern horizon, tracing its autumn route. No matter how glorious, it is never seen on Fifth Avenue: a sense of unreality pervades here; no shadow falls because skyscrapers bar slanting light and columns of smoke seeping off tunnels float eerily.
On the ground, the vast sky is but a dream. Only a narrow slit hangs above like a canopy propped up by towers of concrete, glass and steel. The tallest, the Empire State Building, shoots up like a needle that could pierce the moon. From up there, people, dogs, and cars, shrink as toys for King Kong.
Fifth Avenue at sunset grinds as if run by an infernal machine. The ruckus is maddening: cars rushing into any space, as if escape is possible, and people swarming onto the sidewalk like a shaken colony of ants. The racket is deafening: rasp of wheels, blasts from horns, wheezes from city bus air brakes, and unison wails of an ambulance, fire truck and NYPD cars in a rush to save a kitten – so the word from someone in the crowd is passed on – hanging by its paws on the terrace of a 20th floor condo on East 56th Street.
The swarm of people soon turns into a dark flowing mush that of bodies wrapped in thick armors of invisibility – the black coat, jacket, cape, cap, boots, and square-toed shoes. Strides are hurried; heads don’t turn, each one moves lost in private space. If a show window snares someone, she is not missed: the throng gets on, relentlessly. At cross streets, the crowd lurches to a halt, eyes riveted to a flashing light that warns, “Don’t Walk.” When the light switches to a command, “Walk,” the crowd, like wound up toys, obeys.
In the crowd, I am lost. I shed my name. Under my woolen cap, I wonder about the color of my hair. Beneath layers of cotton warmers, a jacket, and leather gloves, I cannot remember the hue of my skin. No one talks to me; I have turned mute. And when I say, “I’m sorry,” I sound as if I really am for something I can’t recall I did.
A pink sky falls on East 23rd Street where a triangle fans out from the Flat Iron Building’s rear toward Madison Square Park. I feel touched, and now I’m melting. With my heart, I listen to a soundless pink splash at dawn in Baguio, my mountain city perched from across the other side of the hemisphere. When I look up again at a slice of sky, night has crept in. An undertow pulls me to surrender. I stop. I stall. My heart resists.
Posted in iluko.com/Published in myjournal.thoughtbook
Love–what is it, really?
For this insight, I give myself a ‘jornal’ of $550. Quite high, isn’t it? But a friend pointed out how true, how true it is. How much value will you tag how you feel after reading it?
Love should begin on a blank stare contrary to what everyone thinks it must. If eyes meet seeing worlds not visible there, only then does love start on a ‘supposed’ note and from this will spring a host of the unexpected.
Blind—that’s what lovers should be but not blind enough to recognize the first opening, the gesture that bids the soul to flight. For flight to me, is the beginning of love.
But only momentary flight. Lovers span time and space in each first moment. They make landmarks of ordinary places and things. The first smile, tender touch, kiss, the first word of love. Breathing is always breathless with young love. Words bind magically. Moments remain enchanted.
Yet if love were to last it can’t be young always. Lovers must will to end the flight. In the fall, lovers must recognize each other still — stripped, bared already scarred. Love turns quite ugly but solid, roughly hewn and darky like a rock. If lovers turn away then, then love does not exist.
Posted in iluko.com
Who is St. Valentine?
I give myself a ‘jornal’ of $500 for this new knowledge. How much is yours?
Think red on Valentine’s Day and the image of a beating heart comes to mind. Run to a flower shop for roses and a love note to give to that special someone and presume your gesture like millions of others on this day began centuries ago by a lover. But who really knows how Valentine’s Day came to be.
Vague ideas about it have always hovered in people’s minds. But a search for the real Valentine goes back to a pre-Christian practice, which was later layered over by some genuine act of “sweetness and thoughtfulness” from a “holy man”. The rite honors the Roman goddess Februato Juno in a “ lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls on the fifteenth of this month.” As in most manner of conversion to Christianity, pastors substituted the honored goddess with “the name of a saint in billets given on this day,” and thus, St. Valentine.
