Vicente Soria de Veyra

  Vicente Soria de Veyra is a Filipino indie poet, fictionist, and painter. Born in Tacloban City on the island of Leyte in the Philippines' Visayan islands group, which makes him likewise a Waray (Samar-Leyte language) writer, his focus in his poetry and fiction is on the individual's struggle with the landscape, the human atmosphere, and with the context of existences and presences and events. He is the author of the first online books of poems by a Filipino poet, Alternative Prosaicnesses (1999), Gifts/Parties/Titles/Unrests (1999), War Photos (1999), and Decayed: Travel Poems (2000). Forthcoming online books include the poetry collection In The Level of Gods (2001), and the short stories collection Vexed. His work has appeared in anthologies including Brown River, White Ocean: Contemporary Philippine Prose and Poetry (Rutgers University Press), Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poetry, and Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica In Philippine Art and Poetry. He is currently working on a screenplay, as well as a first novel.

Currently running a neighborhood internet cafe in Tacloban City, Vicente divides his time between Leyte island and Bulacan province on the outskirts of Manila where he lives with his wife and two children. He is also currently at work on a set of paintings for a first one-man show with a Manila gallery.

Weblinks:
Music - geocities.com/warphoto/mp3_download.html
Literature - http://www.geocities.com/warphoto
Art -http://www.geocities.com/pinoy_indie_art.

You

You, sitting in a fabulous coffeeshop
holding this webpage via the language
bestowed on you by sheer privilege,
you it is I now write these verses for.

Visa to enter my thoughts, please,
singing the chirpy vowels & consonants
of the mental birds of migrations,
and I will begin to shine like a fork
on the breakfast roll of cafe poetry.

May I begin with a sole description
of your eyes, reading there against
a foreground of employees walking
to their bundy-clock ways, may I
watch you, finely educated worker,
take your coffee with the elite behind
the glass walls of a beanery franchise.

You, it is; I recognized the face from just
watching your reflection on a chrome
column˜unperturbed by business talk,
beyond detractors of verses, classily
classless. In a coffeeshop for the coffee
and not a coffeetable book no one
            really reads.

May I swiftly end here with a dedication,
without apologies, without explanation.

11/01/01
© Vicente Soria de Veyra, 2003

Interior Decoration

The freedom to be careless,
the privilege of disorder;
a right to be unlikeable,
a prerogative of odor.

Let me practice husbandry
of the animal magnetism
that attracts irritation,
my wife a mood of misery.

This is neither defiance
nor pure aggression, but
the definition of utopiae˜
the one me, one you.

Freedom's not absolute
I know, responsibility's
a given e'en to the laity.
I know, however, cultures

collide in homes, offices,
couples, seats of buses,
and patience is doubtless
the enemy within.

Let me therefore express
my right to paint yellow
a room reserved for red,
anger is presently dead.

That's my belief and sight,
not to spite anyone
but the life celebration
I seek, end of each week.

Togetherness, I presume,
is internally dictated
by yin and yang codes . . .
of beauty, of a beast.

11/04/01
© Vicente Soria de Veyra, 2003

A Well-Off Neighbor's Sunday

Christianity is a boast beyond realization,
The tag on a churchgoer beyond reaches of love
Healing hate homes abound in, and nations

With this vanity of popish heresy, a mere enigma
Consisting of couples for Christ practicing family values
Of self-fulfillments, self-pities, self-centered enemas

Of/On views. Communication, understanding, sharing
Of news˜sheer TV projections of an ideal
Unreachable to habits of egos, pains, or living.

Let me be the voice of frustration at this mirage.
Let me make noise, curse the curtains
Harboring relationships imprisoning ambitions, rage.

Aren't we all each a pedestrian˜uncultured
Saints, pretending virtuousness behind a pious mask
Of a religion, ultimately exhausting ourselves bored?

Lord, wherever art thou? Leaving your church to a market
Of bears bullish with successes, triumphs, feelings
Of having the upper hand. Like fundamentalists

Terrorizing each other by our respective righteous
Takes on situations, your Christianity terrifies
Like a wrath from an Old Testament. A burning bush:

Intent on perpetuating a need, like a failing regime,
Based on a Sunday- or holiday-activated religion.

© Vicente Soria de Veyra, 2003

Blood The Color of Bruise

Neither lord in a war nor
what they call lord in a trade
of drugs or dreaded game
o' numbers, he speaks like a gun
and gives aliments to worries
by way of extensions, gambles o'
what may be deemed collaterals.

He is but your everyday landlord.
No, not a god. Nor what they call
divine inheritor of a blue blood.

˜11/27/01

© Vicente Soria de Veyra, 2003