nameabledays Archive One

(engraving of a tumbrel and its passengers from a Charles Dickens book)


In the meantime that I am ploughing through (but enjoying myself anyway) all the Bikol poetry and some prose available in my own library right now, so that I could competently say something about any of them in my next postings (and perhaps get them out of the shadows, or just make them new acquaintances with those who are in the shadows about Bikol writing today), here is another poem from my new book from which this blog gets its title. (Tumbrel, of course, is the famous wagon used during the French revolution to ferry passengers to the guillotine).


TUMBREL

The revolution eats its own children.

The elections are a feast of fools.


Mornings lurch on the highway like most,
Except this one feels most condemned.
It ages before it is born, it burns out before
It starts burning. Growing cold among
The fumes, it is tired, head-hung, hung-over.
The papers tell us what we most expect.
We behave like we usually behave:
The lights change (the only changes we can
Expect), and we swerve and cut into each
Other’s paths, without so much
As a by-your-leave, except in our favorite fishwife’s
Expletives. Because we are all so alike,
We condemn each other with our choices:
We fling our curses about like spit,
And we are stained, stunned, tainted.
We cannot tell the taste of the blackened air
In our mouths from our own irredeemable
Bad taste. Blind, berserk, bigoted,
We ride this phlegmatic slick
In our bestial cage, in an agony of wheels.

(April 5, 2004)