How to kill a Lit Major
By Denver E. Torres

 

 

(For Danilo Gualberto)

 

 

This semester,


 I die every other day, except the two tail-end days,
For about eight hours.
My teacher energetically gives his lecture,
To my ears it’s a eulogy of my in-comatose cells.
He does not know
I am as lifeless as the uncomplaining hard wooden stool
I am sitting on. He talks about the fathers-of-this-and-that,
The long dead people who lives only in his laboratory

And biased books.


 In the nude cabinets behind him,
The fishes and frogs flaunting what-they-have-inside,
Proud as the teacher are dying for my attention.
I, on the other hand
Like in funeral mode, silent and still,
Lamenting without tears for my wasted time.

Yet, I manage faking the interest with my senseless nods.


 

Moments of biting pencils, moments of mimicking Ninoy


 Then, like the sound of hundred beakers
Falling into the floor,
Cascading down like the waters of Catanico.
My Biology class is done. My face turns yellow and round
As the Petri dish.
I am alive again
Only to die in my next class: Chemistry.