FLY ART
By: Iris P. Concepcion
Art, that arrogant branch of human thematic explorations, was butchered by an axe one day, and found itself legless. That was also the moment it had decided to acquire a gender in the form of a gonad bearing being. Art, that boasting piece of Towering Craft, decided to become a he.
And he, that legless form of gallivanting creativity, shook the drawing pencil with might and conviction and had uttered:
"From your tip shall arise the most hawkish eyes, the mocking irises, the conscience-piercing pupils, the sly retinas, the snowy orbs."
The drawing pencil, suicidal at this point for the production of horrendous cartographic sketches, chopped ears, misunderstood shadows, cross-eyed faces, straight and limp hair, faced him, that legless creative tyrant with a thinning eraser on its tail's tip, growled like a pained chimpanzee :
"Damn you art! Damn you and your pretensions for one lined eyebrows, your noses with only two dots as its breathing holes, your four-fingered ladies in tights, your uneven tilting heads, your pouty mouths, your canvasses with drawings that always start in the middle, your shadow strokes looking like substandard road cement.
Damn you for liking death so much, you and your incompetent fingers wincing my tip with your incongruent noses, your faces with bland emotions, your lips with nary a character to grip me with the words : "MAKE ME ALIVE! MAKE ME ALIVE!"
Sunday, November 11, 2012
ADVICE OF A FATHER TO A DAUGHTER, A YOUNG WOMAN IN BRAIDS
By: Iris P. Concepcion
And thus it shone, lined in bright skies, a signal that a father is about to give his daughter away to a man of noble stock, in celebration of multiplying humanity and spreading the good genetics to fill the living rooms of cheers swathed in velvet canopies.
The clue is spelled out in the clouds, wooly cottoned in white fur. It illumined a word: UNION.
Ginter Grass, the European, haunting writer who had dramatized and horrified food in his mocking novel, Hunger, would have traded his big toe to craft the sentences supporting the word apparition that flies like an airplane on air.
To the ordinary father though, it holds a different meaning. Itched in unshaven stubble, soaked in grey hues all over his body, it brought forth a panic unlike the wound shots that he had bitten and brandied in the past: how to pacify a daughter's desire to experience a bonded, marital hell.
His own had been ordinarily blissful with routines of a dining table and desk shuffling like outworn crads. It had ranked a little higher than a soap opera boredom. He had been dissuading his daughter to forego the wedding gown and instead, sprain her feet in marathon tracks, drink apple cider juice for a week, carry ten sacks of rice, gulp down a barrel of barley, to test her stamina. But, all these, for naught.
His daughter wants to burden her ring finger with a gold plated ornament festooned with a giant stone at the center weighing like a volcano, perhaps dipped and coated in second class alloy that could, in twenty years, give her red scabbies.
He had been meaning to write her in ballpoint pen, ditching the computer keys that he had never fallen in love with. He had originally thought of them as a squared driveway that gives him the frantic thought of turning into a bald man. He sees it, even as he ponders on its usage, as a vulcanized platform to Braille his soles, mistaking them for blind bats.
How to paragraph the words in their exact meaning, how to slice the sentences with the handy appearances of commas, how to galvanize the semi colons in between words, how to wind the letter contents to bring home the message of urgency that a wedding is only meant to be solemnized by and among squirrels, how would a man, of ordinary pedigree, be made to put all these in stringed words and offer it as wisdom to her only daughter?
My own foray into romantic liaisons was not entirely a feast of triumohs. Women are loudmouths with words zooming out from their mouths like jetplanes, forming foamy chatter from their razor mouth teeth. I have squired plenty of them in various anatomical diagrams with their foul and shrill voices animatedly engaged in gossip, instigating frictions and poking into their neighbors' woes and affairs. Their jealousies show peasant-like envy; I have often dreamt of putting my smelly, unwashed socks on their mouths to turn off thei inane diatribes forever. It is unnerving to wake up in the morning, especially when they shout like untuned orchestras, bewailing about smudges, money, baby poos and stains. Why couldn't they live in tents then? Or as a better alternative, use their aluminum roofs, misused as house walls, as their future coffins?
I have, nonetheless, met a few possessing elan and fortitude, docile and meek like tongue-less herd of sheep. They have provided a homing nest better than the wagging, nagging and tweaking beaks of the rest. Your mother belongs to this latter group. I was treated like an unsatisfied pig by this lot, finding myself rewarded with food in cupboards, cabinets and refrigerators as if my digestive organ is their whole revolving universe. You find yourself opening your eyes not to an irritating wail or misplaced anger but to a bowl of hot chicken macaroni soup with carrots. I was even nudged out of my deep slumber once to find a tenderized goat's head marinated in ginger and lemon grass beside my bed. My first ever voodoo meal.
