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Bible & Belligerence

Alfonso Manalastas
 CONTENTS

Christ is Reborn in Gen. Malvar Ave., Cubao (2019) 7

History of Mankind as Postscript 9

Daybreak11

Paint by Numbers as Van Gogh 13

Juxtaposing Hotel Luna 14

The first time I encountered the word guillotine, 17

A Study of Grief 18

The Hunt 21

The Moon Addresses her Enemies 22

A Study of Anger 24

White Bodies Splayed on White Sand 26

Genesis According to a Gazelle 29

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Christ is Reborn in Gen. Malvar Ave., Cubao (2019)

And so he awakes, first

with a faint sigh—an almost
yawn, but not quite—here

where Technicolor indifference

is the expertise of the wicked,
pink and purple dancing to the beat

of EDM mixtapes, and just enough skin

to fuel oceans with as much
salt as they desire. Jesus

Christ props his body

on the dance floor of a dingy bar
in Gen. Malvar Ave., Cubao, wonders

how something could look

so beautiful in the dark. What is certain
is all the angels and saints

must have roamed here, too,

how else can lifeless beings defy
their own decay? He takes a sip

from a moist bottle of Pale Pilsen

to wash down a millennium’s
worth of grime straight through

the tunnels of Manila and into

the Nile. Behold, the second
coming is as naive

and unforgiving as the first;

how nostalgia betrays the faith
it is beholden to: Jesus Christ

pays for sex, smokes a joint,

kisses a boy—the most human
of humans under a sky whose sun

rises only when this street’s

inhabitants permit it. There is no
salvation to be had here, too, except

eons of erroneous accounts

be revised; no foretelling
of any looming end, nor 7
brand-new testaments fit
for twenty-first century tenets.
Jesus Christ falls in love, and on

the dance floor, and to a stranger

whose name he won’t remember
in the morning, and all

organic matter will crumble

and suffocate us underneath
the earth’s coiling arms one day,

but today he is new, warm

and supple as he was that day
in Bethlehem, savoring the sweet

of Aurora Boulevard unscrolling

early in the wet of the night.
A cross-dresser, an atheist,

and a prostitute come bearing gifts,

wades through the four o’clock
violence to where our savior

sits nakedly under pink

and purple beams flickering
like a lone, radiant star.

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History of Mankind as Postscript
What is worth mourning isn’t so much the end
but the manner in which the end unravels itself

where not a tremor nor even a blip is felt by hands

clammy in anticipation, only the ground’s soft

sigh of surrender as the planet drifts to sleep.

Right there is humanity’s greatest unease:

how lights that once beamed bright inside buildings

shall languish in repose, their windows transfixed

in half-sleep, half-prayer; cracked sidewalks

uninhabited by feet that once rattled at the tick

of the clock staggering to the closest bus stop;

furniture still wholly intact, moist from the remains

of what ample life once nested on their pincushion

limbs; every turn and intersection of this city

just idle witnesses, bored by the dull act of a world’s

quiet decomposition, how nothing truly ceases

to exist, how all things remain—in some sick

fashion—exactly as they are, only grayer.

And is there no irony in its provenance? How all

stories begin with stars constellating in a sea

of nothing, unspooled with a flick of God’s finger

and from there, formless and empty, the planet

morphed into this magnificence—good, green,

and grand. Fractured light. Shimmer of newness.

First came the dinosaurs, and then the myth.

And finally, when all things big and great

have slumbered, humans began to walk, peeling off

like plastic on brand new merchandise

whatever shine the world had left. Let me tell you this:
we who’ve slaughtered and destroyed

our way to Earth’s doom shan’t be rewarded

with the grandness of a booming firework finish. 9
There will be nothing to dazzle the crowd.
All the great poets and philosophers will ossify

as ordinary creatures do; lives punctuated not

by the grandeur of an awestruck finale

but by the thick silence of one’s last breath

exactly like any last breath—noiseless and solemn,

almost of a great desperate cry muffled shut.

