Excuse the salad stains

Written on my desk, Phil. Lit. in English -- The past is only the future with the lights turned on. Turned on daw. Makes sense, I think to myself, taking the teensiest of breaks from multi-tasking: half-listening to a discussion of a poem by Alejandrino G. Hufana (damn my irreverence) and reading more of Wilfrido Nolledo's But for the Lovers on the sly.

"She is passionately shredding the coconut," says my profesor. Immediately (because my my mind works fast in things like these:) I imagine a woman in her prime, straddling a coconut-shredder, her floral skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, legs damp and glistening, every lithe surface separated from everything else, undulating, with each hard motion, each intense press and pull of niyog to the spiked circle.

In Nolledo, a few pages ago, Hidalgo de Anuncio, aged Spanish nobleman, tragic clown by profession, remembers the consummation of his marriage to one Mariya -- she with her self-mutilated vajayjay, gash traversing the planes and curves of her young body that she appears to be one giant gaping wound. He stabbed through her bandages and blisters, eliciting from that blessed pyre what could not have been ecstasy but exultation, not sex but sainthood, for she was joining not him but a gringo God . . . brutal, beatific. A beata from a brute . . . . says page 209 to 210.

So bury me in memory / his smile's your rope / so wrap it around your throat demands my desk.

You're just a sad song / with nothing to say pines Gerard Way in another deep cavern in my head.

I'm just a lonely ghost / burning down songs -- it comes back to me: yours truly making emo at a balcony in some hotel somewhere, listening to the disembodied vocalist of From Autumn to Ashes: glaring right back at the sea, watching mismatched (but who am I to say, really?) lovers canoodling under a tree, smiling at the sight of a passing bicycle (lolo is steering, lola is daintily perched between his arms, his legs).

"Go to sleep, Cinderella," said Hidalgo wryly. "For tomorrow we die."

DAMN! NAKA-LACE THONG!!! gushes my desk one last time, a large white arrow pointing to an absent, unsuspecting stranger once sitting in front of it.

I could leave my own mark, immortalize my own schmaltz in the form of shamelessly horrid pseudo-poetry (until the next repainting) on the wooden surface, or I could just rather make people think, swoon, perhaps, saya aww -- I could quote Billy Collins: "Excuse the salad stains, but I'm in love."