Open Letter to a Young Poetic Genius

NB: I wrote this open letter in January 2021, which got lost among a million pixels at the end of a wholly unrelated Word document. As I was by chance editing that document today, I happily found the letter. Though I intended to at the time, in losing it I forgot to send it to Troy, but I have now.

Dear Troy, 

This is a letter of deep appreciation for your writing; an acknowledgement to the sizzling talent you possess : I would like to thank you for making me cry, both with the beauty of your words, and with the grim pit of the dark soul of man you so incisively decry.

Your metaphors - rather, your meataphors, they are that succulent - sting like flayed flesh; your words are some of the most searing I have heard and read in recent times.

Your work is urgent, weighty, fraught with the borders of existence and identity in a world so fractured, it seems each person lives in a galaxy all their own. You are a Poet of the Now, but also a Poet of the Then; of legacy and lineage.

That your people's existence is under threat in the Philippines - as is that of the boar you choose as sublime metaphor - is the work of the spineless; not only of the Dudertes of the world, but also of those who, brainwashed and themselves terrified, sit mute; whose blind adulation and subservience to their leaders becomes their complacent disrespect for mankind, for fellow humans; such people are the bane of humanity, or rather, should I say inhumanity.

Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong wrote in "On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous" that, in places like China's Hunnan province, and certain parts of Vietnam, live monkey brains are consumed by men who wish to enhance their virility. I feel such men must be akin in spirit - or lack thereof - to Phillipine dictators like Duderte, and Marcos before him; pathetic, weak men whose shriveled souls, black, must feed on the strength and resilience of others. That in controlling and cannibalizing lives, these puny, limp men think their shriveled cocks will grow to satisfactory size for show; their prowess and performance enhanced, engorged by the misery of others.

I wept with "When Startled by Ambush, Wild Boar Will Flee." Wept for your people. For all those who die at the hands of hate. Wept for my relative lack of agency, too.

"My people turn into a mouth of teeth" is one of the most beautiful verses I have read recently. So simple, yet so loaded; so mellifluous. And you, young man, are a robust, relentless performer.

Burial upon burial, which you fight against with your quaking tusks of rage, your weapon-words of knuckle-bruise; extolling the fight of people who never asked for those who lead them off cliffs into the abysses below.

Excuse my language - but fuck The Orange Man in the White House; that mealy-mouthed, limp-dicked, acephalous Monster of Mediocrity; much in the same way as at the beginning of the century, I said fuck W. Bush and his merciless, warmongering Rumsfeld. They waged wars on foreign lands. The Orange Man wages war in his very home. 

America: you took advantage of a world who once loved you well. And while some people might say I have no right to say so, because I am not American…well, America, just because you quelled two Great Wars doesn't entitle you to wage new ones, sorry, either abroad or amongst your own people.

Yet the flaying continues, as does the senseless cornering of innocents whose only crime is that they sought in you, America, a better world than what they left behind in their own home.

I hope, with all my heart , that when the time comes, the Orange Man be deposed from his Iron Throne; that he be publicly hung, drawn and quartered. I hope that mentalities change, however slowly.

I am sorry from the depths of my being for what your people have had to witness, had to fear - both at home and abroad, in "the land of the free" - the Wolf always slavering, pawing at their doors; its gnashed teeth craving what it can never consume: the valiant spirit of resistance.

Activist Brandon Lee almost died because of his words. A victim of the intent to silence; though he survived, there are many who have not. Vincent Chin died for merely existing.

While speech - The Volume of Voice - may temporarily be drowned out by static, it can never be killed.

Please, Troy, keep writing. Your words stem from a transcendental, painful, yet indelible furnace of nerves. Please, never let that fire go out. The world needs it. You are a prince among men. 

Yours, in scintillant admiration,

P.

© Pedro B. Gorman

15.1.2021

Some of Troy Osaki’s sizzling performances: