DEAR CONTRACTORS, ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS, LANDSCAPERS AND BUILDERS
By:  Iris P. Concepcion

Dear Contractors, Architects, Engineers, Landscapers and Builders of the Philippine Government:

I have noticed that your street lights had dimmed over the years, making my shadows smaller and unimpressionable.  I take it personally that I could no longer form my hand dog drawings using your connection.  I suggest, with glimmering aspiration, that our bulbs be retained in their original wattage as the General Electric and Philips handy people had envisioned them.

I propose the following innovations too:

1.  Broccoli light, following the pattern of this vegetable for salads.  Let its stem light fully as its Hiroshima bombing flower on top illuminates a greenish flicker, giving the illusion of a live plant.

2.  I have seen my vision, regrettably, placed ahead by an Indian starving man, on a food cereal advertisement.  His pole swayed like a perfect dancer and his bulb is in flaming orange fruit, resembling a stage klieglight.  I wonder if its actual execution could properly deliver the hues to form my hand drawings.  It is a significant start though.  One step of orange, a bigger leap to broccoli.

I also propose, in the interest of aesthetic justice, to commence your urban development projects from the point of view of a washed stone or a pebble.  The roads in the future shall be made of pebble pools that could generate a possibility of producing my orchid-designed wheels (in pristine white, look Ma, no dust!).

I am bearing an acronym for an easier facility with your future plans using the RMP method (river, mountain and parks development).

Have your rivers rejuvenated; give them a colorful shot in the arm.  The grass could be landscaped like steel, giving the provocative shapes of flowers and live ferns.

Let me return to the rivers: Please, and kindly expand your imagination on this, form arcs on the river streams using either of the following:

1.  Wild flowers i.e., orchids and other crawling plants.

2.  Choose trees, if you intend to plant them around the streams, with colorful leaves (mix of pinks and reds) where spiders (in gray) can spin their webs and catch their prey.

3.  Always cover your rocks with the softest green moss for people to glide in, instead of being wounded by their pointy tips.

And the buildings.  Oh, yes, the buildings.  The Un ited States of America, Europe had transformed their mountains into open space museums for busts and historical markers.  India and the rest of Asian countries (the next exciting place for creative thinking), untouched by internal political strifes in the modern world, have already surged in terms of aesthetic visibilities even in their small towns.  They might look overtly sleepy but their furniture is beyond reproach.

I have seen a signage here in Yala, Thailand, hung in front of a house with a superb string music blaring from its stereo, with these words: Cultural Tour, instead of the usual Guided Tour. I have seen its owner's majestic sofa fit for royalty.

My proposals may seem daunting and unpalatable right now but they could enliven Ninoy Aquino's statue in Makati City.

I do not hold a diploma in Aesthetic Development for Urban Development but my suggestions here could merit a twitch on the brow and a flap on your ears.

I faithfully remain,

A student of  Visionary Development, a diploma course in an unknown university somewhere in Nepal.

 Taken almost three years ago at McDonald's using my old phone without the aid of lens. By myself.

UNIVERSITY OF CONCEPTUALIZATION IN AERONAUTICS ENGINEERING
By: Iris P. Concepcion

"At the end of the programme, they will also be able to develop effective strategies for goal setting, time management and to execute design concepts to a professional standard. Many of the projects work with industry experts to give students practical exposures to "live" projects. They require skills and knowledge to enter into the global design network."--- Limkokwing University in Malaysia with a foreword of its brochure penned by no less than American President Barack Obama, dubbing Asia as the new innovation hub.

Prominent among the visual impetus that I had obtained as a child are sights that are big.  The insignias were plated in non-staining gold that I had taken to pin on my dress without any notion on why the medals were scattered in the dresser (with mirror) beside my father's morning after shave, Mennen Breeze.

The folding wood windows are big, the glass panel above the door is big, the glass porcelain water pitcher is big.  They were all designed intricately.  This is the reason why I wrote about my plate with a Rembrandt-like painting nestled in the middle with gray, ruffling folds around it.  I had thought then it was normal for kids to spoon their rice from plates that looked like paintings.

