Two Poems by Jonel Abellanosa

Tricycle

Metal madrigal for the masses,

Minute-by-minute maelstrom,

Engine croaking like alien nightingale,

Tooting from marketplace, plaza

To bus terminal, delivering the fat lady’s

Daily bread: soiled aprons, fruit, vegetable

Baskets, crabs, dried squid, towers

Of egg trays, daybreak truculence to her

Jobless partner, cellphone crazed helps. 

 

Seven of the itinerant’s assembled philomels  

Race from uptown, waiting sheds disgorging

The habitually tardy.  Ugly droning dissymmetry

As three students, a saleslady in apple-green

Uniform and a security guard climb in. 

Next driver in queue doesn’t have to yell

For passengers – four in the sidecar, one or two

Behind him on his creaking trike.  The bank’s

Loans officer offers 50 pesos for solo ride. 

 

Who hasn’t heard this cockcrow cacophony? 

Claustrophobic circuit of the drunk and the stoned. 

Free rides to the police station.  Fit in like sardines. 

Don’t open your umbrella.  Coins only, please. 

Passenger weight syncopate engine heavy metal music,

Tires skirting potholes en route to jeepneys

Like airy stomachs, the carless from bumpy ride

To bumpy ride.  When my turn comes

My heart will leap and sing.

  

 

Lucid Dream Fragment #3 with Julian Assange

The Australian with a new hairdo

On the balcony for free speech,

Holding a sheet of cadenced words,

His other hand guiding the symphony

In cheering hearts.  His villains are asleep,

Their twin pussies rioting from Sweden.

 

“Hand over the messenger,” the British said. 

The Ecuadoran juggles Milosz’s words: 

“Reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only

With the hope that good spirits, not evil ones,

Choose us for their instrument.  For our house

Is open, there are no keys in the doors.”

 

 

 

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry is forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The Lyric, Ancient Paths, and has appeared in Windhover, PEN Peace Mindanao anthology, Star*Line, Liquid Imagination, Mobius Journal of Social Change, Inwood Indiana Press, Golden Lantern, Poetry Quarterly, New Verse News, Qarrtsiluni, Anak Sastra: Stories for Southeast Asia, Fox Chase Review, Burning Word, Barefoot Review, Red River Review, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic.  He is working on his first poetry collection, Multiverse.