 

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Daybreak
Right turn into the car park
We had once entered, I can only
Watch you now from a distance:
Gray polyester, blue jeans,
A man by your arm
Who can only be described
As not me—him and his red cap,
Black cotton shirt. I see

Even from here,

Armed with my carefully
Measured distance and the brevity
Of this yawning city,
The gravity you both emit
In that which spans between you.
See how it throbs, flutters
Through the ink spillage
Of a shadow you cast on my direction
You cannot see, your eyes fixed
To nowhere but onward.

This, in its own cruel, comic way

Is a story that has nothing
And everything to do with me.

A jolt in your every step,

Fingers lingering onto skin,
The palpable thirst of your
Outstretched limbs
Coaxing the warmth of each other’s
Touch from the sinews
Of your bodies—how amusing
To witness what so many others
Must have missed:

Two people walking side by side,

The most frequent, if not most mundane
Utterance of desire, and I
But an echo reverberating
From the click-clack of what
Footsteps you no longer
Bother with.

It is all in the past

I imagine you must think, if
You think of me at all.
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That I am only an echo
Is to say that even the soles
Of your shoes are through with me.
What is most familiar, after all,
Is most eloquent, I learn now
In the unforgiving language
Of your body. The way
You tug his arm with both
Inhibition and urgency,
I have already seen from you
Many times over.

We used to flee the same dizzying

Scene, the same gumption, enjoyed
The company of the same people;
A quiet dance in your feet
As though you need not
Share a look to know
Exactly when and where to turn,
Tethered together only
By the heat of each other’s
Yearning and the diction
Of what shared quiet now persists
Between you, and once between us,
Always somehow lingering.
 

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Paint by Numbers as Van Gogh
I once was asked on a job interview to describe
the color blue to a blind man, to which
I responded with a resounding no, I said

what sick man would I be if I lied? The truth is,

who knows for sure how blue looks? Like
right now, as I glance at the sky hand-painted

on this marvelous box, I see a flurry of blueness

—eight different kinds numbered differently,
the opacity to which they’ve found their resolve.

Some even a little green. You can place next to it

a picture of the sea perched perfectly still, and
I wouldn’t know the difference for what is the sky

but just an ocean without gravity to hold it back?

Eleven stars and a moon—now this, I can tell
clearly, is a starry night, an approximation

of all the dark we’ve abandoned in the day, blueness

whirling around yellow dots as if to devour them.
Such carnivorous display twinkling above cities

whose hues and pigments pulsate

under the tyranny of math—three for blue, four
for another kind of blue, and so on. So tell me,

how am I to describe the color blue to a blind man

in all its forms? Six is also blue,
and so is seven. Instead, I turn to the cypress tree

black and sullen in its singular hush of dark,

its tree bark clawing up the rectangular frame
as if to say here dear blue, devour me, too.
 

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Juxtaposing Hotel Luna
1.

A blood splattered painting

hangs regally in a corridor:

increments of the artist’s DNA,

some overt political message,

an antiquated brass frame,

deftness, dexterity, taste.

A woman in shiny pearl earrings

stays at the hotel, smokes Esse

along the cobblestoned streets

of Calle Crisologo, a microcosm

of Spanish occupation in rural

Ilocos where a plume of smoke

erupts from her mouth, lungs

brimming with ash and heat.

The rate goes: four thousand

pesos a night, not bad

for its middle-class occupants;

a pool, an intercontinental breakfast,

a blood splattered painting

perched outside your door

to decorate your mornings

with, as a warning, perhaps.

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2.

We will stroll around this city

made of stone. We will meet

at 8:30 sharp, travel by foot past

old walls, red bricks leaking out

of concrete like gushing skin.

We will have steaming white rice

for stamina, meat in distinctly

Vigan sauté for protein, something

sumptuous that will say we are

neither of this land nor new to it;

what hybrids can find love in a city

that sells horseshit and decay

by the pound, and be so in love, still,

that we are drunk after two beers,

unperturbed by the click-clack of

the kalesa, how spit and sweat are traded

in gleaming currency, how we barter

for more as soon as we run out.

The hotel staff will find our sheets

disparate from their appointed beds,

a crescent yellow forming outward

from the center—nothing that good

detergent can’t fix in Hotel Luna

where it’s business as usual.

