Some college poetry

College was always cool. It was when you [got to] experience many highs, even without smoking a joint.

For one, it was when you were made to understand “being” or “existence” without knowing why. After some ten sessions under “Philosophy of Man,” you were drawn towards reading Plato and Gabriel Marcel. You later found yourself speaking highfalutin rhetoric about essence but did not really understand it. You were compelled to speak like the obscure neoclassical thinker you were assigned to read; you may have [wanted to] learn the language but sadly had not been able to converse with it.

So you thought you’d find some rhyme and reason from the lectures of your teacher who now sounded very much like her teacher Roque Ferriols, who she said had been a popular and notorious teacher who made a name at the Loyola Schools because he brought down deep introspection to layman’s terms.

But the sessions you attended under her were now giving you too many what ifs. What if she speaks her own words, what if she uses her own understanding to tell you about being, about the benefits of unhappiness? What if. What if she teaches us what she herself knows, and not what Ferriols had to say to their class? You wondered whether she was just echoing what she had heard from her idol teacher. You wondered what Ferriols basically had to say; you wondered whether all of them really mattered.

You decided to shrug off all discussions on being and essence, and instead turned to the poetry on the page of the paperback you picked up from a shelf at the English majors’ book sale, now staring you in the face: “I’m nobody, who are you?/Are you nobody, too?” Right on the white page, someone is talking to you and rather keeping you somecompany. Wonderful.

In order to avoid [the chaos in] your class, you kept going, poring over Dickinson and a lot more of her terse musings. In the monotony of the lecture on existence, you sought refuge from the tedium of topics to which you never did relate well.

American poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, 1950s

You started (a)musing yourself. When you could meet again with your secret Lothario, your classmate in Sociology class who majors in political science? Would he stride along the hallway near the president’s office today? You remembered days ago, you saw him smiling, sharing light moments with his noisy friends perhaps after finishing their Biology experiment at the Science Building. Who else could inspire you enough to endure a rather boring class? But what if he’s a fake? What if he doesn’t have anything to say? Will he even speak with you? For sure, you’d last three classes in the morning straight without having taken anything in your stomach. You wouldn’t even mind your ulcers. But would he mind you?

After consuming the verses of Emily Dickinson, you retrieved a worn out notebook and started to write the same incantations.

By chance, I pass your yard

just to make my journey short.

And you welcome me like a guest.

Not bad, not bad.

And there was nothing so beautiful.

with all the flowers and fruits

and leaves and flies.

Come the birds that chip the sky.

Even the worms come and see.

The beauty of the yard I think could never be.

With my bare hands I pick a fruit.

Ants come trailing

mobbing me with my catch

demanding justice from my cup.

I settle the topic.

I blow the wind that brushes my hair

turn the tree to raining gale

The trees that cling to the branches

Now cover the ground.

And now I’ve seen the best of it.

                       —Angela Rafon, “I have seen the best of it,” c. 1995

Since when have you seen the worthlessness of human beings despite Nature? Since when have you seen the void in human life because of his nature? Since when have you started talking about the boring nature of Nature?

Leaves and insects you now began to notice. Imaginary orchards you started to romanticize. The title of your poem even read outside the convention of caps and lowercase, quite inclined to mimic e.e. cummings’ transgressive tendencies. You now thought you were romantic. You thought you would die in oblivion. Unnoticed.

You wished you were named Emily or Sylvia.