i remember the wooden floors and the rocking chair
it could've been Fitzgerald's Curious Case of Benjamin Button
but it's just a girl, quite bemused and curious (of course), wandering through
long hallways held the old-age books printed somewhere in Carolina
where I'm just here in the Philippine Islands
the stain... I knew it was normal,
the rotting wood from these dead trees cut during 1976
still reaches my nose while I read about Mississippi
the irony
I've never read about the Cordilleras and Sierra Madre
but I know a great deal about Montana and Grand Canyon
I never figured when's Biak na Bato happened
but I know about 1776, just becaue a free novel website
wrote about a happy ending plot, catching my impressionable sensibilities
write me off...
I never knew how the Americans did jues de cuchillo
in Visayas, in Mindanao
before these books reached the largest library
in the province
the scars of the Visayans
the trauma of the Mindanaons
America, how then should I know better God
from you
look at the blood, look at the gunshot
your campaign always do
this borrowed muse, I remember values
before Lincoln caused a necessary havoc
for the South, I recognize
the strings and rhythm of the South
I listened to them since childhood
just so you know
I'd rather not look to what I'm meant to understand
I'm here a hemisphere away
it's long gone
but it's not
the scratch of the wooden floors in a library
the creak of the rocking chair nearby a grassland
somewhere in Baguio City
leave me alone
yet you left a fingeprint
I will never be left alone
from your shadows
even if it ties my neck to a noose
even if I resist
to be hanged from this knowledge
once they get back to my senses
the thrill of the happy ending fairytales
I still see paradise, straight from your hell
but as it goes, what can I do?
except to know
America, here's your brown bastard kid
raised from your influence
it misses things she never experienced herself
and remains ignorant to what's in front her own yard
