"Ang Tula Ko Ay Hindi Ako" (Axel Pinpin)

I Am Not My Poetry
by Axel Pinpin

I am not my poetry.
My poetry is unlaurelled, ungroomed in Barong Tagalog.
My own voice is not my own poetry.
My poetry is not a canvas of color, odor, shape or music.

My poetry neither fits into figures of speech
nor rhymes with the passages of mysteries.
It’s neither as free as fantasies in flight
nor as wild as lovely illusions.

My poetry lacks for love and love-making.
It is tone deaf and is ignorant of creative writing.
My poetry is lacking in playful wordplay.
Indifferent to the terror and tingle of meaning.

I am a poet with no self-made lines.
I am a poet who gatecrashes, impoverished.
I am a poet starkly starving, broken and destitute.
I am a poet begging for your alms of true lives.
I am a poet forgotten in the muck of poetics.

I am the poetry of the poet they can never recite.
I am the poet of poetry that they will never recite.
I am the poet, beginning and ending in poetry.

September 5, 2007


translated from Filipino
from Tugmaang Matatabil (Southern Voices Printing Press, 2008)