Poetry.

Edo Ot Alinam
- A. Ramirez, 26 March 2010, Manila, Philippines

With the extinct song of dawn she wakes
Those who never fall asleep
She breathes the lilts and troughs
The poisons and perfumes
Of those who walk, purpose with or without
She is in the fresh metal and the dusty mirror
She lives in the gravel beneath the slow train
Her hair is the gray smoke that hangs
Over the million four-wheels and four-footeds
It is the heavy fog that sets over roads
That radiates the quivering heat of her eyes
Her gentle face is pitted and plastered now
She hides your obvious secrets
In the sinuous curves of her nose and cheeks
She speaks the thousand languages
Of the world's thousand slices
While her neck is adorned and strangled
With the collar of her patchwork dress
She wears stolen satin and well-earned silk
Stretch polyester and workaday denim
With endless bare threads underneath
And the seams are heedlessly unravelling
Barely covering insect-ridden shoulders
Revealing paper-brown skin
Perspiring from weather born of fledgling gods
Bedecked with tattoos in olden languages
Curved and dotted letters that stop
At fifty-one bracelets she brandishes
While tottering on small feet
Knees shaking from the impossible weight
Of the potential she never lived
She is on unsolid ground
She has fallen in love with too many ideas
She has forgotten the significant
Remembered the banal and benign
She fights fleetingly and suffers for long
And with the extinct song of dawn she wakes
Those who never fall asleep
She breathes the lilts and troughs
The poisons and perfumes
Of those who walk, purpose with or without.