poetry

Thief
by Ramil Digal Gulle

Summer was about to end. I could see it in the sky,
smell it in the salt air, a thick and humid despair
blowing in from the docks.

My father was still alive but I did not yet know
for how much longer. We couldn't fit in the shack
he stayed in,; all he had was a cot inside a plywood box.
He said he wanted to save on rent money.

But it was a special day. We were visiting him at his post
in the port of Cebu, where he was a customs inspector.

The only place to spend the night was at
a pension house that was really a motel.

My mother looked happy, as she always was when she was
with my father. I wasn't happy at all because my lesbian
girlfriend, who couldn't make her mind up, left me
for another man: a guy with long hair and a beard.

The pension house stank with age and the rot of love
made in a hurry. If I were psychic, I would have
probably seen the ghostly cum stains, the phantom
vapors of cunt exhalations curling in the air.

The next day, we found my father's shack broken into.
All our clothes had been stolen.

My mom was still happy because she still had my dad.
I didn't care because I felt like I had already lost everything
anyway. My dad was pissed because he lost his gun, a locally
made .38 that might have blown his hand off anyway.

That afternoon, I watched "The Piano" at the mall,
a movie about a rich landlord who catches his mute
wife having sex with the local handyman.

Three years later, my dad was half-dead from paralysis.
My mother found out he blew all his earnings on his mistresses
in Cebu. My brother hated my father and wished him really dead.

And I perfected the art of staying away from all of them.

Now I know what was stolen from us many years back but I'm not saying.

The telling won't bring it back.

first published in The Philippines Free Press

back to poetry | home