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3.

The philosophy of forgiveness

resides not in the abandonment

of history, or the virtuous denial

of our pain, but in the cruelty

of remembering, how we preserve

the cages we were slaughtered in,

how we bend our knees in worship

of the wealth that flourished

on our hunger, how we build highways

out of stones we collected on our broken

backs, how we slice off our tongues

to learn the language of our enemies,

how we create monuments

out of bomb shelter ruins,

how thirty pesos per person

is what it costs to enter bell towers

built in the names of those

who enslaved us, how so willingly

we surrender our last change, how we

take the shape of our oppressors

and sell it back to them, complemented

with the finest hotel arrangements

our tempered sense of selves can offer,

certain they will come back for more.

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The first time I encountered the word guillotine,
I confused it for gluten and spent
weeks wondering what new brand
of Keto diet had decided
to pay my generation a visit

this time, when my city crumbles,

I imagine it to sound
like snapping a biscuit in half,
the kind that forms

in the mouth the exact moment

the word fuck is conceived,
how it trips and knots
at the throat but still manages

to swim up to the surface, breathe,

take a life of its own,
maybe even get married one day
and name one of its children

after the pope, who knows?

For now, I am inclined to believe
when Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
invented the device

that would cause

thousands of heads to fall
from the thousands of necks
they once belonged to—

all of them presumed murderers

and thieves disloyal to the crown,
traitors to the French monarchy,
heretics and false gods, you

name it; noblemen and the poor

both bleeding the same red—
he must have slow danced
his wife and whispered to her ear

I promise, this will all be good.

 

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A Study of Grief
I.

You walk over to an empty bar stool,

Etta James blaring from a speaker

some honeyed words uttered
with a kind of eloquence
made possible only
by rain,

tiny droplets drumming

beats to a window, tapping
Morse code for are you alright?
where a hooded grief
takes the seat next to yours.

You do not welcome grief’s company,

but his is a language where no
means yes and yes, anyway,

sips gold liquid and insists

small talk while you spit
blood with every answer
from your alcohol-parched mouth,
his line of questioning
a forceful inquiry
into your joy:

But why? You have

so many reasons to be happy.

II.

Here is a pamphlet.
Like many of its kind,
it will tell you what to do.
It will know exactly what to do.

It will tell you of resilience

and laughter in children’s lungs
as they drink gutter water
and play naked through the flood.

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It will tell you of lost people:
lost mothers, fathers, of lost limbs,
how hope is a blue pill
you purchase on eBay,

drink knowing that the world

is far too tired to have any room left
for grief, and you will
believe it. You will

believe it when it tells you

to take grief in a box,
ship grief off somewhere distant,
limpid cold, except

everything we send skyward

eventually finds its way back.
You are lucky if it doesn’t land
on your delicate head.

III.

Of all things,
grief understands this most:

the only thing that separates

the departed from the disappeared
are the footprints pressed
on moist terrain.

Welcome to the factory of alleged virtues.

Here, everything you’ve lost

is found, only better.
Like polished chrome, watch
as grief glistens

in the high tide of the morning,

on stage at a talent show,
dripping wet from a pulpit
over Sunday’s homily.

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Grief comes to you
un-abandoned,
unabashed,
weighs your pockets down
heavy as a missing organ
and yet shinier than ever. This

is where grief comes to die,

to be reborn and baptized
new; a teething infant
eager to suckle your light,
swirl you gentle on his tongue
as you dissolve.

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The Hunt
Consider the tusks,
an elephant ambling about
naked and fight-less.

Somewhere,
a shaman grinds animal bone;
dust splinters sprinkled
liberally over scraped knees
like herbed meat.

We invented the tooth fairy

to remove the bite
from the hunger—barter teeth
for flat coppers,
molars for a shiny watch,
a jaw for a new car. This

is how we learned to mutilate:

instant, wholesale,
forgetting what we lost
even as it jangles
in our pockets.

Behind waterlogged lashes

the elephant bleeds,
looks on,
and as the flare of tiny
radiant wings smear mute
in the foggy distance,
the elephant drifts off

almost
as though a reward gleams
underneath the rubble.
 

