Beautiful Mesmerizing Landscapes with Magnificent Sparkly Waterfalls

1. This is a street, a sidewalk: a symphony of rumbling engines, horns blaring, indistinct chattering – of AM students planning their afternoon escapades, of PM students groaning, their hair glistening wet and necks white with powder, of aunties and vendors haggling, of men calling for more passengers to board a jeep blocking traffic, of motorcycle riders clicking their tongues in disapproval – still yet, AI-generated music that went TikTok-viral blasting from Bluetooth speakers, hot oil crackling as neon orange pieces of kwek-kwek disturb its deceptive stillness; all this, a plethora of sounds that could kill a medieval Scandinavian peasant, maybe, but affects not a pedestrian in North Caloocan.

2. Alternatively, this could be a home in which you’ve spent countless juvenile summers in: your friend cajoling you for another round of games, their mother exchanging gossip with their coterie of fellow care-givers at the dining table – the one that’s wrapped with fruit salad vinyl, sticky to the touch, the same one covering the stone-hard floor on which a puppy naps – as they pick apart malunggay leaves for tinola, perhaps even sinampalukan (you never stay long enough to find out), the electric fan buzzing, persuading your eyelids to grow heavy. This function of gravity, however, is disrupted by the crow of a neighbor’s rooster, telling you that 5 o’clock is nigh and, with it, the threat of returning to a house that isn’t this.

3. This is an image, a Platonic heresy. Therein, something Picturesque: a body of water, a verdant landscape, an expansive blue sky that could go on forever, and does, until suddenly, destroyer of daydreams: a calendar, a Taoist dictum, or a frame of plastic, bright pink and scallop-shaped. “Made in China,” because what isn’t? Also made in China: the image itself; as in, the image does not exist in real life; as in, fake. All of the above, spliced together to form an Edenic promise – conditional and, therefore, doomed.

4. As far as heresies go, this is a painting. Portrait or landscape? Both, but to be more specific, landscape as self-portrait. Approached in a way that does not concern itself with naturalism. Painting, not as a way to understand the natural world, but as a way to disengage from it. Painting as meditation: dwelling on one’s interiority, composed of a constellation of memories, both real and imagined, true and false. Therefore, painting as mythology.

5. This is a fall.

My heavy body in bed,

when, at once,

a crack in the ceiling

gave way to a gushing

downwards fountain –

as if Heaven,

itself, caving in! –

flooding

the floor of my grief.

I look at the cavernous sky

that drowns me