Poetry Friday: Love does not come in spaces

Thanks to Jama of Alphabet Soup for hosting today’s Poetry Friday

Iphigene here.

For those who willingly risk their hearts for love know how it is to have it unrequited. The poem I’m sharing today is by featured poet, Kristian Jeff Corteza Agustin (KJCA). I enjoyed this poem for its use of the writer’s love for words and the narrators desire to be just at least the “meaningful” spaces in a poem.

At first glance, this short poem comes across as a poem about writing and a writer, but at second glance, the meaning becomes more apparent. Words and writers are inseparable. There is no writer, if words do not exist and so what is a space to a writer…isn’t it the absence of the thing they love—words. The writer explorers longing and the feeling of unrequited love in his short poem “You are a Writer.”

We also got some good news, KJCA and his book for love and poetry was recently featured in our local paper (Philippine Daily Inquirer). Congratulations!

You are a writer

You are a writer

And I am nothing to you—

I am not a paragraph, not a line,

Not a word, not a syllable,

Not even a sound.

But even in your poetry

You put blanks and spaces.

Perhaps, I’d like to think,

I’m one of those spaces

In between your words.

—-

The Poet: Kristian Jeff Corteza Agustin

Born in 1984, the Year of the Rat, and a ‘Cancerian’, he delves into art and poetry as an effective means of self-expression and learning. In 2012, Agustin accomplished his Master’s degree in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, London in 2012, after completing his dissertation on ‘social media interventions in governance and subject formation’. In 2006, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, where he co-founded the Sirkulo ng mga Kabataang Artista (‘Circle of Young Artists’) in 2002 and served as its Artistic Director to date.