AS A YOUNG AND emerging poet, I always hear from my seniors who know the craft of poetry writing better than I that a poem is never defined by how loudly it speaks but by how much it leaves unsaid. But as a bayot who grew up learning to mute the shape of his desire for more than half his life, I cannot help but wonder: when I withhold in a poem, am I crafting subtext or reliving repression?
If restraint is poetry’s oldest art, what does that mean for someone like me, whose silence was never an aesthetic choice but a condition of survival? Do I risk turning poetry into yet another closet? Another drawer to fold myself into? Another way of making myself smaller?
The answer, at least for me, is not to reject restraint outright, but to reclaim it not as a tool of censorship but as a tactic of intimacy. Restraint does not have to mean silence. It can mean tension. It means writing the kind of poem that knows when to hold its breath, the kind of poem that stares at the readers instead of screams. Because as a bayot, I’ve been told to quiet myself all my life. What I need isn’t to scream louder; it is to stare harder and longer such that the receiving party becomes uncomfortable. To write poems that don’t flinch. That do not explain themselves. That simply sit beside the reader, heavy with everything they refuse to spill, or acknowledge. This tension between withholding and revealing, between quietness and visibility is the very terrain where my poetics are born. I do not reject restraint. I bayot it. I let it burn slow. I do not smother the self. I test how long it can hold a stare. I write poems that whisper like they’re keeping secrets, because often, they are.
I’ve come to believe that this kind of quiet is its own form of protest. The quiet that’s bayot, watchful, taut with subtext. And a protest of survival. Of desire. So when I write, I don’t obey restraint. I transform it. I let it slow the poem’s burn. I let it shape the silence around the wound, not erase it. I let it ask the reader to come closer, to lean in, to listen for what’s not said.
This is how I begin to answer the question I asked. How a bayot writes. By staring, not hiding. By leaving the door open, not to escape but to invite someone to sit, uncomfortable of my staring, beside me.
I write to return to myself. And every poem I write becomes both a map and a memory of who I have been, what I’ve survived, and who I might still become. The eight poems I’ve written for example—Anananggal, Ang Wall Fan sa Kisami, Unsaon Paghinlo ang Pagkatawo, Walay Sweldo Kini nga Kusina, Mga Tudlo nga Gadunggab Kang Mama, Room 409, Akoang Kintsugi, and Walay Hunong nga Tuka—may be different in tone, image, and gesture, but they are all attempting the same thing: to speak about what I’ve long been forbidden to voice. To name the things we cannot scream at the shore. And thus the title of this suite that currently has thirteen poems was born: “Mga Dili Nato Masinggit sa Lapyahan“ (What We Cannot Scream at the Shore).
These poems were written not only to process my trauma, but also to liberate myself sexually. As a bayot writer who grew up in the province, in a home where silence is the language of survival, I learned early on how to tuck myself away, to fold my longings into drawers like old shirts, to wait for darkness to stretch its permission across my body. I did not have the vocabulary then to call it repression. I only had objects that would soon make themselves metaphors: the pitcher that is slowly emptied, the kitchen with no wages, the rice cooker that gets blamed, the wall fan that spins where it doesn’t belong.
So I write with metaphor, because metaphor gives me the safety that language often denies. Metaphor gives my monsters wings. In Anananggal, I become the creature I was warned about as a child. I feed in the dark, split myself in two, and try to fly through shame. But even monsters need mornings. Even monsters must return to their skin. That’s the cost of freedom when you are a bayot in a culture that believes silence is virtue.
But I do not only write about monstrosity. I also write about ordinary rooms, where mothers burn tupperware and are blamed for rice that won’t cook right. I write kitchens because that is where labor is invisible and endless, where care is cooked into exhaustion. Walay Sweldo Kini nga Kusina is my love letter to those who feed us with nothing left. Mga Tudlo nga Gadunggab Kang Mama is my attempt to capture how blame can ricochet across generations.
Many of these poems are rooted in class. I come from a working-class family in the province. I grew up around Orocan drawers, wall fans tied with shoelaces, children sent away for stealing Skyflakes, and parents gambling while the rice spoiled. These aren’t symbols to me. They are my life. And so I write them not to decorate, but to remember. To dignify. To declare: this, too, my life, is poetry.
Language, for me, is not just a medium but a form of time travel. I’ve been rediscovering my native tongue, Sinugbuanon’g Binisaya, and learning what I failed to appreciate in my earlier years. I once saw Cebuano as a language of casualness, of the everyday. I was wrong. It is a language of memory. Words like “tunaan” do not just describe a place, they carry the whole scene with them. One word, and suddenly I am ten years old again, running barefoot past a cow, a dog, a mango tree, one slipper flying into the mire. That memory taught me something: language is where the body remembers what the mind forgets. That is why Unsaon Paghinlo ang Pagkatawo is written like a list. That is how I learned to survive. By steps. By rituals. By hiding the self in parts. That poem was not imagined; it was practiced. Each poem is an attempt to break free. But some poems, like Walay Hunong nga Tuka, are not about breaking free but about showing how freedom is slowly pecked away bit by bit, by the people you love, by the roles you’re assigned, by the hands that keep pouring from you.
My poems are trauma-informed. They do not seek neat closure. They allow pain to sit in the room. They let grief breathe. They leave holes. They let the reader feel what isn’t named. I’ve come to understand that this is also what it means to write as a bayot: to name without unraveling, to accuse without shouting. Because bayot poems cannot be restrained. To be bayot is to break free from the form that sought to confine us. My poems do not always resolve. They don’t always shout. But they stare. They burn slowly.
I write because there are things I cannot say in daylight. I write because even if my voice shakes, the page does not. I write in Cebuano because it knows me better than I knew myself. It holds the scent of my grandmother’s kitchen, the sting of makahiya under my feet, the mud of the tunaan, and the ache of having nowhere to go but language.
I write to prove that quiet, restrained, unblinking poems that stare are no less powerful. Especially for bayot poetics, where the most radical thing we can do is survive, observe, and name what we are told to ignore. The poems don’t have to shout. They just have to stare. To burn slowly. And if I could tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: write it all down. Write the slippers, the cow, the mango tree. Write the pain before you know how to name it. Because one day, you’ll need to remember. And language, your language, will bring you home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurence Lanurias is a BA Literature student in Cebu Technological University – Main Campus. He lives in Medellin, Cebu. He is a fellow for creative nonfiction in the 2nd UGMAD Creative Writing Workshop of Cebu Technological University- Main Campus. He is also a contributor to the 9th Issue of TLDTD (read: Taludtud) in 2024 and in Kabataan Partylist’s Zine and Poster booth at XXL, a Zine and Print Fair organized by Silliman University (SU) Fine Arts Students Organization (FADSO) and the SU English Society (EngSoc) in the same year. He is a published novelist under PaperInk Imprints in 2023.
