In faraway Bohemia

In the faraway galaxy of Bohemia, 15 light years away from the more popular Milky Way, a planet reigned in peace and magnificence during the past 20 millenniums. That planet is Natasha, most astonishing in all of Bohemia because it is blessed by 18 moons, 2 harmless balls of fire, and 35,000 shooting stars.

The Order of the Pretty Immortals, Natasha’s most high life forms, has never ceased in maintaining happiness and grace in the planet. They will continue to be responsible in shaping the never ending future of Bohemia’s economic, entertainment and political capital.

The Order is composed of one supreme chief and five associate immortals. The Royal Cupcake, Natasha’s supreme immortal, remains instrumental in maintaining intergalactic, interplanetary and interkingdom business cooperation. One of the tremendous results of the cooperation is the advocacy to the principle of interplanetary social responsibility, which has helped preserve Bohemia’s marine, upland and urban ecosystems.


The Royal Cupcake in an intimate moment with the Royal Hubby

The Bloody Mary works closely with the Metabolism Master. The former creates, pilots and replicates responsive education system while the latter strengthens Natasha’s workforce composed of elves, mutants, humanoids, gremlins, fairies and groupers.


Bloody Mary and the Physical Fitness Guru in a photo taken at Natasha's Grouper Preservation Camp.

The Level-Headed Fashionista is the overall in-charge of the planet’s administration, most especially in ensuring the steady supply of laser beams that fuel Natasha’s industries and corporations. Meanwhile, the Physical Fitness Guru perseveres in developing and strengthening the galaxy-wide web.


The Level-Headed Fashionista is cooling.

Finally, the Romantic Kisser is relentless in promoting arts all over Natasha and in many zones and regions in Bohemia. He is ceaseless in his quest at discovering films that inspire and uplift, music that sings to the heart, and literary pieces that are truly slices of life.


The Romantic Kisser is wallowing in romanticism.

But alas! A new millennium is fast approaching and Bohemia’s Executive Committee issued a memorandum that challenges the galaxies’ attitude towards Food and Health. Upon receiving the information, the chief and associates of the Order of the Pretty Immortals unanimously asked: is there a potential in the aforementioned development challenge?

How would major players and other stakeholders, e.g. Krua Thai, Sbarro, Kublai Khan, McDonalds, KFC, Shawarma, Chowking, AA, Larsian and Ice Castle, react to such kind of pronouncement?

But The Order, who has been unfailingly consistent in promoting mechanisms and strategies that ensure the growth and long-term sustainability of Natasha, ruled affirmatively. Yes, the challenge has been accepted!

Thus The Order embarked on a series of engagements that will ensure the physical well being of all its planet’s inhabitants:

The Royal Cupcake focuses on the science of physical therapy and the preparation of food varieties that are mostly boiled and lacks oil and other cholesterol-inducing substances.

The Bloody Mary is very religious in culturing white pearls that melt fats.


Bloody Mary and the Royal Cupcake are having a very focused and emotional discussion about he future of Natasha's fairies and gremlins. Photo taken during the training workshop for Natasha's garment workers.

The Metabolism Master is consistent in discouraging the intake of beverages that trigger hyperacidity.


The Metabolism Master is happy and refreshed.

The Level-Headed Fashionista is relentless in building a database of laxatives and substances that can cause stomach pain and heart failure, among other ailments.

The Physical Fitness Guru illumines the virtues of regular exercise, proper breathing and intimate evening acrobatics that are good for the heart.


The Physical Fitness Guru is being shy and modest.

And the Romantic Kisser concocts mixtures of fibers and acticol, which are plant sterols that reduces cholesterol.

Choose wellness!


The Level-Headed Fashionista, the Romantic Kisser and the Metabolism Master are cooling in the quarters of Natasha's highest governing institution.


The Super Supreme Chair of Bohemia's Executive Committee is celebrating the survival of 10,000,000 forest and fruit tree species planted in Natasha's Watershed Forest Reserve.

Ahem Ahem: The Prequel

Before the Boogieman was declared a Romantic Kisser, the black Physical Fitness Magnate cracked the online personality quiz conspiracy that caused a hoard of social development mama’s and wannabe’s mesmerized by the regular doses of revelations.

The New Wave Extrovert, donned in shawl, became glorious in orange, her magnificence captured during the sunset.

For Bloody Mary, the red mantra is an early glimpse of her current hedonistic pulsation.

The color black was a judgment to the Physical Fitness Magnate and the Level-Headed Fashionista. Flowing in their veins is a benevolent mission – the task of administering the countless and urgent daily demands of a leading foundation’s mama’s and wannabe’s.

And of course, the Romantic Kisser was hailed a green creation. Neither for his mind’s naughty exploits nor for his life’s few yet lingering, highly emotional dramas, but for his supposed humanity that would make Sabertooth run for his dear polar life and Snow White green with envy.

Believe me, you would force me to walk down the aisle to ensure your lifelong security!

