Now is no longer the time for poets.

Abstract

A reflection piece-on rethinking the return of a Martial Law dictator in the form of his namesake, the newly elected president of the Philippines; the gamut of conversations on (un)covered facts, post-truth, appearances, interpolations, populism, revisionism and transformations, as well as the power of (trans)national media and images entangled with participatory publics; and how might a younger generation and/or transgender poet, such as myself, who did not experience first-hand the atrocities of military rule and learned them only through dominant narratives, might create and/or open capacious spaces for empathic opacity, new understandings, and possible coalitions and resistances within a historical moment concurrent with a present and/or imagined dystopia-expressed as a suit of three poems: To write another eye; Now is no longer the time for poets; Requisite condemnation.