Patrick

From Krip Yuson's column:

Then we got a send-up from the young poet Paolo Javier in NY: "Congrats
are in order for Patrick Rosal, whose poem 'The Blue Room' was recently
selected as one of the 'Best of the Net 2006'!
Patrick has authored a couple of poetry collections, both published by
Persea Books: Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive which won the 2003 Asian
American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award, and My American
Kundiman, a recent release he sent us a copy of, and which we should be
reviewing in this space soon.
He came over for a visit late last year, chilled out in Baguio for a month
in the company of fellow poet Frank Cimatu and gang, maybe did some
breakdancing on Session Road. Then on his Manila stopover we arranged for
him to read (more like perform) at Mag:net. He was terrific, and "The Blue
Room" was one of the poems he delivered with great rapper's energy and
astute vocal handling of lines and phrases — plus nuggets of revelation! —
as excellent on the auditory plane as they are on paper.

Hey thanks are in order to Grace, Chon, Padma, Gary K. and the wonderful people of Rumors for giving Patrick a hell of a night.

The Blue Room


That was the year I first smelled a girl
on my fingers – a consensus of sweat and blood
and bloom – the same year a skinny Polish kid and me
turned a recess tussle into a year-long fight
not long after I learned “Hotel California” on the guitar
and squeaked a desperate chorus to every
freckled schoolyard chick who’d listen
That was the first year I believed the white boys
who bragged about all the sex they’d had It seemed
everything by then was a race so there I was still
crouched at puberty’s starting blocks anxious
to sprint toward that orangutan manhood of my own
Each afternoon at the library across the street
from St. Francis Convent where nuns without
last names came and went (the ones who taught us
to memorize the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and
to avoid the only two kinds of sin that mattered–
mortal and fun) Carrie Anne Evaloy and I
would loiter between stacks of big-print novels and
artbook nudes reclined in some French meadow
We hid behind racks of Boy’s Life and Highlights
finally crept upstairs to an empty lights-out
high-ceiling high-windowed vault of a space
where everything gave up its color
for some vague shade of blue
where she and I jammed our tongues
into each other’s mouths -– more lost than lustful -–
where I lifted her plaid skirt and she goose-stepped
out of her panties and I pulled down
her bra to taste her nipples pink and perked
between my lips Of course
I didn’t want to – I had to
What could be more Catholic

Sometimes I wonder what’s become of that
strong-thighed half-French/half-Irish gymnast who let me
for one year in the Blue Room of the public library
slowjam and slopkiss her from neck to hip–two of us
dodging the few beams of afternoon that lit
the slant columns of dust our bodies unsettled until
we emerged into the full light back
downstairs to the other kids: her friends in one corner
and the white boys in another waiting–hungrily–
to sniff the what-was-it-like musk of my hands
and inhale from my fingers the perfume of a future
they swore they already knew



-Patrick Rosal (Boxcar Poetry Review)