this was a piece that we first performed in 2003, when my best friend and i tagged along with my officemate and his friend for a couple of friday night beers in a newly-opened bar in Quezon City. the in-house band was playing acoustic music - a fad during that time - when my friend showed me a poem that he wrote. i was immediately awed by the imagery and thought of an instrumentation that would be a backdrop if ever he decided to read it onstage somewhere.
we mustered enough guts to ask permission from the band to borrow their acoustic guitar and did an impromptu performance while they were on break. the manager liked it and asked us to audition a few weeks later. we went to audition with another group who had obviously more chops than we did, but somehow we landed a "one night only" gig slot where we played a couple of cover songs because we didn't really have any compositions back then, and we saved this piece for last. as souvenirs of that performance as well as the audition and that fateful friday night, i'd like to thank Mr. Leo Laroza for the pictures that he took. i posted these in my facebook:
alas, we didn't have any recorder back then when we performed this piece. fast forward to 2012 - my best friend came back from Singapore, and we decided to nail this down last Sunday. thanks to my old reliable 5-string RJ Stratocaster and his trusty Fender G-Dec amplifier, we were finally able to record a performance of this.
this is the madsong of hesus.
words by Alexander Agena, Jr.
guitar work by Mic Entoma
2003 photos by Leo Laroza
here's the full text of the poem:
THE MADSONG
OF HESUS
Alexander Agena, Jr.
In the summer of 1999, in Aranque, Manila, a grease-man who goes by the name of Hesus, ran amok, killing a pregnant lady, and wounding several others. Mob of butchers finally caught and killed him with cleavers and ice picks. The total stab wounds were 13, nine of them filled his left chest, forming bloody sinkholes. Inside the coroner’s room hours after his death, a novena booklet with the image of Christ was found, crumpled in his hand.
1.
Rubbish. Flies. Styrofoam. Lies.
Grime leading nowhere fills the esteros.
Not yet with foul meat or bone scraps
Will my stomach be filled. Not yet–my hair
Greased black, an extension of the Pasig river–
With leftover rice from the eatery. (The pregnant owner
Scowled at me in her oily apron. I detested
The way she smirked, the way the knife and the cleaver
Were chafed against each other. This bothers you, she asked.
A bolo was there among the soiled dishes.)
Now I see the grime
Filling the esteros, heading somewhere.
Shimmering ground
Mucks my eyes from the heat; and once more
The doorknob of the mind opens ajar on
A period rhymed with cataclysm.
Perennial and has passed unobserved. Cold winds
Left, and then a summer. I lay among the rubbish
Beside the wet market. Under the scorching sun,
Where my lips, like the season, blistered,
I scraped my Father’s name down to a deeper trash,
My hair greased black, an extension of the Pasig river.
2.
It was like any other street market. Stalls
Hang their meat and other innards. Papayas
Still attract flies. Fish fresh from death
Or seemed to be dead get caught the second time
In plastic nets. Getting awake from the sudden
blaring of horns,
I seemed to see scenes from Galilee, where jeepneys become
Fishing vessels trudging the sea of cements,
and uncoordinated
Music coupled with street-like oration blast
the ears of passengers.
And sometimes I ride it to give them a sermon,
But they always ignore me, the helm-master shouting
Profanities at my grace…Rubbish. Cans.
Flies. Styrofoam. Lies. And, and,
Clean faces, smiling, government faces,
On big boards in the sky, smirking.
The esteros fill with grime, leading nowhere.
I laugh at how strangers become familiar,
Going in and out of the market, plastic
In their hands, plastic in the garbage cans.
I wake to see them at dawn, trading plastic,
As if they go here to worship plastic, just before,
My stomach rumbles, then another vision.
3.
One of them bobbed in the Pasig river one night.
Got dumped from the bridge, tied in plastic rope,
His head covered with plastic sando bag, the radio said–
A messenger, (not one of my angels), a starwitness
Of some government scam, married,
and shining sleek gray-anew
Like an inflated balloon.
I used to get off from jeepneys there,
To look at the river, to see the sea of Galilee. Now the esteros
Fill with grime, leading anywhere. They found
His wife in a bank, claiming blood-money; maybe
She sold him for a fee, she’s only a housewife–
I lay among the rubbish.
Beside the wet market. The jeepneys stop blaring.
She struggled to get out of her store,
Approaching me, in her oily apron. All buoy upstream now.
–And then it dries, cakes, and the horizon forgot to quiver.
4.
I could not intend to smite her,
The pregnant owner of the eatery. But the ground,
Shimmering and passed unobserved,
mucks my eyes from the heat
And shudders like Mount Sinai. I cry to them my sermon:
Not all papayas attract flies! Sermons attract flies!
Why don’t you all give up your stores and stalls because
You can’t stop stomachs from wailing? Those plastic images
Where you put your blood-money and dried jasmines,
like my hair, at its feet–
Put me there, too, among the plastics;
Let me live. Not foul meat, not bone scraps,
Not leftover rice from the eatery. I did not
intend to smite her,
The pregnant owner of the eatery.
I spread the grime at my hair
As the papayas got crushed. Rubbish.
Flies. Lies.–I slashed at her inflated belly like a balloon,
With the bolo from the soiled dishes. She kept on smirking
As her innards and what seemed to be
a live fish splattered out.
So many soiled dishes, all those plates and forks,
And how those familiar strangers
go in and out of the market,
And we can’t even go out, come out,
with plastic in our hands,
Ignoring the profanities against my grace,
hurling street-like oration
In an uncoordinated music, howling, howling, in jeepneys
Trudging like fishing vessels in the cement sea,
While grime fills up Manila, the capital of the world.
i had to shorten the description in my YouTube channel as this write-up would have been too long.
here's the YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPLdhlR2kd0
