Itinerary:A Poet in the Making

A writer is a traveler whose feet are her heart and whose eyes are her hands. She doesn’t merely walk along the patterned sand dunes but rather feel every bit of sand particles kissing her soles. She sees not everything but grasps what’s natural and abstract. She’s a muted damsel lost in the wilderness of her own song- a stranger in her own world. Poetry is the song that charms her into the virgin paradise.

No one knows about her madness as she secretly imprisons it into the four corners of the blank white pages. In her transient journey, she opts to lodge herself in a cut price room among the slums. She arrives to the place, carrying with her a red backpack and a black suitcase and a mineral water bottle squeezed in her right armpit and the emotional baggage she forgets to divorce from herself when she leaves the house. There, she aims to immerse herself within the wild nature of life as she showcases the drama of a woman’s soul. Inside her dark and gloomy room she writes alone. She locks herself inside a room trying to extract creative juices for hours, wandering around the rambling streets of paragraphs and sentences. She always does it in the dark, when all around her is cold and dry. When she writes her poetry, she prefers to do it in the throbbing pain of silence where nothing else she could hear but only the piercing cry of the cicadas and the rustling of the leaves.

She makes love with the words the same way she adores the places that she visits. She is compassionate to others but not to herself. She hands money to every beggar who seizes for her shirt asking for a help, to street children who sell sampaguita flowers along the streets, all for the sake of other people. She never smells the fragrance of sampaguita, she never looks back to those ill-fated beggars for to smell and to gaze at them would only cause her pain. Just like traveling, writing also requires patience. One can encounter flight delays or traffic that can burden the traveler in going to his destination. If one wants to write, one should be willing to be disturbed for only with those things that a piece of writing becomes interesting.

She writes what she only knows. For one could only write things that she herself knows. She is the master as well as the servant. She knows how to feed and satisfy herself. She knows that she has a story to tell and it is about a journey she needs to embark on.

But it is true that a word needs words to complete a certain thought the same with a traveler who gets to meet people along with her journey. Writing is traveling with words, there’s movement in every corner of the page. There is no such thing as dead ends; no failures because the only failure in writing is when your get tired of writing and stop doing it. Nevertheless, in this journey she 's just a lone traveler, a tormented writer trapped in the middle of a crossroad.