My favorite fixture is, of course, the Radiowealth stereo and the big, wooden stairs that I had used as my bench for drawing my comic strips.  I am astounded now that the nails used were not visible.  My father used to line up his students for his chorus projects on the stairs that could easily pass up for a stage.

Our bed is likewise cottony with a very soft cushion.  I use it as my gymnastics tarpaulin, jumping on it as its springs provide me the gravity to be on air.  I have noticed from the recently-designed beds that they are hard no matter how soft-looking their cushions are.  The trick, I think, is putting springs on the cushion to give the sleeping gadget a certain bounce.  The bed's stands are like Roman columns, reminiscent of the Capitol Hills building.  I still use it as my bed when I am in the Philippines even as its springs had already peeked out from the cottony cover. The cushion has remained priceless though. Reaching beyond 50 years, it is still useful as new.

The mirror also makes one staring at  it very slim, without spooking his visage with an enlarged nose.  My mother had likewise purchased a bathing robe for my father from the North, with his name initialed on it.  I used to cover myself with this water cape, pretending to be a religious monk.  It also passed off as my makeshift house as I hang it on rows and rows of chairs.

I am writing these memories to give credibility to the fact that one can obtain a Diploma in Sound and Musical Engineering on the dot without grabbing your notebooks and pads.  I had learned my architecture absentmindedly when I was four and was lost in abeyance of mortal appreciation when I was growing up.

It is only now that I am rekindling the magic that was, to live on the present, that is.

POETRY ON VALENTINE'S DAY
By:  Iris P. Concepcion

I had clearly remembered the skittishness by which I had celebrated Valentine's Day when I was in grade school.  I shall be pinned a heart insignia on my dress, flaring in red with socks up to my knees, silently oding to the gods of Olympus that I shall be spared from cupid's arrow that looked like a doctor's scalpel out to slit my throat.

Unerasable too are the tacky messages inscribed in the cards with the following gems of words:

Don't
4-get
2-pray
4-me
======
10-derly

Or the terrible mistake of ascribing words to country names similar to this:

I-I
T-trust
A-and
L-love
Y-you

At a prime age of 44 and totally rinsed off any mushiness, I had evolved an acronym, LOVE, that I had written like the Italian, genius word above.

LOVE= Logistics Onboard a Vehicle of Equality

February 14 regurgirates with verses and prose as I was dozing off, half awake, after I took my lunch.

Benetah the waves
Of sunbeam's rays
An apple twig
Birthed a pear's egg.

Another highlight thunderbolting in my mind:

Have you not lingerly
Pierced a soul's
Sculptural bent
Elevating awareness
Of connubial heritage

Hidden partly in consciousness
Soaring mentally to
A sworded world
Bequeathed to a Supreme
Calling of nature's Piety.

Half of my day was spent scribbling these lines, aside of course, from meeting a happy band of birds that had grown bigger in weight, all plump and splendid, on my afternoon walk to the public library.

BEDROOM IN MY PARK
(Outdoing Buses, Terengganu, Malaysia, February 8, 2012)
By:  Iris P. Concepcion

The night suspends itself in a spectacle of lights and an epiphany of sketches had appeared before me like a cartoon dream, embossed in barks, formed in shadows.

This is Terengganu, Malaysia, a first visit by this writer that grows in shapely surprises from morning till night.

It is three hours away from Kota Bharu using the SP Bumi transline transport service. The ride was like atop a ship in an ocean with its precise sways and bumps. It floated like air in the circuitous road with the impeccably-dressed driver in gray vest (an imam) leading the way for us, passengers, in search of anything from epistle passages to a new fruit jam. He navigated the trail breaking nary a sweat, curse nor shriek.  I have always experienced my roller coaster rides in reverse implements, say, getting my fright ride in trains. I had my fill of a 180 degree ferris wheel ride on this trip.

I arrived here past lunch time in a sweltering heat but possessed with promising eyes to discover its cultural contours. I had paused then for a breath and walked.