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The Moon Addresses her Enemies
“In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed secret
plans for an unprovoked nuclear strike against [the moon].”
-The Atlantic, 5 April 2017

I see you, clad in metal badges pinned to green,

a troop of the finest men marching at your
command and disposal, your finger—foolish,
condescending—pointed at my face, as if

to question my place among the stars. I see you,

donned in holy robes, scepter, staff, the body
and blood of Christ for nourishment; your impulse,
the divine will of an imagined god. I see you,

gray suit and leather, sparking trade inequities

and carving hunger in the world’s most remote.
This isn’t the first time I’ve stumbled upon your kind:
specks scrambling like wildfire around Earth’s

lush foliage, you come to me in many forms,

from many dynasties, across many centuries
with the credence and conviction that you will one day
see me fall and never rise again. How unabashed

you were after setting fire to the women of your

people: witch, gypsy, harlot, whore, you aim
for me—your planet’s lone companion—looking
to burn down what you cannot defeat. Or, looking

to burn down what you cannot attain. As with the soft

outer layer of an eggshell, you mistake my skin
for something decadent, brittle, can be cracked open
by force except something inside refuses to be naked.

Do you despise the lighthouse I become in the dark?

How it denies you the power you hold at night?
How it clothes my sisters from the nakedness
you inflict? Do you despise
how it unrapes them?

I orbit around your seas, your valleys, your deserts,

beckoning women across six continents to bleed
in the parts you want to conceal the most.
Their bodies—diminutive in size and heedless

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of their power—are vessels of a life force unbreakable,
like a rock in space whose permanence gloats boisterously
against your quiet mortality. O, how jealous
you must be that a decade from now, you will set forth

on an expedition to plant a steel rod on my surface.

You will send two of your best men to X-Ray my deepest
secrets, chart my vast expanse, deface my solitude
with your star-spangled banner. Loud and liquid,

the story of your bounty will be spilled across every

dinner table, how man alone tamed and conquered
the undying beast in the sky. My vanity, to be televised
for a world that has forgotten what gravity I hold

in my navel, what light I carry in my breasts, what

succor I bring to the rising of the tides. Yours, after all,
was not the first finger to be pointed at my face.
I’ve seen them from kings whose crowns bleached

to rust, thrones crumbled to ash, men shriveled

to gray, and soon, you will, too—but I will be
the same moon coasting through the night whose flight
is yours to observe only from a distant telescope.

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A Study of Anger
I.

I cannot say fully

that I understand anger

Is it the carnal form of hate

distinguished by the potent diction,
almost eloquence,
of how it wrecks

Is it a world upon the discovery of fire,

how ruthlessly and decidedly
it scorched the tongues of those
who dared lick its face

Is it the wearing off of the valium,

the violence in which the veins
protest the sober submission
eclipsing the human soul

Is it a dying language; or
a language fervent and festering
in its attempt to be alive; or
a language so alive, the gods are
hell-bent on killing it

II.

Once
I took my anger on a field trip
to the largest labor force known to man:
a factory of alleged virtues;
its business, to sanitize anger
to exhume it from, and for, the human body

No silver was to be offered,

only that anger be traded
for penance
for mercy
for gift cards

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The gunfire backdrop unlearns
its coarse and callous ways,
the wailing sirens slither
through the cracks of Metro Manila traffic,
blood becomes the final coat finish
of a sturdy road

I walk home with a newly

prescribed dictionary
—thick, glossy, the word anger
missing from its pages

I stagger towards conviction

hoping to find semblance,
only conviction is anger’s distant cousin
from New York; Milan;
somewhere first world

III.

The Bisaya word for anger is sukô

I live in a city whose language
desecrates my native tongue,
softens my anger inside a petri dish
and calls it surrender

Anger still sits heavy at the backs

of our throats—swollen and tangled,
nuzzling at the prim of these windpipes
we so desperately choke back at the dinner table,
that our mouths shatter
upon the saying of grace

There is no god in this city,

no benevolent one, at least
only a wasted blue collar worker of a god:
limping, middle-aged, about to lose his job

He carries the weight

of all our genocides,
our tyrannies,
our civil wars to the doorstep,
an uninvited guest
knocking for bread
 

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White Bodies Splayed on White Sand
1.

