The Rose Bud

I met Evelyn, the wife, during my first year in Ateneo. Our family moved house towards a neighborhood that had once been familiar to me in the past. The old apartment where Uncle Mameng’s once rented was just nearby. Lustre Street felt familiar, there were those stark reminders of those adventures I had in my childhood. There were the chronic water ponds were fishes used to roam and we go fishing like there was no tomorrow. The rice fields somewhere in the out backs of the houses on stilts seemed barren now, but in the past, wild birds dotted the swampy area that I had slingered quite a number of them.

I never had a girlfriend up to the time I met Evelyn and it took me quite a number of nights thinking about my move. I was not used to these sort of things.The neighborhood friends were too urgent that I had to save some manly honors. There were not a few times that I sipped a bottle of beer before I would speak to her. And some nights it was not merely sipping when I was already half-conscious from too much beer.

There was nothing I thought I could do best at except at making love letters and I wrote them in stationeries that I burnt with cigarettes to heighten the effect and then I wrote her poems.

Poets have privileges that others do not have so perhaps when I finally got her acquiescence I celebrated my poems, almost putting them in plaques.

I wrote poems that were somewhat surreal; the kind only the poet knew the exact meaning and nobody else. They were erotic at times, but adventurous at most. There was the poem that I remembered the most and it was like magic that until now, I remain its most ardent admirer, though it may look I am the sole admirer. That poem was the “Rose Bud” and it goes…

Set your fodder widest
Like an ocean of yellow poppy field,
On an orange farm
That once ruled
The mazes of my perverted dreams.

Here I stand,
A smirking child
Lost in the underground caves
Where I set my Indian soul free
Always upon your magnificience.

You offer me your oriental meal
Flavored with salted tenderness,
Laced with diamonds of
Hopes and promises.

When you tamed a whispering storm,
The moon was a scarlet fire.

Aziz, an old friend, accused me of inventing some poem that was heavy on insinuations on drugs and sexual perversion. I said it was only in his mind. I explained that the poppy field is the beauty of the farm I used to see in pictures of Europe. They must have been tulips, but I preferred to coin them as the poppy flowers.

Poems are always misunderstood. Mine were not exempted.