This might sound awfully Neanderthal to you my child but rarely can you find a mate who can fully grasp your own individuality, a mammal who could intuit the unruffling of your moods.
The temerity of the married flock could never give you a widespread insight the travails of being marooned forever with a partner, bondaged as you are in a series of foul smells and spooky sound, irritatingly routinary like a ticking clock.
I shall, nevertheless, impart my miniscule wisdom on how to combat this boredom and repetitions made more important by your visions of tykes cuter than the animated characters, your own children looking like Ava Gardner in sequined gowns, shrieking like fairies, elongating their pink tongues like hissing snakes. Think about their oval eyes first before you dread the actuial mincing of that goat's head.
Allow me to deliver the marital tips to you, my daughter, freshly experimented from my busy cranium. These are tests meant to examine your future spouse's loyalty not only to his archaic and hymnal devotion to the two prominent orbs frotning your body.
Could he gaze beyond the wonder of your twinkling eyes and dig deeper into the cuticles that had camped on your feet like flattened ginger?
This brings me to the fore of boasting my old wit. Call it a wit's tip, from an old owl.
Is he willing to clip your blackened nails without causing you a scandalous wince? Could he extract their ingrones without cursing to the gods in heaven the futility of, ostensibly, foot servitude?
If he ever develops a curious goiter that has caused his neck to swell, would you scram away from that terrible sight or would you lovingly wipe it with an Oriental ointment to reduce its size? IF he vomits copiuos red corpuscles in your urinary pan like a Quentin Tarantino character, would you scream out of your llungs or would you scream out of your lungs or would you carefully wipe his mouth and pray for a catastrophic wrath and famine to the vicious people who had caused it?
If he suddenly finds himself without a leg in a gradual series of amputation owing to some undiagnosed sickness, would you hide in your closet, run for your life and seek refuge behind the curtains or would you rather consume all your money to order artificial legs in prosphetic mastery from atelemarketing program?
If he serves you food that looks like womited worms and shove it in your mouth as an appetizing gourmet fare, would you show dissatisfaction or would you be very polite to excuse yourself from the table ans sneak a bar of Reese's chocolate and peanut butter hidden under your bedroom pillow?
If he suddenly, insiduously and maliciously, annoint you as the founder of the Satanic Cult in your rough neighborhood, brandish your forehead with incense and holy water after muttering spiritual incantations without halts, would you throw her the King James version of the Bible and shout at the top of your visceral voice that you had, in fact, edited its English translation and holler piously, with cherubic sonatas piping in the background, that his false postulation is inanely unfounded?
If he hastily leaves you for an Interracial Planetary Alignment of Constellation and HEavenly Bodies in Nevada, U.S.A. while you are wallowing in a decrepit cornerstore selling sugarcane vinegar in a far flung village in Croatia, will you feign an incurable dementia to forestall his departure or will you allow him to fly so that he could pursue his alien dream?
My child, the horror and tribulation that I have mentioned thus far is not even an inch to the 12 ft. ruler of doom awaiting you in that, pardon my genteel puke, state of bliss.
Succumb to the intelligence of handling this conjured pairing in purgatory, persist like an Amazon jungle survivor like your mother who had faced bullets, insults, blood, gore and ill will all by herself to build the future, even those of her tormentors. She is an impervious and cunning matchmaker too who had singlehandedly improved the mental faculties of infants, removed their illnesses, fattened their bank accounts and gifted them prestige and respect in a society previously hostile to them.
The preparations laid before you, waging in a way into a marital combat that could drain you, is no match to the promise of living in glorious castles specially lit for your presence once you have hurdled the hell of this marital damnation.
Bravery, my daughter, has nothing to do with i9nnocent courage. Bravery is measured by how far you can endure the degrees of responsibilities, clasping your existence like a hawk, staring at your face like opal, blank void, swirling in your periphery like an unformed guilt.
