Two poems about dumaguete from co-fellows below. One's a lawyer now and the other's a magazine editor. Then they were just drunken buffoons.
These just bring back memories of sea and bacchanalia and hedonism. Mostly sea.
Nightlight on Breakwater
Negotiating the last port of call past midnight,
Post-conversation in a coffee shop in Pasay,
I take your white hand through an aisle
Of gaslamps bathing the vendors in orange light
Until we face an opening to the open sea,
Tossing in the world's shadow, keeping
Whole islands of countries together or tearing
Away at their edges, breaking off engagements.
Late into dark, the docks retire the whores,
Transvestites watch each other with suspicion.
Drunks huddle in a conspiracy to murder the full moon.
The policeman points his flashlight at parked lovers.
If we could ride a rented bicycle across the ocean
Morning would find us bright with sand in the Visayas
Reservations called through a seashell payphone
To a hotel whose beds we'd turn on one by one.
Maybe if I tell you all this you'd come with me.
An oil tanker slides out the harbor of heavy chains.
The captain paints small rainbows on the trail
One might follow another to Dumaguete.
-- Easy Fagela
Surfing in these Islands
The Sony of this island
is causing us some minor dilemma.
Waiting offshore are Dumaguete dolphins
and their happy sonic squeals
for the first time Costeaus:
couch potato mariners
of Discovery channel whale
and Trinitron shark fame.
But on simulcast are Misses Cuba
with her luscious Havana- pout boca,
China (Taiwan) and her mixed English maxims
of a 21st century Confucius confused,
the girl with enormous chakra
coal-dancing nails-for-a-bed India,
and Italy sleek as a Ferrari
all set to win her race the Universe.
Since Electricity it has been like this:
our eyes splashed with occasional static,
our bodies suddenly jerking to a halt.
A hot finger on the pause button of our lives.
-- Ed Geronia, Jr.