Who is St. Valentine? The few lines written about him have spawned a legend that in fact, there are three St. Valentine. Closer look reveals St. Valentine as not three but just one, a “temple priest jailed for defiance during the reign of the Roman emperor, Claudius, the Goth (Claudius II)” around mid-250 A.D. or the early centuries of Christianity. Valentinus was caught “marrying Christian couples and aiding Christians who were being persecuted.” While in prison, Valentinus is said to have tried to convert Claudius, who took a liking for him. Such attempt proved fatal for the priest whom Claudius ordered beheaded at the Flaminian Gate in 269.
A clue as to why the emperor almost had a change of heart for Valentinus: the priest cured his jailer’s daughter of her blindness. A link if not quite romantic but “sweet” to today’s “love-crazed” tradition was Valentine’s having left a note for this girl where he scribbled, “From your Valentine.”
Did Valentinus ever exist? Yes, he did. Archeologists have unearthed his remains in a Roman catacomb although he was supposed to have been buried on Flaminian Way shortly after his beheading at the gate. It took another 200 years before he was canonized saint by Pope Gelasius in 496 AD and marked February 14th as his feast in honor of his martyrdom.
St. Valentine wears red, the color of blood to represent martyrdom. In his portraits, roses and birds surround him. In Christian tradition, he intercedes or is the patron saint of engaged couples (for a happy marriage), the young (and confused), those with epilepsy, or those plagued by fainting spells, bee keepers, and travelers.
For the shy and the lazy, the feast of St. Valentine’s should make a great excuse to declare love just this once a year.
Gotham in the Mist
The city rose lifeless in the storm this morning. It stayed glued on a seamless sky, receding in the mist like a legend. The huddle of spires, bell towers, smoke stacks, brownstone boxes, glass towers, and steel spikes, seemed timeless in the smoky veil that shimmered in the sun.
Yet, it breathed. Its breathing was a dull hum like the rhythm of waves in a nautilus held to the ear. And it moved like a ghost slapping potted annuals, and whipping skeletons of trees.
When it wakened, the city was a mad woman, flailing unseen in the wind, riding on the smoke that billowed from chimneys. When it came to life, the city spewed flavors in the wind that wafted the aroma of spiced meat simmering in broths, marinated fowl roasting, and scented grain steaming in pots.
I had watched the city wrapped in legend from an insulated window looking east. I saw the opaque sky ripped like a dome, letting out heavy vapors that suffused the horizon. And through the mist from the same window, I watched it move in the wind, and sniffed its aroma from hairline cracks. But I could not decide whether I lived the legend or the dream.
For this conjured memory of New York, I give myself a ‘jornal’ of $350. What’s yours?
Copyright © 2001 by Alegria Imperial, NY/Posted in iluko.com
Sunflowers
She folds her arms on the table and turns a limp head to the window; the gray sky meets her sad eyes. She crumples on her slack arms and sighs, what lonely weather.
I watch her head drop on sunflowers blooming on the vinyl kitchen cloth where she works all day. The blossoms blaze around her. When she looks back at the sky, her eyes glisten with tears now pooling.
I snap out of my stare and tell her, it’s only the rain. But in my mind, I wail at the weeping sky, who is it that came snuffing out the sun?
Then I begin telling this woman, it’s only rain, and it’s fine too, like a baby’s hair. How could it hurt you? Look how it falls — like a touch. And watch how it splatters on that window — like sweet crystals that wash the grime and the sadness off the air. See how the sky would tauten soon — like the skin of a man’s arm.
And the woman laughs at the thought of a man’s arm crooked around her, scented sweet and strong by the rain. She laughs splaying her own arms over the sunflowers she couldn’t seem to see.
Copyright © 2001 by Alegria Imperial/Posted in iluko.com and myjournal
For reading this piece again, and remembering the moment I wrote it, I give myself $300 as my ‘jornal’.
What’s yours?
Hello world!
Jornales. Daily Wages. Why have I chosen jornales as the name of this blog? I’m neither Spanish nor English but I was brought up on both languages and on both cultures. I speak and read only smatterings of the first, fluent in the second but I am much more. I live and exist on many spheres of thought that come out as poetry, stories, essays, feature stories, news stories, scripts if need be and whatever shape or form words that seem to write themselves when I compose take on. I work hard to keep alive where I exist. And where does my “jornal” my daily wage come from? What is my “jornal”, my daily wage? Ahhh, that’s the mystery you and I will unravel in these pages. Welcome!
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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