Why am I terrifying you with prophetic assaults on the home front? Why am I not twiddling you with sash and bolts, the shrieks and guffaws, the birthday candles lit to illumine your freshly scrubbed cheeks and Listerened mouth? Why am I not weaving you a quilt of mountainous mayonnaise surrounding your pasta like snow dug by ski men in neon spandex? Why am I not magnifying your retinas with the nervy sheen of your beloved's toned biceps? Why am I not orating to you the versed rhapsodies in iambic meters that might have, surprisingly, emboldened your pillow to talk, mouthing the piled letters, penned no less by the Mennen-breezed aftershave who is your husband, liquified and trapped in a swirling bottle of fragrance?
The answer to these questions is akin to the four-fingered dwarf with a fat nose: no one has fully assimilated the logic reasoning of domestic unions in textbook understanding. It can acquire a nose with only a single hole on it, an elbow with hooks, toes with peanut butter fillings in between them.
I do not mean to startle you with these frightening predictions but astrology could save you from this grim foreboding.
Your husband can add a little finger to your uneven hands, remove the hooks from your arms, sculpt your toes to look like Taj Majal.
Think of that 40 inch waistline shrinking into a dimunitive 24 inch wrappable anatomy. The plaque of your teeth expelled, leaving your chomping pearls earnestly flossed in horrible whiteness.
Seize that field where you could pluck your dreams like growing grains bathed by spring rain. Marriage is all about the nourishment that considers your body a wondrous habitation, a harvest of abundance that could sustain any of your expectant desires. Have I not laid down the tribulations only to open another window that could grope your soul with mental prosperities? Is it not a puzzle then, that your husband could widely stretch that window for you to marvel at the other side of this domed coin?
Part then, that sullen gaffe of confusion that is now inhabiting your mind. Envy, gossip and fricrions shall hover to dissuade you from enjoying that zone of satisfaction that welcomes you in that bonded bliss. Set forth your sword of defense against the incompetent harangue of doomsayers who might have lavishly poured you with unfounded criticisms. Announce proudly the security of your chastity belt that had not been unlocked at your very young age where others might have immediately and freely given, producing unwanted pregnancies and fodders for dizzying scandals.
All the swallows on streams, their beaks privy to the secrets of the ground worms, shall be with you in that aisle of abundance and prosperity of noble stock and genteel breeding, of a luife free from the chaos of the muggy and murky underworld.
Even the reindeers, with their twiggy horns furnishing shadows to the dark and sullen moon when flown by the Sleighs Of December, shall provide a chorus in that age of equatorial marriage, to be witnessed not only by the piquant but moody giraffes, but the uniquely pouty mouthed, and here comes the punishing insult, very crossed water hippopotamuses who are prouder than ever by their vulgar unfriendliness to camera lenses.
Let us then advance our ruminations on this wedded communion with nappies and budgeting by envisioning the allure and scenery of your wedding ceremony. Shall the entire zoo and all the offspring of the outback wildlife be present? Call in the marching zebras with their gifts of cups and teaspoons, the white Bengal tigers with their ironing boards, the white sharks with their electric pots, the gayest porcupines with their immaculate dinnerware porcelain, the roaring lions with their air conditioners and the little, furry rabbits with their soft towels and linens!
By: Iris P. Concepcion
And thus it shone, lined in bright skies, a signal that a father is about to give his daughter away to a man of noble stock, in celebration of multiplying humanity and spreading the good genetics to fill the living rooms of cheers swathed in velvet canopies.
The clue is spelled out in the clouds, wooly cottoned in white fur. It illumined a word: UNION.
Ginter Grass, the European, haunting writer who had dramatized and horrified food in his mocking novel, Hunger, would have traded his big toe to craft the sentences supporting the word apparition that flies like an airplane on air.
To the ordinary father though, it holds a different meaning. Itched in unshaven stubble, soaked in grey hues all over his body, it brought forth a panic unlike the wound shots that he had bitten and brandied in the past: how to pacify a daughter's desire to experience a bonded, marital hell.
His own had been ordinarily blissful with routines of a dining table and desk shuffling like outworn crads. It had ranked a little higher than a soap opera boredom. He had been dissuading his daughter to forego the wedding gown and instead, sprain her feet in marathon tracks, drink apple cider juice for a week, carry ten sacks of rice, gulp down a barrel of barley, to test her stamina. But, all these, for naught.
His daughter wants to burden her ring finger with a gold plated ornament festooned with a giant stone at the center weighing like a volcano, perhaps dipped and coated in second class alloy that could, in twenty years, give her red scabbies.
He had been meaning to write her in ballpoint pen, ditching the computer keys that he had never fallen in love with. He had originally thought of them as a squared driveway that gives him the frantic thought of turning into a bald man. He sees it, even as he ponders on its usage, as a vulcanized platform to Braille his soles, mistaking them for blind bats.