JESSIE, YOUR TRUE COLOR IS GREEN! You're green, the color of growth and vigor. Good-hearted and giving, you have a knack for finding and bringing out the best in people. Green is the most down-to-earth color in the spectrum — reliable and trustworthy.

People know they can count on you to be around in times of need, since your concern for people is genuine and sincere. You take pride in being a good friend. For you, success is measured in terms of personal achievement and growth, not by status or position. Rare as emeralds, greens are wonderful, natural people. It truly is your color!

To the staff and crew of Tickle Inc., the Romantic Kisser would like to extend these Virginia Woolf and Rhett Buttler quotes for you. Respectively:

“You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be.”

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Ahem Ahem

12:50 P.M. Lunchtime.

Bloody Mary forwarded one of those perennial personality-defining, personality-affirming, ego-boosting online quizzes.

The Boogieman just had his dose of fiber, good cholesterol and canned fat, somewhat energized for some official social development goals that can no longer wait 'til the clock strikes one.

Bloody Mary, the red hedonist, who seemed too intent in whatever engagement she is planning through the boob tube, announced her diagnosis - she's a playful kisser!

So the Boogieman just had to put some work on hold for a few minutes for his free no-psychiatric-license-required psychoanalysis. And the verdict: JESSIE, YOU ARE A ROMANTIC KISSER!

Whew, is it warm in here or is that just you? When it comes to kissing, you get your drive from the lure of romance. For you, it's more than a meeting of the lips. You appreciate kissing for the rush and for what it symbolizes. Long-stemmed roses, candlelight dinners, and weekend retreats to bed and breakfasts. Sound about your speed?

You're a kissing partner who can go beyond the sweet surrender of locking lips to discuss the meaning of relationships. To really express yourself, you're probably one who's concerned with setting the proper mood. You might light a fire or take your date to a beautiful lookout before cuddling and kissing. You probably like to make a lot of eye contact, gently hug and touch your date, and talk tenderly about your feelings.

Hallelujah Tickle Inc.!!!

Beautiful Universe

Here is a love poem. Its magnificent spectrum of emotions – tenderness, longing, wanting, love – is to the recipient greater, more profound and decisive than the lines and stanzas Cummings, Dickinson, Neruda or Whitman have ever woven. Here is a love letter that is no longer just an intimate correspondence between two souls bewitched by each other, but an affirmation that love exists, breathing ceaselessly within the time of its unfolding, gravitating and pulsating endlessly thereafter.


BEAUTIFUL UNIVERSE
By: The guy with glasses driving a silver gray Toyota

I see the small window
of my cellphone light up with a message from you:
“What are you doing now?”
I send you these words: “Back home, in my room, in bed,
looking at photographs
in an astronomy magazine: so called images of heavens,
breathtaking views of planets,
comets, galaxies, constellations.” Something like that.



Something more, actually.
for the truth is, the magazine is Sky & Telescope,
and this I’m holding now
is its yearend special edition titled Beautiful Universe,
which I found this afternoon
while killing time, lost in stacks and shelves and boxes
of second-hand glossies
cramped in one of those Book Sale black holes.



The truth is, I bask in this
infinity of swirling, swaggering supernovas,
nebulas sensuous and subtle,
the emerald rain of aurora borealis, Saturn’s rings ridged
and radiating beyond the page,
sunflares, moonblooms, grandeur defying gravity,
the soul and span of stars,
all of boundless space for a basement bargain price.



In another time and place,
I would have seen something else in these wisps
of cotton-candy gas and dust,
this blue heart of the Iris Nebula, these two galaxies
collectively called the Antennae
in Corvus ripping each other apart, or Mars’
water-gouged channel
Reull Vallis and rift-gashed craters of that red planet.



In another time and place,
I would have mourned these muddled wounded skies,
these scarred tissues, the stillborn
and solitary adrift in amniotic fluid, curdling, festering,
bearing the chaos and clutters
of celestial debris, arbitrary explosions, cracks and webs
bereft of meaning or magic,
meandering specks and pricks in a world dim and mute.



Ah, but the small window
where you string words and wishes for me shows exactly
the latitudes of love, here
and now in this orbit where you and I, despite
our separate islands, pulsate
and persist as one, our every heartbeat a pinpoint
brighter than Orion’s belt,
deeper than the Ring Nebula or Big Dipper’s bowl.



For the truth is, what I’m doing
now is thinking how you navigate my body, how you
cast light and song upon my soul,
how your spirit overflows into mine, bridging time
and distance and uncertainty,
the pages I hold and the messages you send
opening our windows wider
and wider into this beautiful universe I share with you.

Love

Love

Love wants
to break free, asks
to be revealed
because it is in its nature
to give happiness
and peace.

It cries,
it grieves
when
it is unrequited,
but in time
it accepts
because it is in its nature
to forgive.

But
it is neither to be silenced
nor kept hidden
because
fear of failure is not
its virtue.

30 April 2006

If You Forget Me

If You Forget Me
Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me

e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)