There is no mapping out a space

definable only by the pigment

of its occupants. In these shores,

the economy of skin and hair

and eyes outweighs the mandate of coin.

An island local jokingly quips:

the border that outlines General Luna

from the rest of Siargao is determined

by the sudden, sporadic presence

of white bodies splayed on white sand.

A German tourist at a local nightclub

takes out his phone to film six

brown bodies across him, cheeks

blushing pink, teeth polished

and gleaming like mothers-of-pearl;

an ornate display of what attempts

to be the finest catch in an island

best known for its clam and fish—

their scales silky, slippery; guts strong

like shells carrying saltwater; mouths full

and seething with a language

so broken it is almost beautiful.

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2.

On the day General Antonio Luna

was assassinated, the sky broke open

unleashing glacial wind over tropical

seas for the first time, his corpse

lathered in red amplitudes, purple

spreading on his meaty back barely

leaving any trace of brown on his skin—

such is the betrayal of man, how once,

the Kawit guards struck him on the head

with a bolo, life slowly trickling from his

still-warm body, a most swift decay

of his voracious, unforgiving name. Now,

the name General Luna sits on maps

that point a surfing capital known best

for its pristine whiteness, forts of bamboo

sticks shooting upward like white pickets,

transient beds laced with blonde hair

and freckled limbs, then, the brownness

of the soil yielding to the sand’s sprightly

shimmer: a carnage of shells, mollusks,

splinters of corals—fragments sprawling

dead across a shore bleached so white,

I might’ve overheard giggling children

once proclaim it looks just like snow.
 

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3.

In a packed city of thirteen million

you can always count on a body

lying still, a disruption of space

and movement so palpable, the world

can’t help but stop dead in its tracks.

In its stillness, mortal and mutable

at the core of every life, you can always

count on the chalk that outlines

the body as though all it takes to keep

liquid from spilling out of a wound’s

gaping mouth is a white line that cannot

be crossed. On my flight back to Manila,

I carry the weight of the sand still stuck

stubborn on the creases of my khaki,

my body a repository of grain fine

and wispy as gunpowder: something

lethal to fuel this rage with. I take

my bags and forget the island; this city

prefers things fleeting. I shut my eyelids

on the ride home; this city thrives

in darkness. I watch sand spiral over

my shower drain, in a city frozen

to a standstill, where the closest thing

alive is water swirling, breathing, white.

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Genesis According to a Gazelle
Goblin shark, cottonmouth, leaf deer, wasp—what a waste.
Dinosaurs didn’t sleep for man alone to speak, what a waste.

Birds leap from nests, fishes breathe underwater, bees sting,

and worms infest, yet only man pontificates, what a waste

for these two horns to spike outward from such thick skull,
crown of thorns on my feeble, useless head, what a waste

to be born as prey: no one to rule over and always overruled,

these cretins with mortal gifts of tongue, what a waste

of animal meat devouring animal meat; humans must grow

tired of our dull and slurped out bones, what a waste

this garden is, plagued foolishly by man’s stupor; a relentless

flight of a flightless thing wanting to try sky, what a waste.

I catch a glimpse of Eve’s gaze before the deed. I churn fizzled

words like please not the fruit and eat me instead! What a waste,

had I learned how to speak, no. Had they learned how to listen.
Unmoored, her body aimed for the forbidden, what a waste

for something so beautiful to gnaw strong, jagged teeth over

something plain as hunger—a fistful of sin, what a waste.

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Alfonso Manalastas is an op-ed contributing writer, a poet, and a spoken word artist from Butuan
City, now based in Manila. He was accepted as a poetry fellow for two national writers’ workshops
and was invited to speak and perform for two TEDx events (Cebu and Davao City). His op-ed articles
can be found in Rappler, Scout, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, while his poems have appeared in
several journals including Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Likhaan: The Journal of Con-
temporary Philippine Literature (UP Press), and Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), among others.

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 Copyright 2019
Alfonso Manalastas
Bible & Belligerence
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