You can find me inside a hole in the wall, sweat
Molding from my brows, the way kitchen grease
Loiters in the air like a sleazy proposition
I’m resting on a wobbly stool, leaning on
A warm window, waiting for grace
Flies fatter than raisins relish the appetite
Did a roach just crawl up my leg? Or was it a rat,
Stretching its fangs?
Only the stomach squeals. It is mad but it is
Composed. I know this world. Galaxies away from
Bland prime ribs and fake American accents
Growing behind fortified gates has
Not disintegrated my soul into
Soft gold. Milk and honey, wine for water?
How about Chinoy chicken and crispy
Fried dumplings doused
In MSG, crystalline as shabu?
Paint this perfect picture of
Acrid mami, enveloped in steam. How I let it
Settle on the surface of my
Tongue and allow its miasmic
Charge to disarm my sense of lucidity
Paos as white as snow, soft
As heaven, stuffed with asado
Shreds, served by a waitress blasting Visayan-tinged
Curses at her colleague is my
Vision of loveliness
This is not a hypnosis exhibition. I am most
Conscious when hakaw, bathing in a sinister
Black sauce, is dissolving in my mouth.
Understand this predilection for perfect symmetry and
For Hong Kong Milk Tea
Sales spiels are dead
Echoes inside a hollow stomach.
Like a languid dream, I walked into
This ramshackle, inhaled the
Smoke like a fiend to reach illumination
Food and fornication on old glossy
zines are sickly cliches. Why compare the
Gastronomical affair with sex when
There’s no chewing and
And hardly any swallowing?
Death is more apt. It is precise, unrelenting, the way
Hot yellow lava pao invokes patience. Allow my
Heartbeat to flatline, allow me to lay on this
Mud-streaked floor as I atone for my
Gluttonous traumas with my belly up, facing
the Chinese masters and daemons
Punch Time Clock 