hi-density by Lourd de Veyra

baby tonight I'm trying to watch television and outside the moon seems to have stopped breathing—a pool of flat radiance and the only image in my mind is that of the black and white Siamese kitty cat tattooed on the small of y our back because I hardly understood the true nature of cats until you silently tiptoed into my life and I entered you with the smoothness of hot knife through butter and smoldering like the tip of a syringe and because the memory of your skin still haunts me burning more savagely than this moon so boring the television appears to hum with more life and baby I am sorry I had met with apathy the concern for your real true Siamese  kitty cat because I am in a state of consciousness that receives neither the eleven o'clock news nor the lunar manifestations of truth and love and whatever strange music it is hanging outside these unreal windows and baby I hope you are not thinking it as the cat you keep between your legs I think about all the time with an Egyptian's impious devotion to bash and baby I hope you are still alive and you too are watching television on this very moment with only the real virtue of moonlight more beautiful than death and imagining what might have happened had you come over to let the feline tattoo curl up cozily on my bed tonight baby now I begin to understand the true nature of absence and hunger in the sudden keening of a cat.

(I found this poem in the book, One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson)

Haze by Fran Ng

We collide on purpose

not our own

leaping

into orange.

Then I am red

and you are yellow

circling

a solitary fever

We make

rings of fire

in dim spaces

stroking time

Where I am red

and you are yellow

and when we meet

We set ourselves on fire.

(Source: One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson)

27 by Nerisa del Carmen Guevara

And by the time I reach 80

I would have fallen in love with

An entire city.          

All the people on the streets

Would follow me down with

A knowing.

All hate gone. All sorrow.

The word absence would not

make sense.

The dinosaurs are still underground;

All the species the eco-warriors were not able to save

Have walked without regret to wastelands they haven't found yet;

Most of the people we love, walking or dead,

Are sometimes in the dust we sweep out on Sundays.

The trees we leave an instant mix,

Just add water

And we are still

Here

Remembering even what we try to forget.

The once loved, the once loving,

The kept, the abandoned,

Finally making sense of it all. 

(Source:  One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson)

The First To Love by Simeon Dumdum Jr.

Always she is a step ahead.

When I think of giving her flowers,

She waylays me with wine-red roses.

And if I get up in the morning,

Pulled out of bed by the idea

Of a long walk across the fields,

She would be there, lacing her shoes,

The coffee, which was on my mind,

Filling up the room with its presence.

But one day, when there was a downpour,

I made sure I would be the first

To suggest that we have a race

In the rain, but she turned me down,

And I saw in her smile that we

Were too old for such recklessness,

But that afternoon, the sun blazed,

And she asked what just then had crossed

My mind, that we both go outside.

The road was a patchwork of water.

I wanted to help her across

A rain puddle, forgetting that

Her legs were longer than mine. 

(Source: One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson)

Seven years later, Driving Home by Justine Camacho

It is impossible to fall in love again

for the first time.

The first blush, the heart quickening,

racing madly with a secret:

these things happen only once.

Yester, in the car,

only half-listening to a song,

I remembered.

And in my mind, I turned around.

If I had known that i would never see you again.

If I had known that afternoon in August,

I would have stayed rooted there.

Watching you.

Nineteen yet and dreamy,

I felt the years deaden me, one by one.

And all the headlamps around me

blurred.

It was so sweet,

even to feel

that wound again.

(Source: One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson) 

Negros Museum, June 13 by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

We could have been in different place

                at that moment when we were listening

to Frank Sinatra sing I'm Walking Behind you

                from a gramophone, the museum guy spinning

the turntable with the exact speed of 45 rpm—

                something he practiced, he'd say to his guests,

one the song ends. We could have looked

                at each other tenderly as Sinatra crooned

into our ears, remembering the time when

                we were still strangers to each other

during that night on the ship. Memory

                would have rolled effortlessly—cloth,

or ocean as we recognized the luck

                sweeping us together to an appointment

of what seemed to me the greatest story of our lives. But instead, we were silent,

the heat of the day was uncomfortable,

                and the needle stuttered on the record

which we let go for the needlessness of it

                Looking back, I realize everything of it

was perfect—your eyes shy at the briefest

                touching with mine, the way we avoided

this love which was meant to be bigger

                than us, following us towards the daylight

blessing the corridors of a beautiful world—

                in a way not one of us could ever predict.

(Source: One Hundred Love Poems by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson)