Ecstasy Facsimile
Gerard Manley Hopkins
I will love you with a clarity
of a fourth-floor window, my swift-moving
bird body smacking against you.
I will confer upon your dick Homeric epithets,
no covenant more sacred than adjectives,
mnemonic, signifying the one wish:
authorship. For when I look at you, I’m made
aware a return to myself wavers
between unsafe and unbearable, the difference
being, I cannot live in the world, and
I cannot live in this world.
Ecstasy Facsimile
I
Soon we’ll belong to a time of joy, books and diplomas finally dusted and sorted
into boxes stored in my parents’ house, my deposit to the apartment claimable
despite that one time I dropped a bottle of chili oil on the floor and that other time
I stapled blown-up photos of you to the wall. Soon we’ll walk into the closest
Uncle John’s, buy sub-zero Red Horse Stallions, and marvel at how wanting to drown
sorrow, and in the most stereotypical way, actually works. Soon, though we grow old,
we’ll never run out of original feelings, marketable ideas, the world opening like a secret
you contrived so you could tell someone something. We’re no longer kids, obviously
we’re dying slowly, soon it’ll be time for a second, third, fourth attempt at another life,
quit our jobs, stop stress-eating and take up running, either abandon our partners
or gaslight them into thinking they must shoulder most of the blame, when in truth,
after their devotion gets unmasked as provisional curiosity, I invariably disappoint
those most important to me. We’ll sort out supporting documents and find fulfillment
in another city where we’ll rent an overpriced WG, get a useful degree at a polytechnic,
II
take language classes your tongue isn’t shaped right for, hoist yourself up the capitalist
food chain, and make a point of being content posting selfies with cherry blossoms
or medieval cathedrals as backdrop. On occasion, drop smug, vaguely insightful comments
on your friends’ Facebook updates about how much better life’s been since we’re out
of ourselves or decry the nation’s fate or sign online petitions against a president
whose pastime was to slap his metaphorical dick against the public’s cheek. At some point
within that commonplace trajectory, the rest of our lives clicking into place. Pretty soon
we’ll start fermenting kefir, harvesting black trumpets, we’ll unpack our traumas as if
we have all the time or funds in the world to indulge them, because soon we’ll be under
socialist democracy, the state helping whenever needed. And regardless of my inconsistent
commitment to the fantasy, all the systems will defo work. Meanwhile, I GCash this month’s
installment of my memorial plan, wear a mask on the UV Express to Cubao. Meanwhile,
this test body is still unignorable fact; meanwhile, the muscular capture of the empty. I
Facetune my face free of misery: soon that face will be my face. Meanwhile, victorless battles.
Mark Anthony Cayanan is based out of Angeles City, Philippines. Their most recent poetry book is Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo, 2021; U of Santo Tomas Pub House, 2024), and their poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. Their fourth book, Miracle Fever, is forthcoming in 2026 from Northwestern UP. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they received the 2021 Doctoral Research Medal. They were a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and are an Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman.