The Habits of a Pessimist
B.B.P. Hosmillo
The reason that he remembers so much and I so little is that he is a pessimist, whereas I am an optimist. A pessimist puts his golden age in the past, an optimist puts his in the future.
—Yi-Fu Tuan, Who Am I?: An Autobiograpy of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit
1
This rapacious silence
wraps around
our bodies
at the brink of forgiveness,
so we breathe and sink together,
hallowed by a nocturnal light.
Your pointer finger
writes in the air
“have you a travel tomorrow?”
and perhaps, perhaps
my orderly room,
an enterprise of my repetitive
ornamental compulsion
is telling you
my eyes have no vision
of the future: my feet,
they are content
with the hold of the soil that frames me
now; there is comfort in my home.
2
But like a bored bear
keeping the secret of survival
in belligerent walking,
you stood up,
eyes traveling outside
despite the fog
a mask of the view.
Chinese collar,
one, two, three, four, five, six red buttons,
Dr. Martens boots,
proud chest that linen cannot hide,
eyes disciplined to make mad lives:
I am your record.
My body imbued,
threatened by nervous wobbles,
in every rattan
of a homestead chair
read as a growing caterpillar
in a consoling cocoon.
Outside is the hell of tropical summer,
my skin feels
—there are no Viet survivors found
in the 1984 war—
and I have no water left: artificial genitalia
are my only real possession:
a bottomless abyss
compounding imagination
without which a memory of what became
a figure,
a delight,
a subterfuge
in our togetherness
will negligibly be
a desultory,
a desultory meteor in a haphazard course.
3
Your wristwatch
resists waiting
—survival depends on mediation of death—
each ticking
burns
the opportunistic moment of bliss.
When your body turns
into a gallon of excretions,
this heaven
offers
an egress
and there your face
wanes like a sea
ebbing away
from every fisherman
leaving prosaic marine relics:
empty shells,
light pebbles,
another shell
empty,
another pebble
light
without a pulse,
and these
vanishing bubbles.
With your careful lips,
sweet thumb
—how
your filamentous black hair shines
like a thirsty night in my mind—
you will seduce your future,
while our escape,
cave
in a now deceptive,
now daunting city
to a vagabond’s deadly hunt
for nature’s beauty:
I am your hiding place.
Not urban topography
misses a single fabric of me.
My body is everywhere
when you begin
to dim the lights
as your heavy eyes
take
the last shot of the world.
Punjabi long-sleeves
the color of a sallow,
lolled letters in senescence,
faded postcards
dated
“at the tragedy of reverie,”
a rotten kiss:
I am old treasures’ keeper.
B.B.P. HOSMILLO, author of a chapbook collection of fragments in series entitled Dear Good Night: A Yearning Project (forthcoming), is a Filipino poet and a critic of gender, neoliberal heterosexism, and queer precarity. He received the JENESYS Invitation for Graduate Student Research Fellowship in 2011 and the National University of Singapore-Asia Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship in 2012. He is shortlisted in VOID poetry contest of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hong Kong’s preeminent literary establishment. His poetry is featured in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Philippine Contemporary Poetry (2011). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Far Enough East Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Alice Blue Review and Nude Bruce Review among others. Currently, he is finishing his first collection of poetry that is deeply linked to Southeast Asia and Desire with the help of an arts and culture residency granted by the Government of Indonesia. His email address is bryphosmillo@yahoo.com.