{"id":1106,"date":"2019-06-10T17:31:21","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T22:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1106"},"modified":"2019-06-17T09:27:32","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T14:27:32","slug":"poetry-by-mark-anthony-cayanan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1106","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by Mark Anthony Cayanan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Self-Portraits With Tyrannical Consistency<\/h4>\n
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Fig. 2. The man says the silence makes the bus a barge. You, lacking the compassion to leap past the literal, tell him it\u2019s because everybody else is sleeping, bone birches interrupting the cold white, sky a distracted blue. When you reach the house, he takes you down to the sauna in the basement. Yours for the moment is the kind of private life freed from most laws, you\u2019ve yet to gain anything from this. Dry heat like the lame boy who can\u2019t walk fast enough to follow the doomed children into the river. The man guides him back home, tells him he\u2019s special now. You\u2019re now the one child who may or may not matter, depending on what you can do with your hands.
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\nFig. 4. The city has everything you would want to gawk at, except the relics of a great saint to call its own. An angel appears before the holy man you\u2019re named after and reveals the journey of his bones, so centuries later two merchants travel to the next continent to fulfill the lore. Cranium and clavicle, sternum and sacrum, femur and fibula, they place the remains of his saintliness at the bottom of a basket, hide them with slabs of pork. The men fly back on a winged lion, the city swooning in ecstasy as it meets them, at which point you look at the man with a raised eyebrow, Where have you taken the punchline to.
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\nFigs. 5 & 6. Ashen and hollow, the city loses its monuments in exchange for another history. No bombs, the man orders his army. But the enemy has never bothered to pick up his language, the university hall a gun nest, slabs falling off the fa\u00e7ade. When the city finally goes quiet, the man walks around with a camera, the lens trained on the vulnerable insides of a civilian on the ground, the rubble that used to be a tenement, white soldiers drinking from a rusty artesian pump. You turn up the volume to hear the faint scratching noise beneath the voiceover. A woman leans against the one wall of her house and falls asleep.<\/div>\n

 
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\nFig. 9. The citizens slip their ballots into the mouth of a stone god, his bug-eyed warning now nothing but an accidental feature of the city, the kind tourists easily overlook. Mossy flames shoot out of his brows, and the citizens make their choice based on who has the silverest tongue. The man spends his last few days in power watching their gifts of rosewater and balsam diminish. You see him walking along a corridor, his raiment the weight of a small child, he picks at a gold thread when you make small talk. They say he has everything, but because he wants more, they paint over his likeness with the heaviest black.
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\nFig. 13. The painting of the lives you covet is in the Museum of Quaint and Neglected Holidays, right next to a banh mi store owned by a white guy and his tiny wife. The man hugs you, which means Till we meet again is really a polite refusal. Nature, given over to randomness, concedes and gives you night and day, spring and autumn, death and death. And the man is a face glimpsed through the window as the bus pulls away, the man is sluggish smoke from the chimney. Look up, the man\u2019s a hazy moon. He\u2019s the amniotic silence that takes over your evenings.
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\nFig. 19. Drab shore, sand the color of the inside of your elbow. The man teaches you curse words from his country, shows you a video of his hometown. Someone opens a bottle of room-temperature water, which immediately freezes as it\u2019s exposed to the arctic air. When he says he feels smarter with you around, read a future into it. Understand that the way he brushes sand off your thigh is the answer to all the questions you need courage to ask. Back in the city now, walking to his flat for a quick fuck, he shouts at a vagrant huddled in a corner, there\u2019s nothing like heroism to turn you on.
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\nFig. 20. The man\u2019s voice takes you out to the pub, maybe the locals bark encouragements as they play pool, maybe the bartender\u2019s singing a song about Friday night. The man explains the origins of the game, discusses its connection to horses at some point. You\u2019re on your sixth vodka tonic, and all you can pay attention to is the slight curl of his bangs, the way his shirt sleeves ride up his arms. The cold is nothing to him. You\u2019ve read the novel and decided to make it your life, strip it of the one thing that makes it interesting. The man is the boy, not as young but as inaccessible, and the unfortunate hero is the one who, knowing distance is the cheapest conflict, says OK anyway.
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\nFig. 26. Stuffed into a sack is a life you covet, slapping against the breakwater. They lay the sack on the pavement and untie its knot, the man crawling out, muttering apologies while tipping his head to the side to let water out of the right ear. When he asks to borrow your phone, you stare at him with great fear, awe scratches at the hem of your pants. Panicked rat. The man has a face that can force forward the morning, street sweepers restoring the city\u2019s dignity. A few minutes later, a motorcycle pulls up, and the man slips the driver\u2019s face onto his head and drives off into the dark yawn of a nameless alley.
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\nFigs. 27, 28, 29. Mundane setting forced into grandiosity, evidence of the vision you claim to possess. How special you must be now that you\u2019re here. Description of the weather, ominous, to promptly suggest impending loss. People and what they\u2019re wearing, the faces they make, if they have any. The man. Unguarded admission expressed as philosophical dilemma. You. Random fact, something to dispel the ponderousness. Answer why. After two beats, ask how often. The man, you must always give in to the man, that man, and that man.<\/div>\n