How to paragraph the words in their exact meaning, how to slice the sentences with the handy appearances of commas, how to galvanize the semi colons in between words, how to wind the letter contents to bring home the message of urgency that a wedding is only meant to be solemnized by and among squirrels, how would a man, of ordinary pedigree, be made to put all these in stringed words and offer it as wisdom to her only daughter?
My own foray into romantic liaisons was not entirely a feast of triumohs. Women are loudmouths with words zooming out from their mouths like jetplanes, forming foamy chatter from their razor mouth teeth. I have squired plenty of them in various anatomical diagrams with their foul and shrill voices animatedly engaged in gossip, instigating frictions and poking into their neighbors' woes and affairs. Their jealousies show peasant-like envy; I have often dreamt of putting my smelly, unwashed socks on their mouths to turn off thei inane diatribes forever. It is unnerving to wake up in the morning, especially when they shout like untuned orchestras, bewailing about smudges, money, baby poos and stains. Why couldn't they live in tents then? Or as a better alternative, use their aluminum roofs, misused as house walls, as their future coffins?
I have, nonetheless, met a few possessing elan and fortitude, docile and meek like tongue-less herd of sheep. They have provided a homing nest better than the wagging, nagging and tweaking beaks of the rest. Your mother belongs to this latter group. I was treated like an unsatisfied pig by this lot, finding myself rewarded with food in cupboards, cabinets and refrigerators as if my digestive organ is their whole revolving universe. You find yourself opening your eyes not to an irritating wail or misplaced anger but to a bowl of hot chicken macaroni soup with carrots. I was even nudged out of my deep slumber once to find a tenderized goat's head marinated in ginger and lemon grass beside my bed. My first ever voodoo meal.
This might sound awfully Neanderthal to you my child but rarely can you find a mate who can fully grasp your own individuality, a mammal who could intuit the unruffling of your moods.
The temerity of the married flock could never give you a widespread insight the travails of being marooned forever with a partner, bondaged as you are in a series of foul smells and spooky sound, irritatingly routinary like a ticking clock.
I shall, nevertheless, impart my miniscule wisdom on how to combat this boredom and repetitions made more important by your visions of tykes cuter than the animated characters, your own children looking like Ava Gardner in sequined gowns, shrieking like fairies, elongating their pink tongues like hissing snakes. Think about their oval eyes first before you dread the actuial mincing of that goat's head.
Allow me to deliver the marital tips to you, my daughter, freshly experimented from my busy cranium. These are tests meant to examine your future spouse's loyalty not only to his archaic and hymnal devotion to the two prominent orbs frotning your body.
Could he gaze beyond the wonder of your twinkling eyes and dig deeper into the cuticles that had camped on your feet like flattened ginger?
This brings me to the fore of boasting my old wit. Call it a wit's tip, from an old owl.
Is he willing to clip your blackened nails without causing you a scandalous wince? Could he extract their ingrones without cursing to the gods in heaven the futility of, ostensibly, foot servitude?
If he ever develops a curious goiter that has caused his neck to swell, would you scram away from that terrible sight or would you lovingly wipe it with an Oriental ointment to reduce its size? IF he vomits copiuos red corpuscles in your urinary pan like a Quentin Tarantino character, would you scream out of your llungs or would you scream out of your lungs or would you carefully wipe his mouth and pray for a catastrophic wrath and famine to the vicious people who had caused it?
If he suddenly finds himself without a leg in a gradual series of amputation owing to some undiagnosed sickness, would you hide in your closet, run for your life and seek refuge behind the curtains or would you rather consume all your money to order artificial legs in prosphetic mastery from atelemarketing program?
If he serves you food that looks like womited worms and shove it in your mouth as an appetizing gourmet fare, would you show dissatisfaction or would you be very polite to excuse yourself from the table ans sneak a bar of Reese's chocolate and peanut butter hidden under your bedroom pillow?
If he suddenly, insiduously and maliciously, annoint you as the founder of the Satanic Cult in your rough neighborhood, brandish your forehead with incense and holy water after muttering spiritual incantations without halts, would you throw her the King James version of the Bible and shout at the top of your visceral voice that you had, in fact, edited its English translation and holler piously, with cherubic sonatas piping in the background, that his false postulation is inanely unfounded?
