Rhyme Is A Crime

Sometimes, it's just she
and the crickets
that croak right through her walls,
or she and the same old lizard
against her walls
who glides, pants, and then crawls.

Sometimes,
she just grits
her faux teeth
and then
she just spits
onto her own filth.

Sometimes,
it's just her
and the purring scowls
of her feline friend,
but it's just her
and the scowling purrs
of her benign descend.

Sometimes,
she just
stares.

Sometimes,
she hardly even
cares...

In a Whirlpool, Paralyzed

She lies on her mutilated rose-coloured sheets, supine, like a bedridden patient waiting for her time to be consumed. She thinks in an osculating dimension, stares in an oscillating depression. She quivers as forces her mind to slumber.

Then she slumbers deep.

Rapidly, subconsciously, her eyes move in a violent turgor. She dreams lucidly, both lids closed but slightly pulsating. She dives into a putrid swarm of memories, she swims through despair and malice and revenge. She erases all the people but the memories, she kept still.

Still, she slumbers deep.

Her television set whirs in static, noisy specks of gray and white. It was, like, communicating with her subconscious. Both the living and the neuter speaks to her in vowels, summoning her to divulge her eyes out, provoking her to shut her dreams off.

Tonight, she slumbered deep.

Evitable Wretchedness

Actually, she is tired of everyone's Palahniuk references. His words used to be her Prozac but right now, everyone's making him sound ludicrously ridiculous. This sudden shift of her sickened cells are perpetuating into the smallest particles inside of her: making her more photosensitive and less comprehensible. She babbles nothing but bullshit. She gobbles anything but guts. Who cares? Everyone else does, too.

Ingloriously derailed!

Everybody's flaunting, everybody's so fucking great and there's not a room for originality and sensuality. All is constantly driven by some disillusioned alter ego. All is manipulated by heightened self-esteem. Who is not going to get tired? Who is not going to get sickened?

Human being by human being, each is detaching oneself from the other. Away from this whirling web of a wicked world. Away from you, furious assholes with illusions of grandeur. You know nothing but self-masturbation, and yes, that's a term coined by your ever-poignant idolatry, Palahniuk. We owe you a lot, sire.

Gloriously senseless!

Cinema 21

* originally featured on Manila Bulletin *

original photo,
taken using a Blackbird Fly TLR x Kodak Elitechrome 100
in Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines

Call for Help Scenes

She prances under the paisley sunbeams, skin scorching, smelling like nitrogen.

Her dark goldenrod hair, swiftly shifting shades, shuffling, succumbing.

People notice her,

she swims and then sinks.

All is synchronized.

Pitiful,

she is lost.

Her limbs enunciate the whirlwind of pain passing through her veins.

Her heels remain steady, like that of a ballerina - softly staggering and suddenly stuttering.

She bends and then

she breaks.

All is jeopardized.

She glares,

face to face,

without a single blink across her lids,

faking like a fairy tale.

Her

salmon-colored face,

her

perfect skeletal frame,

her

glowing insides.

She is drowning.

Someone save her.

Someone

take

her.

Paranoirexia

Some time in mid-2010, I got an email from David Dell'oso, a rad comic artist from Phoenix Arizona, who found my proems, which are mostly written in the third person point of view, worthy of being turned into a comics.

I was ecstatic. And of course, I agreed to team up with him.

A number of emails later, we started Paranoirexia—a collection of visuals and words featuring the cantankerous tales of a sick, strange nymph named Blythe.

This project means a lot to me because I have already written the stories firsthand, which are either based on my own tarnished tales or lucid imagination (and sometimes exaggeration), so they need not be intentionally sculpted just to conform with the comics' theme.

The visuals give justice to the words and the words give meaning to the visuals. Everything is yin and yang.

And because I tell my stories, its lead pin-up resembles me in a lot of ways: she's into analogue photography, smokes like a muffler (I only used to, though), and is all sorts neurotic.

(Fact: I first used "paranoirexia" as one of my Tabulas blog's name, way back in 2007.)

David has been constantly working on new panels and his outputs always amaze me. A bunch Paranoirexia pieces may be found on his online sketchbook. You may see them here and here.

He also helped me with an illustration that I needed for an essay on ambitions, which I wrote for New Slang. To somehow return him the favor and, of course, to highlight his other talent as a film photographer, I interviewed and featured him on Lomography Magazine's Analogue Lifestyle: Digital Is Dead.

Come 2013, Paranoirexia is already on its 10th installment. Just recently, we also had its first printed version. David has mailed one to me a few days ago and I am so stoked to see it!

I'm really lucky that David found me on the weird web world. I haven't put my heart into Paranoirexia lately (I'm guilty!) but I adore our collaboration very much so I promise to write again.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of links to more Paranoirexia, where you can know more about our super-heroine in eternal distress, see how David sketches her from scratch, and, of course, read the monochrome panels of paranoid anorexia:

→ paranoirexia.blogspot.com
→ facebook.com/paranoirexia

Tardis Dyskinesia

* originally featured on Status Magazine *