 
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\nFig. 33. The life proves impossible, as he spends much of his in the frozen lake where he engraves bedtime stories on rocks. So you grow your own gills with a butter knife and half a bottle of whiskey. You rest your throbbing neck on the iced-over surface and from there try to read what he\u2019s written about you. You can\u2019t see deeply enough, of course, you\u2019re only the blue you can\u2019t know into. So the man comes up out of the water, records your anger with his phone, promises he won\u2019t ever delete it. Snow falls around your body like a contrivance, the intended mood cracking the discolored ice with its heavy hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 
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The World Uncontrollably Slides Into Bizarre And Grotesque Derangement<\/h4>\n
The pale and secretive face is the future \ncarried through warm trees and unfamiliar rain. Thicket \n\nthat in a novel might have seemed exotic but in a war... \nalready self-heroic, miles from\n\nthe muddy road, check the ground for \nsnakes, smoke cigarettes. \n \n \n \n <\/pre>\n
As if one were sixteen again, this one likes this one
\nthis week, likes another the next, their invented triangles
\na triumph of engineering.
\n                                                            Desire bids one
\nget past the point where to be kissed upon
\nparting is an impossible delight.<\/i><\/div>\n
 
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\nBoy with thorn, body a bronze abundance, hair<\/p>\n
a Keatsian relic. Who, bending
\nover, opens up possibilities<\/p>\n
like a wound. They overlook tallying the dead<\/p>\n
of their enemy: against their four thousand, proof
\nyou knew to grieve in private.
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\nWhy even keep track. One trades fish for wine
\nand their loyalty for favors nobody\u2019s eager to grant.<\/p>\n
One grows bored borrowing a face
\nfrom another mirror. One just happens<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>to be just a person but
\ndoesn\u2019t realize what this means, at what cost.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
 
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\nSoftness and treachery
\nbeing what they have to make you you, your perfect mouth<\/p>\n
its own form of violence
\nanaesthetizes them from their virtues. They know most of all
\ntheir envy but conceal as best they can<\/p>\n
the savage malevolence of their longing.
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Every day one lives in themselves a generic hurt,
\nthese islands have been sinking since they first knew
\ntime, one hears they\u2019re of sand.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>Because prosperity makes one an available target
\nthey make no movement and rely
\non shyness to give themselves character. One\u2019s heard of sand.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
 
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\nYou inspire the tendency to accept injustice
\nif its end is beauty, are you your illness.
\nThere is no end yet, only<\/p>\n
its many monuments. Out of the white crosses
\nsix thousand ghosts in olive drab rise to state, good little boys,<\/p>\n
safe words. Hunger drives many to incoherence.
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Nudged as if they were on open sea, one flees<\/p>\n
inward and offers prayers. Rainwater collects
\ninside the well and to prop up each island, no more<\/p>\n
than a boggy marsh, messy as sex, they drove wooden nails<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>into the water. One splits their palm
\ninto flexion creases of half-truths.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
 
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\nWhat\u2019s told of you: grave
\neyebrows, teeth so white they\u2019re blue, quick-loading Krag-Jorgensen,
\ndum-dum bullets, woman his white soul wakes to,<\/p>\n
turning toward him, his fate yours,
\nyou were beautiful, you were godlike
\nin your indifference.
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There\u2019s barely any pain in winter<\/p>\n
only obvious snow. There isn\u2019t a lot
\nof dirt so use one\u2019s hands. Say you\u2019re strange places<\/p>\n
too tiring to cut across, say you believe
\nwhatever you say about yourself\u2014it isn\u2019t devilish<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>hard work\u2014knowing so little of it.
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Ode to the Exit Sign<\/h4>\n
North star of the spunk-scented cinema, the fire before every fire, you\u2019re the ready come-on in the necessary dark. The nights have been hard and cold but you\u2019re the one bright thing at this bar, the certainty of your command is aluminum. People hang out beyond you, passing around a pack of cigarettes, small talk flimsy as trust, sundry boredoms slapping each other\u2019s butts, rattling off cheap puns. O portal to the unlit alley where they dump vegetable peels, your authority is a nose that keeps spreading, your nose made of tiny scared men who pick up mugs and books made of more tiny scared men. Your body\u2019s a high-rise of tiny scared rank and file, you wrote once when in you was the same spirit that made you jump high enough to rip the exit sign off the ceiling. You didn\u2019t succeed, but boy you were endearing, your face in the white light of the hall looking so much older, a roughness absent in people your age, decay not yet inevitable, decay self-inflicted. No one sees your gray eyes through your glasses, so I wipe the smudges off with my shirt, so I twirl my shirt above my head to prove a point: everyone falls in love with you, you, you the LED party that inspires the great philosopher, your light smears his lips. I pray for my gorgeous skin, my old skin loose and itchy, I wait for skin I deserve, I want my decay to match yours, I\u2019ve ached too long. Meanwhile I lie on the carpet as if I\u2019ve eaten too much, flick my tongue as I spend hours knowing your face, you the Platonic ideal, everyone wants what you hide with your hands. I youtube your name and every shy smile lives up to the truth of you, who deserve both epic and limerick. When everyone\u2019s shuffled out, you\u2019ll be the only thing on, unignorable as a threat, steadfast as a cockroach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
 
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\nMark Anthony Cayanan is from the Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and are a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. Among their publications are the poetry books Narcissus<\/i> (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2011) and Except you enthrall me<\/i> (U of the Philippines P, 2013); recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Crab Orchard Review, Miracle Monocle,<\/i> and Lana Turner<\/i>. A recipient of fellowships to Civitella Ranieri and Villa Sarkia, they teach at the Ateneo de Manila University.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Self-portraits With Tyrannical Consistency | The World Uncontrollably Slides Into Bizarre And Grotesque Derangement | Ode To The Exit Sign<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1161,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}