Give me a reason to abandon everything

by Mark Anthony Cayanan

Published in the author’s poetry collection, Except you enthrall me (2013), from University of the Philippines Press. Click the arrow (>) to learn more about this piece

From the author:

“Give me a reason to abandon everything” is part of the book Except you enthrall me, which I developed when I was dealing with issues of belonging and alienation, relative to various social configurations. The kind of conflicted experience someone goes through when they hope to be more involved in another person’s life, while also balking at the diminishment of agency that devotion (the homonormative kind, at least) seems to insist on: that was what I was trying to puzzle out using the poem. It’s a decade old, but I thought it would be a good idea to release the poem back out into the world (void?) because I’m still fond of that younger version of myself—maybe even more so now, since it would be much easier to disavow my connection to them—which wanted their existence validated, no matter how petulant they felt about seeking validation. Candor is one of the most magnetic qualities of poetry for me, but so is concealment, so I often appreciate—and attempt to write—poetry that desires the presence of an auditor as persistently as it resists them. The speakers in my work depend on a “you”—though I’m not sure they want to be completely exposed to this other. “Give me a reason to abandon everything” is one such poem that (maybe) favors candor—or at least contains enough of it to make apparent the passive-aggressive streak which runs through it, something it shares with many of my other poems.

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Mark Anthony Cayanan holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they received the University Doctoral Research Medal. Their full-length poetry books are Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011), Except you enthrall me (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo Publishing, 2021). Their poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and Australian Poetry Journal. A permanent resident of Angeles City, Philippines, they are currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin.

Did you enjoy this piece? If you’d like to support the author, you can purchase their books Narcissus, Except you enthrall me, or Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous.