Biringan

“May isa pang lugar dito sa Samar na natatangi ang ganda. Laman rin ito ng mga usap-usapan at
taning mga espesyal lang ang naiimbitahan dito. Ito ang di umano, mahiwagang siyudad ng
Biringan.”

--Biringan segment (Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho)

Language is the architect of this city in Samar, forged

from the languid bricks of hearsays.
Wanderers are said to have vanished
along with the metropolis, folding up its skyscrapers,
its architectural advancements beyond our mortal time
like a pop-up book.

A city between foreign and familiar, stranger to daylight

its own luminosity swat the moon
and has long drowned the sandman to the sea.

Leitmotif: only happiness and a fixed smile.

Sickness understood restrains of its predicament.
No psalms of cars and get stuck with it for hours.
No one has to inject insulins for having a sweet time galore.
No bullet in flight while walking in the streets
then suddenly the flesh blossoms with bags of shabu,
face down to the earth, no news to fill
people’s pockets with stones.

Here, the idea of magic is just as normal

as those seen from the movie screens that forced us to believe
that there is no room for cheap forevers.

Only permanence: a kind of weather

that never goes beyond tender. Nothing withers.
Just a one-trip ticket vacation from our version of reality,
too weary to enter the incoming day.

But the absence of its locals’ philtrum

is already a giveaway.

Mortals are presented with two bowls:

black rice for a lifetime membership,
(that is, if you still have enough soul to sell!)
or a bowl of white rice for a fragmented mental souvenir
of this growing community.
Many tried to capture its light for themselves
the obedience of woods left only spores of secrets,
refusing to be erased.

As long as people believe in this city’s lustrous promises,

the story will never stop, the story never sleeps.