Darkness

A veil of darkness is creeping

Cast over a blanket of light

Sweeping over the vast empty sky

Against its ebbing might

It leaves a blackened hole

Over what once was green and gold

Cutting through the silence

Destroying new and old

Drown me in a fountain of endless sorrow

Obliterate my soul

Feed my heart to the lions

And my eyes to the crows

Frigid

I miss going out. And not just going out, but going out and getting hammered, going out to while away the night without concern, without care.  But I haven't gone out, there's nowhere to go anymore.  There's nothing to do.  Am I getting old, or maybe just too old for my age?  Have I been too preoccuppied, with things seeminly more important, more urgent and more pertinent in life. I miss the kind of freedom that you feel when you're out there getting blasted for no reason, in a club dancing or even just swaying to the music.

I think that there's a deeper need that's brooding behind everything, that what I feel is nothing but a symptom.  Like a fatal disease that gives you tremors.  Is it boredom?  Yes, I'm bored on certain days, but overall everything's quite dandy.  Sometimes a little too dandy.  I've reached a plateau with no end in sight.  Nothing excites me anymore.  Sometimes I try something new but I just learn too damn quickly.  Everything is too easy. Nothing challenges me anymore.

Fact is, I've long been sick with this disinterest, this great apathy, this general lack of energy for many things.  When once I used to think I had a "passion" for writing, the past several months have proved otherwise.  This is the first time I've written anything that means something in what seems like years. 

What?  What is this with which I am afflicted?  Is this the pain of all pains, a pain in which you can actually feel no pain, no joy, no sorrow?  What has cast this frost, this shadowy emptiness, this endless winter.  I am frozen in ice.

Cebu

Fake Magellan's Cross

Forgot the name of this church

A street candle-maker

Leaving Cebu

Queen City of the South

Off to Cebu on Friday for a couple of days.  Be back Sunday night.

Serendra pictures

From 15 April 2007

Holy week happenings

Death

In the end it’s not going to matter if we’re sinners or saints because we’ll be dead.  Dead as dead can be, like dust from which we are so proclaimed to have come and at which our end we will meet.  If we sin, and sin we do, or if we do good, none of it matters to this world as much as it matters to us what we do.  None of it will reverberate throughout history, nothing will be changed, it will be as if we had never lived. 

A name, yes, a name.  A name might live on in history, it might just squeeze itself into a side note of a history book as the shadow of a person who once lived and died, who did mighty and infamous deeds.  But then, so what?  His time came and went before his eyes and now his flesh and blood are now nothing more than paper and ink.  At least for a few that is their glory.  But for us, the unfortunate masses whose only significance in this world is in our collective prowess, we are neither heroes nor giants.  We are not Davids or Goliaths, Caesars or Gladiators but insects and the only name that the future will know are numbers, just body counts of humanity that came and went.

It’s a sad yet comforting feeling, to know that life will end one way or another.  There is relief in knowing that there is an end to this suffering, to this trudging, to this walking and working and pushing and pulling until your body wears out.  Whether we be peasants or princes, whether we live and die in a thousand years or a thousand days, it really doesn’t matter because it all boils down to that singularity, to that equator of all men.  And if truly we were so lucky that there were an afterlife, there we would all meet and greet, to share our exploits when we were still meat and bones.