INVOCATIONS

They were healers and leaders.

Perhaps it was through their intercession that Cigna debunked the myth of the "pre-existing" rider by guaranteeing to cover an expensive radioactive tracing procedure.

We are grateful and we continue to plead for the babaylans' intervention --- for Our Ina ng Biglang Awa to always quickly step in for us, for La Pilarica to support our aspirations, and for the La Naval to unleash her spirit guides to protect us.

And with the throng gathered at Plaza Miranda, we stormed the celestial kingdom of Jesus Nazareno with our eternal gratitude for a healing along with our prayers for long life and good health.

Eat, pray, love.

We ate --- nibbled on Goodah's fried pork ribs before the scan, high protein with low carb and sugar, picked on Max's fried chicken afterwards, a revenge lunch of sorts, before indulging on Rue Bourbon's all-meat pizza and what it touted as a Big Ass Caramel Beer (whoever thought of it should be hanged!), and a barrage of Manmaru Izakaya's sashimi with two servings of sake (we will be back!).

We prayed --- at the Binondo Church and a supplication of  braised beef tendon and black chicken soup, at Sta. Cruz Chruch and a petition for Lord Stow's egg tart, at the Quiapo Church after an invocation of an Excelente ham sandwich and Dada's palabok at the Quinta Market, and at the Sto. Domingo Church where the bus dropped us and the Grab picked us.

All that in the name of love. 

Work.

Cigna was pre-meditated, a battle plan tucked between rote Monday meetings while chasing ASEAN 2025 and "The Lao Big Event" in Luang Prabang in between huddles on safe programming and a partnership platform while catching up with tegional and global conversations on just energy transition and a concept note review.

There were matters arising, a potential donor meeting, an annual planning, hotel bookings, a requested ASEAN briefing, and an exchange that finally got me moving (from OGB to ONL).

Interspersed is a dentist pulling a tooth from the money changer who paid the cobbler with US dollars for mending the legal assistant's sneakers after notarizing the Almaguer Papers to authorize a bank deposit after the morning street sweeps so the Solid North bus will cease promoting a party list of poisoned brown grasses.

Ride a bike, drink a beer.

I did disposed the trash, took out breakfast, got a haircut, restocked our prescriptions, and went to the market.

I did drink too but a sparkling non-alcoholic wine first before giving in to our regular Red Horse sessions with bopis, tokwa't baboy, and inihaw na baboy on the side. 

THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND e.e. cummings

the Hack responded to the Melbourne Assessment through a TeamViewer portkey probing into the case of the missing emails, the mystery of the Monday meetings overlap, why the line to Kuala Lumpur is in Rio De Janeiro when a reallocation was approved to develop content for Jakarta with an OPA amendment as the aborted rumble in Phnom Penh was reenacted in a condensed appraisal report, the flight to Luang Prabang imperiled by an intense electronic exchange inscribed in a project charter and a memorandum about an MCP review on why the Phantom Biker was enrolled in both MSH International and Cigna Healthcare     

'twas pooping cat and dogs

and a vegetable medley wrapped in tripe

warm and airy, short and gamey like salt bread 

a delicate curtain of soft college rain

St. Peter's milkfish, dressed in mud then fried in bottles of extra strong lager, stood between two nights of pure libationism, a wall of bottled amber for the advance nights of a fatback on a crisp February evening, plated and skewered, as the pool filled up with exceptional blended Scotch whiskey to celebrate St. Valentine's abstinence in a week when a "prose of complex and unconventional sentence structure" was fused with "modernist free-form poetry"

a benediction, a warm morning feed, a wet market

a party of saints and kings at a Lakers ballpark

ripe fishwife carved  in a plump green plastic mesh

a homily, a bike wash, pickled tank goby

LYRICS FOR A SONG (The Guerilla Ride Anthem)

trash, breakfast, lunch

quick rides between a report submission and a seccesion
Let's Talk! of guidelines, of a big event in Luang Prabang

credit cards, Compass 2,  and a JET network conversation  

breakfast, lunch, dinner

mornings that smelled of smoked fish, phone bills and a ToR
Linked boosted, like climate to social security and the Sequoia slides

ACE delivered, enveloped in a virtual world, a policy retreat

lunch, dinner, breadfruit

old nuts in scraps of umeshu, I-Phone 13 in a retail warehouse
a community mall, a crime scene, a ghost load spewed  

stale tofu, fried shumai, and a half tank of l'eau de vie

dinner, sweet bulbs, green gram

burning sweepings smoke a swath of bone-dry road verge
a free bird in the market, a man confused by church lauds 

the Almaguer Account signed with ink from charred muscles   

A POEM (sort of)

Once

the internet died in Yangon

"save to survive" it hummed

harsh verses for Vientiane

Twice 

partners spent and tell

a line spoken and heard

KL and Jakarta acceded 

Thrice

poked, probed, crossed

eager Melbourne reformed

civil and secured as a Sequoia

Frice

square as a Lenovo ThinkPad

boxy like the bike from Manila

that's me safely programmed

-o0o-

Rides and vice rhyme

like peddlers and bakers, servers and menders

remittances and riddances

debits for a hermit

not cantaloupes, groundnuts, or a fritata  

nor handy men beating the clock

but routine meetings gone sour...