When the searing sun-shine had just worn off on one summer day, I unexpectedly went to my friend’s house. The heavy black frame brimming broad lenses of her eyeglasses, the baggy black shirt she wears, and her hair - carelessly tailed - greeted me an aura of a writer. With a jest, she had overtaken the surprise I made for her as I was surprise to see her not upset. “Writer na writer ka na ah,” I retorted.
While we sauntered around, I blew one of my usual throw ups: "What were you doing just before I came." She spoke indifferently of her probe for her lost “Dantesque” work. “Dantesque? Hahaha. Was it somebody or just you?” and an amorphous grimace and a laugh evoked from me. I got a knock-out punch before I could say I was kidding. “So, what’s with Dante and your work,” followed after my minute-long recuperation.
In a deadpan tone, she started. Her high school-built confidence in poetry crushed like a smashed glass bottle when her professor remarked her high school poem “deaf”. Then poetry became not her writing form. “I suck at it,” she said pungently – the first time her emotion poured out.
It was distressing: the workshop to come. Her apathy pushed her procrastination and gave her only a day to make a poem.
Pen, paper, and cell-phone dictionary. One more helped her. Recalling the “deaf” spurred blast of craggy-sounding-words; words that abrade listener’s sense of smoothness in hearing, words that induce ear and tongue pains, words that are noise. In her cell-phone dictionary, she browsed through the [word] entries diligently, noted g, r, tr, ex, z, and v-containing words and selected astutely.
On the workshop, the listeners heard a poem that sounded like a heavy metal, like the trills of a bass guitar harshly persists. Reading it aloud produced a boastful stuttering effect. Despite her myriad attempts to efface that accidental ornament on practicing reading the poem, it always occurred.
The fastidious UP CAL professor - stunned - said she liked it and hailed hers as resembling to Dante’s Inferno. Then the “woooh” chorus immediately supplanted the room.
Goose bumps wrapped over me hearing Dante’s Inferno. I said jocosely to her: "Ikaw na. Your talent gets better through time with more rigid training, with more time - with sleepless days and nights. Don’t hate it or give it someone, not to me, I don’t like it." I continued to laugh and jokingly called her genius and we proceeded to 7-11.
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