I faced an anchorage on silent waves in an amber afternoon, beside a seaview  with a deck for watchers.  A giant television set in gray panel is pitched, as if, under leafy and giant pine trees.

Here I am then: lying on a carpet of bermuda grass with its cold texture freezing my back, making sense out of the political discussions on these television programs. A gray cat who talked to me in understandable meows jumped on my lap and never left. He, instead slept peacefully, showing me his closed eyes that had already resembled a tiger's.

The television set: it is only lit by stadium lights but had shown cinematic-like klieglights from down under; they glare on the dainty street lights that bow like hanging tongues to the ground in perfect egg shapes.

Visualize this:

A bedroom with a sea and a green park. I have experienced this kaleidoscopic sense of belongness with Nature as people on screen whom I could not understand, moved their bodies at every cadence of their words, sometimes, unhaltingly. Shadows of the pine trees, naturelle and free, sculpt the ground and are blanketed by bermuda grass.  I just learned one thing at this instance: gray color gives you a magical invisibility at night, a visual illusion that gives objects four-sided dimensions. The television set appeared like a branch from a tree, completely borderless.

This is a perfect segue to my earlier date with a masterful vehicle. If I were a bored kid with nothing to do, I would have shed the paper off my crayons and eat their tips while watching the same set of dirty buses gnarled in traffic back in Makati City.

Here though, the introduction to the transport means is magical. The emergence of a wooden bus at Terengganu's bus station had completely astounded this writer. This vehicle, certainly, does not connote boredom.

It is made of  my Interlude radiowealth stereo, its body carved like the  wood of my childhood house.  Coming off from a  double-decker bus with airplane interiors, I never expected to be doubly astonished by this antique piece of machine. Its windows bear the square-like glass decor of my youth: sandwiched in wood. Inside it is a mini promenade area with bench chairs  in brass and steel with artful paintings on the ceiling like the Roman churches would.  A kindly woman who was carrying grocery bags, alighted from a double decker and uttered  in a perfectly toned voice to her companions in a haunting gaze: "That is my home."

I stayed in the park the whole night with people bringing their picnic baskets and wrapped gifts, sitting in mats, partaking their food loot.  One of them courteously offered me food. I had begged off, saying, I just had my Big Mack meal with french fries.

This is the moment when the gray cat entered, eyeing the surroundings like myself, sifting the chestnut-like, but dried brown fruits. I had picked these marvels, including the big leaf as my mementos. They would beat the tacky cards and keychains on a heartbeat as keepers of memory. I was tempted to take the cat back to Thailand but he has obviously a home. Here too, I ate the kamansi (chestnut) produce of my childhood, heated in a tin machine that rotates by itself. I asked for a piece from the vendor and he readily relented.  It was good as advertised on his mini-van, designed like a propped store. A chestnut that tastes like a Japanese sweet, root crop.

It was also here that I had witnessed firecrackers from a nearby Chinese temple with its loud bursts of colors.  I had experienced Hongkong freely and wildly, with people in wide grins.  Young people, riding in motorcycles, circled around (my) present bedroom with their helmets fastened on their chins. They sat on the cemented benches, perhaps wondering why I was leisurely sitting and sleeping, with my shoes off, on the grass. I had wished them good graces and had earnestly wished they have tried my way of spending the night.

Early morning, while everyone was still in deep slumber, I had taken my steps to the port. Silently trodding the path, I just realized I was walking on a bricked road instead of a cemented one. This is the future of highways, with (cassius) clay designs.  The buildings, mosques and oriental-themed, hark back to the days of Mogul-Islam period. This is Disneyland with its structures, only, they are offices. The water pipes looked like big logs.  I have seen people sleeping on the bricked huts, with wood structures fit for a sleepful rest. Public hospitality is clearly evident in this place; no one shall bother you even at night.

Dreams do come true in little packages. Finally, I have seen my envisioned street lights, sculpted like how I had thought it. The ferns still lack body and I like them plenty. These sweet bulbs stood out from among the lights nearby.

I could not wait to view my airport. I have already met its engineer while swapping sentences at the local church.