Charge

i am driven by a will that is obscure. never has it plagued my foresight with insurmountable darkness. i want to fight. hard and harder still. nevermind if the chances placed before me seem limited in its breadth to promise redemption. i see my shadow in the vale, charging into the unknown, into a battle i am uncertain of winning. yet with me burns the fire of mortality. who remains with me until that day comes i can no longer raise my sword? who wipes the blood in my wounds after it has been impaled by fate? who cries at my passing, at the moment i can no longer utter the sweetness and bitterness of life, at the moment i can no longer see the beauty of what made everything the I have loved? who raises once more the mighty flag that has stooped by the causes it once stood?

***
once existence is questioned, it cannot be unturned. it haunts the recesses of your consciousness even in the most trifling of moments. wake up! wake up! the power of a few thoughts are potent enough to destroy everything that you have gone for, and grown for, and loved for. do not be a slave to your own prejudices. there are mightier truths waiting to be tapped and these, not ones bickering, will knock your skull open and let you bleed your woes.

***

time is malleable enough to mock ones  thoughts if they idle the keeper for too long. time will wake you in your most vile slumber. it may slow, and it may have to be, for it will pace just right once it acknowledges a real challenge.

Manong Janitor

one of the best lessons i learned came from a simple man, a worker of his own right, with his dignity and masculinity and chivalry and magnanimity intact, his heart unfilled with the evils of attrition, always gaping on hope, on what he gives and hopes to give. it is a sheer slap on our faces for talking and thinking too vainly and losing our hearts in what we thought of as our means of reconciliating with the truth. we find the greater truth when it survives the evils of our small obscure painful worlds. we find it unperturbed, and almost always, hopeful, undeceiving, not expectant of praise, quiet and even time cannot break the ardor of its will.

i pondered long on the nature of his scrubbing, his brooming, his collection, his predisposition to speak in a tone that seeks respect for what he is about to do and i thought no, God, give this man more than what i can ever achieve in my life. good men of good measure that awakes your soul from what you perceived as already dilated but truthfully in stupor, deserve more than any praise i could ever write in this note. the world is so overrated. when you see your kind in perpetual service neither mocking or a even a third of your pinky, shamed from the gross mechanics of his duties, whatever it is you think you deserve more, will be lost along the grains of dust he whiffs like virtuous magic.

and yet, you do not demand a man to work harder any more than you do.