Apparently I should have known better

I was 19 when the collection came out. I am thirty now, and for much of the decade between, I could barely write.

It is not that I had nothing left to say or write about. Writing just started to feel suffocating. I would think of something and immediately judge it for being too trivial. Too self-indulgent. Too revealing. I became so suspicious of my own desires and ideas that I rarely let them get very far. I killed every line before it had the chance to become anything.

At some point, I confided in a female writer about the misogyny and grooming I had experienced. I thought she would understand. Instead, she told me I should have known better. If I really wanted to be the strong feminist poet I claimed to be, I should have stayed away from those men. I should not have let their words get through me.

I carried that statement around longer than I should have. Why was I expected to know exactly who to trust, when to walk away and how to come out of it untouched, while those same men kept moving through literary circles and collecting awards with barely a consequence?

Somehow, women were expected to develop perfect instincts. Men were allowed to remain exactly who they were.

And apparently enduring the misogyny was not enough. There is so much pressure on female writers to turn our desires and wounds into something coherent and morally tidy. Mine rarely are. My erotic poems are crass, messy, unapologetic and exhausting. They contradict themselves. They want the wrong things. They do not always arrive at the right conclusion, or any conclusion at all. Most of the time, they are intense because life is intense.

Eventually, I started wondering whether I was the right person to write about desire. Was I feminist enough? Brave enough? By the time I sat down to write, I had already imagined every objection. After a while, it became easier not to write at all.

I keep returning to the comment, “Libog lang ’to ng burgis”, because buried inside it was the idea that erotic writing is somehow too small and ego-driven to matter. It revealed a whole hierarchy of what literature was apparently allowed to care about. Desire sat somewhere near the bottom. There were more urgent subjects and more deserving people to write about or for.

Who decided that the body was politically trivial? Or that a woman writing about pleasure had turned away from the world rather than entered it through another door? Lorde’s framing of the erotic as a deeply female realm of feeling, knowledge and power offers a useful challenge to that logic. If the erotic is one of the places where women come to understand what gives them joy, what they have been denied and what they are no longer willing to accept, then writing from that realm is not necessarily a retreat into the self.

Some desires age badly

For the most part, I was fine with not writing. Life went on anyway. I learned how to drive. I got engaged. I buried myself in work and adult responsibilities. But the book had a life of its own. People still asked where they could get a copy, and I never had a good answer. It had been out of print for years, so when another publisher wanted to bring it back, I thought, Fine. Let the thing live.

In the afterword of the new edition, I wrote that I did not want the book to die. I wanted it to remain as feral as ever, foaming at the mouth. But I was more careful this time. I removed one poem from the first edition about desiring another male writer because I found it unbearably cringe: painfully intimate, embarrassingly specific and – to make matters worse – not even that good.

I no longer feel compelled to preserve every version of my desire because it was once honest. Desire is fluid and perishable. I used to think it came from some mysterious, private place inside me, untouched by anything except instinct. The older I get, the more I see how much wanting is shaped by the world we move through.

Who we find desirable, what kinds of attention flatter us, what we mistake for intimacy, none of that develops in a vacuum. That does not make the attraction any less real. I wanted who I wanted. But once I started seeing how patriarchy and class had shaped some of that wanting, certain desires lost their shine. I began to notice how many of my ideas about attraction had been inherited rather than consciously chosen: what kind of masculinity I find desirable, whose attention felt validating and what forms of intimacy I mistook for care.

It was not entirely unlike what had happened in college, when I had adjusted parts of myself to fit the people around me without fully realising it. Desire felt more private and instinctive, which made those influences harder to see. By the time I returned to the original manuscript, I was less interested in what the poems confessed than in what they revealed about the world that had shaped me.

The feminine urge to overthink a poem

The new edition of Tonight We Slurp in Color includes a new chapter of poems written between 2020 and 2025. They are still preoccupied with the erotic and sexual desire, but they are also angrier. Many of these poems explore misogyny and my disillusionment with the Philippine literary scene.

Admittedly, I became more selective about what I wrote. I abandoned images that felt too revealing and softened desires when I could already imagine the questions they might invite.

I still wonder whether this self-censorship, if I can even call it that, is a result of maturity and better judgement or another form of paralysis. There are things I no longer want to write about because they no longer feel relevant to the life I have now, or because the feeling itself has passed. Maybe I also no longer want to expose that much of myself. Whatever this instinct is, it has become harder to resist than any critic or male writer who once questioned what I was allowed to want or write about.

Lorde writes, “Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision, a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered” (Lorde, 55).

For years, writing did not feel like a longed-for bed I entered gratefully and willingly. It felt like a room in which I was constantly watched and questioned. Even when I was alone, I could imagine a reader hovering over the page, asking whether I had crossed some invisible line. Did the desire make any sense? Did it have anything larger to say? Was the poem intelligent enough to deserve being written at all?

And yet, despite all that self-scrutiny, I still wanted to write. Like erotic desire, that wanting kept seeking embodiment, annoyingly and persistently.

Lorde’s understanding of the erotic asks us to trust the depth of what we feel and to pay attention to what brings us a sense of fullness and joy. Maybe that is what I had forgotten about writing. Before all the judgement arrived, there was pleasure in simply exploring desire and watching it take shape on the page.

But knowing what I want back does not make it easy to return to it. I still find myself asking: Does the erotic power mean refusing fear entirely or learning to write while fear is still present? Can I ever let desire enter my poetry again without immediately asking it to justify itself? I do not know yet.

The problem extends beyond my own fear. Desire is constantly being commodified or interrogated. On one side, it is packaged into something polished, consumable and easy to sell. On the other, wanting is rarely considered enough on its own. Erotic writing is expected to turn desire into a story about trauma or a meditation on power before it is considered worthy of attention.

I want to believe poetry remains one of the few places where desire can stay excessive, opaque and unresolved. I’m not sure the Philippine literary scene has become any kinder or less suspicious of women who write desire that way. I only know that I want to keep trying anyway.

The body remembers

I no longer write about sexual desire with the same recklessness and urgency as I did before. But some part of me still misses what happened when I let desire run wild. When I wrote ‘Pussy Tastes Like Sun-Dried Tomatoes’, I felt almost drunk on how much life a poem could hold. Every image seemed capable of becoming stranger, dirtier, funnier and more alive if I just let it keep going. As a woman, that freedom felt enormous.

Erotic poetry did not protect me from misogyny, humiliation or fear. If anything, it sometimes brought me closer to all three. But it made my life feel bigger. It showed me there were more ways to be a woman than the narrow roles capitalism and patriarchy had set out for me.

Writing erotic poetry cost me more than I could have known, but I do not regret it. Those poems were loud, tactless, exhausting, stubborn, alive. I return to them gratefully. I rise from them empowered.

I’ve spent enough years asking what it costs to be a desiring body in poetry. I want to remember what it gives. I want my skin to catch fire. I want to feel divine.