If he hastily leaves you for an Interracial Planetary Alignment of Constellation and HEavenly Bodies in Nevada, U.S.A. while you are wallowing in a decrepit cornerstore selling sugarcane vinegar in a far flung village in Croatia, will you feign an incurable dementia to forestall his departure or will you allow him to fly so that he could pursue his alien dream?
My child, the horror and tribulation that I have mentioned thus far is not even an inch to the 12 ft. ruler of doom awaiting you in that, pardon my genteel puke, state of bliss.
Succumb to the intelligence of handling this conjured pairing in purgatory, persist like an Amazon jungle survivor like your mother who had faced bullets, insults, blood, gore and ill will all by herself to build the future, even those of her tormentors. She is an impervious and cunning matchmaker too who had singlehandedly improved the mental faculties of infants, removed their illnesses, fattened their bank accounts and gifted them prestige and respect in a society previously hostile to them.
The preparations laid before you, waging in a way into a marital combat that could drain you, is no match to the promise of living in glorious castles specially lit for your presence once you have hurdled the hell of this marital damnation.
Bravery, my daughter, has nothing to do with i9nnocent courage. Bravery is measured by how far you can endure the degrees of responsibilities, clasping your existence like a hawk, staring at your face like opal, blank void, swirling in your periphery like an unformed guilt.
Why am I terrifying you with prophetic assaults on the home front? Why am I not twiddling you with sash and bolts, the shrieks and guffaws, the birthday candles lit to illumine your freshly scrubbed cheeks and Listerened mouth? Why am I not weaving you a quilt of mountainous mayonnaise surrounding your pasta like snow dug by ski men in neon spandex? Why am I not magnifying your retinas with the nervy sheen of your beloved's toned biceps? Why am I not orating to you the versed rhapsodies in iambic meters that might have, surprisingly, emboldened your pillow to talk, mouthing the piled letters, penned no less by the Mennen-breezed aftershave who is your husband, liquified and trapped in a swirling bottle of fragrance?
The answer to these questions is akin to the four-fingered dwarf with a fat nose: no one has fully assimilated the logic reasoning of domestic unions in textbook understanding. It can acquire a nose with only a single hole on it, an elbow with hooks, toes with peanut butter fillings in between them.
I do not mean to startle you with these frightening predictions but astrology could save you from this grim foreboding.
Your husband can add a little finger to your uneven hands, remove the hooks from your arms, sculpt your toes to look like Taj Majal.
Think of that 40 inch waistline shrinking into a dimunitive 24 inch wrappable anatomy. The plaque of your teeth expelled, leaving your chomping pearls earnestly flossed in horrible whiteness.
Seize that field where you could pluck your dreams like growing grains bathed by spring rain. Marriage is all about the nourishment that considers your body a wondrous habitation, a harvest of abundance that could sustain any of your expectant desires. Have I not laid down the tribulations only to open another window that could grope your soul with mental prosperities? Is it not a puzzle then, that your husband could widely stretch that window for you to marvel at the other side of this domed coin?
Part then, that sullen gaffe of confusion that is now inhabiting your mind. Envy, gossip and fricrions shall hover to dissuade you from enjoying that zone of satisfaction that welcomes you in that bonded bliss. Set forth your sword of defense against the incompetent harangue of doomsayers who might have lavishly poured you with unfounded criticisms. Announce proudly the security of your chastity belt that had not been unlocked at your very young age where others might have immediately and freely given, producing unwanted pregnancies and fodders for dizzying scandals.
All the swallows on streams, their beaks privy to the secrets of the ground worms, shall be with you in that aisle of abundance and prosperity of noble stock and genteel breeding, of a luife free from the chaos of the muggy and murky underworld.
Even the reindeers, with their twiggy horns furnishing shadows to the dark and sullen moon when flown by the Sleighs Of December, shall provide a chorus in that age of equatorial marriage, to be witnessed not only by the piquant but moody giraffes, but the uniquely pouty mouthed, and here comes the punishing insult, very crossed water hippopotamuses who are prouder than ever by their vulgar unfriendliness to camera lenses.
Let us then advance our ruminations on this wedded communion with nappies and budgeting by envisioning the allure and scenery of your wedding ceremony. Shall the entire zoo and all the offspring of the outback wildlife be present? Call in the marching zebras with their gifts of cups and teaspoons, the white Bengal tigers with their ironing boards, the white sharks with their electric pots, the gayest porcupines with their immaculate dinnerware porcelain, the roaring lions with their air conditioners and the little, furry rabbits with their soft towels and linens!
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