What would you do
if you have a violet bill
with an emotionless hero’s face printed on it
On a hot day at school?
Cease your thirst for
2 liters of C2’s Cool and clean tea,
but 500 ml of Nestea has a cooler bottle
and Fit n’ Right’s
the new drink in UPMin.
But who would dare forget
about a 6-peso cost
for a homemade lemonade
at the Castillo store?
Buy yourself two glasses.
Or settle with the softdrinks;
Coke Zero’s mirror image
of Pepsi Max’s sugarless,
diabetic friendly carbonated water;
and Sprite is the freedom from thirst
and lousy commercials
with the new idea
of the dessert turning to a pool.
But they’re the same,
7-up and Mountain Dew.
Or keep it for tonight at Lenar’z
Redhorse beer ‘Ito ang Tama!’
for the happy-go-lucky spenders:
55 pesos for every liter.
And Emperador brandy
Sa Totoong Tagumpay:
finish 375 milliliter of alcohol
and you’re the best drunkard ever.
And spare the ten pesos left is for 6 sticks
of Marlboro sold discreetly
at the stores on the side.
Now tell me you did not imagine
anything I said. Just save that 100-peso bill
to buy yourself a new T.V.
°ooOoo°
“The pictorial image is closer to the real thing”, as the semioticians would say it. The poem advertises commercials products that can fill a person with a 100-peso bill thirst for spending his cash. As much as possible, I go along with the concepts of signification so that the readers would easily identify the signified, signifiers, and the referent. The sign, which is divided into two, the signifier and the signified, is the one that would play inside the readers’ mind. For example, when I stated, C2, a reader would immediately think of that stout, half-slender plastic bottle of tea-tasting factory made tea-like drink. The concept, or the signified, is C2 green tea and the word ‘C2’ is the signifier for it. And of course, the referent is the object that the sign points to, the tea sold with a handy plastic bottle itself.
I have always been troubled with the arbitrary relations of words, so then, I incorporated the descriptions of the products I mentioned to the culture in UPMin and also the ones that Filipinos see in their T.V. For example, Red Horse ‘ito ang tama!’, therefore the reader would not think of any Red Horse but only the Red Horse that says ‘ito ang tama!’ In that way Red Horse beer = Red Horse beer ‘Ito ang Tama!’ ≠ Any other Red Horse beer in the world. Or Fit n’ Right that was recently sold in the canteen is new at our school, therefore that is the Fit n’ Right that I mean and not any other Fit n’ Right (Fit n’ Right = Fit n’ Right that’s sold at the canteen.) And the same goes for other products that I have not elaborated so just bear with your understanding. I am 90% sure that you would not be lost with the signs in this poem.
The cost of the products I mentioned in 2nd, 3rd and 4th stanza are equal to 100 pesos. E.g. 1st stanza: P50 (2 liters of C2) + P19 (500 ml of Nestea) + P19 (Fit n’ Right) + P12 (two glasses of lemonade) = P100. The poem just tells the readers how to spend 100 pesos but if they don’t want to agree with me, they can just keep the money and watch T.V. so that they’ll know what more things they can spend their money with. It’s all about the thirst for spending a big deal of cash for a normal college student.
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