Hold - Poem

   Through numbers at random
   you found me, to talk fate:
   how coincidence makes perfect

   sense at midnight. Admitting
   voice in the bedroom another
   wake-up call, its urgency,

   a distress code. In this cycle
   repetition breeds familiarity.
   From your end, the connection's

   clearly for you, meaning,
   it's all one way--need imposing
   silence on my part, while the life

   that leads you to end
   your life travels from mouth to earpiece
   all in one breath.

   In the middle of night what excuse
   would shut out the stranger
   who has dialed me into a friend

   whose only words can be yes and no
   problem? Clearly these are desperate times.
   By extension, your problems become mine

   to solve. Conscience, however, permits hang-ups,
   the only way to keep you in line.
   Hang-ups versus hang-ups.

   These are the limits of free speech.
   You're allowed to talk only
   on my own time--the length I'd give shell

   with the beach's murmur to repeat sea.
   Strange, but only when someone listens
   does life ring true.

   So each night when you wait for the moment to live
   I wait for that moment to keep you
   waiting.

Editor's Note

In his introduction to our Spring 2000 issue, "`Am Here': Contemporary Filipino Writing in English," guest editor Bino Realuyo referred to Manuel A. Viray as the editor of TLR's first Philippine issue in Summer 1960. In fact, Viray wrote the introduction at the request of that issue's guest editor, Leonard Casper. Mr. Casper has been devoted to "Filipiniana" for fifty years, and is now the author of nine volumes on that subject.

Paolo Manalo is the current literary editor of the Philippines Free Press, a weekly news magazine in Manila

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