MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN
Poems from I LOOK AT MY BODY AND SEE THE SOURCE OF MY SHAME:
ECSTASY FACSIMILE
Like the resurrection the end of childhood was a sure thing:
it was time to beget blame: it started with scary music
and asthmatic wheezing as you sidled closer: my soul
oozed amber: pus from stigmata on my palms: I could borrow
martyrdom: no lesson except the dream of patient solitude
that like a drug scrubs my face clean: because I stank up the air
I confined myself to my grudges: my body, magnified, felt
eternal: being worldly I thought it easy to be loyal to those whom
I knew loved me: how blind the world was: how I wanted it
to get to you, I made you change into a contrite expression for it:
you were crumbs the ducks fought over, the enterprising slave
servicing his king: I refused freedom when offered, conviction
pushing through stutter and lisp: my tongue a persistent
sentence: separately we were troubled, together we were gay:
Your aches as inevitable as a five-o'clock shadow, depressing as weight gain, brilliant
as lies lifted off poems of men whose surnames I replace with random gutturals;
there are many ways to need love. Before you, I've pulled the gray of your life back
to prove the fresh drab underneath. There's nothing we can do to change each other
but we can certainly complain about it—instead of touching ourselves, we spend
evenings rattling off reasons to hate and whom, and in between sips of beer
we carve them on the wall with a boning knife and an amen. I nibble on scraps of you
with some margarine and pepper, and I talk about growing old, you learning it
as if it were enough to make us interesting. We were supposed to have wings,
live out our own narratives of captivity and flight, make pit stops in random islands
for coconuts and exotic meats. But I'm always left with my hat in my sweaty hands
and a hopeful expression as permanent as a simile. You, my body, are all this world
has given me, so every day I imagine you with an intensity I reserve for strangers,
my devotion unchecked by guilt or propriety. You're everyone I must be at war with.
I know now we own ourselves when we deny a need. I've no other
talent than to follow. In the midst of my punctual anguish
with the grace of your god I am overcome. The claim your palms make
on my waist. My skin smarting as it must from acid or a hundred suns.
The pain being good unhooks me from my woes. Strips me
out of context. Its empty hours. Evening streaming down transfigures
into premonition. You preparing my body for certainty. The gold of you.
The radiance of you. The marble my flesh is undone as.
You take flecks of me with every thrust. Between need and surrender
my soul trembles. Cell by smoky cell rises off the ground. According to thy will
I tilt my head. Slacken my mouth just so. My wimple creases past me
like mythical hair. Like ocean for which I am earth and Baroque fantasy.
When you glow over me rework me. Agile and aedicular and beyond
thought or joy I'm released into a hereafter without what awaits me.
What is happening inside this story. My soul wants to be stolen from this body.
What is the worth of this soul. I shall answer you once it exists in the third person.
I see other bodies being brought into this body. I am convinced they are men.
They come singly or in droves, depending on which mystery needs complication.
What do they know of this soul. First they have much to know about their hands.
Do they know they are here. They know they will be martyrs. They put on faces
of admirable stoicism when I let them speak of what they desire. You speak of desire
as if it were always the one thing. Every time I use my words they are only borrowed.
Does the body not share your history. Yes, and now you are someone whose disdain
resembles that of my body. I have trouble following you. I am not in what I say
but in why I keep repeating it. You are your soul, with your inflated dissatisfactions.
Yes, and now you know me, how will you have me. I am not here to bend my force.
I want to be the light no longer seen when my soul shuts the door behind her.
You will lead her from the circuitous path of my words. I see your shadow is over hers.
I live as if the miracle I light votives for has already happened and dear god
is a grip on this set: he shoots on my face with an otherworldly light. Appropriately
I float-walk and like a germophobic American I watch out for every sneeze
so I can Bless you. Some endings only happen through poppers and putting out
a small fire requires your agreeable breath. And a small fire is just as much fire
as an itch: you burn under the skin and in a spandex shirt, with as little oxygen intake
as possible, I shimmy into the night and await the real transformation. I abandon stealth
and make the street lamps leer at me when no one else does and although my soul
isn't dead, it possesses no power aside from giving in—my one true saint said that
word for word, I swear. So my body takes it on an all-night bender at the park and
there's pork-rind dust on their fingers, gin in a paper bag, canned laughter, and resentment
for the future. Or in reality they're not even parts and I'm all quarantined within me
like a stuffy nose. Or because the evening's a bust I reiterate that I'm willing
to sacrifice, ask god to sort out my misery, and lip-sync all prayers all the way home.
Mark Anthony Cayanan is from the Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and are a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. Among their publications are the poetry books Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2011) and Except you enthrall me (U of the Philippines P, 2013). Recent work has appeared in Foglifter, The Spectacle, NightBlock, Crab Orchard Review, and Lana Turner. A recipient of fellowships to Civitella Ranieri and Villa Sarkia, they teach literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.