And since poetry is also history, he also comments on canonical, if controversial, masterworks, as in Juan Luna's The Parisian Life which became the center of national discussion when it was purchased by the GSIS Museum years back. In the poem That Luna Woman, Kilates begins with epigraphs from 4 cultural critics — Alice Guillermo, John Silva, Luis Cabalquinto, Tito Valiente — who commented on the problematic, because exhorbitant, purchase of the infamous Luna piece.

 

Like a social verdict not fully resolved, Kilates asks us to ponder again the lives that move beyond the frame: What then will she remind us of? / The false serenity of a time gone past? / The uselessness of Beauty or Art? / The poverty of souls? / … The auction is open.

 

In A Short History of the Buaya, Kilates transforms Santiago Bose's print entitled Inscription of a Talisman No. 42 into the evolutionary narrative of the Philippine crocodile as an erstwhile creature of the Pasig River, that later transformed into the “obese Fraile,” and then as media magnates, and finally as modern-day politicians as we now know them: Ah, like gods they walk among us still.

 

But we are also brought to the most familiar and least poetic of our everyday. In Poem Found in Phone, we read a simple ping-pong of text messages, nearly redolent of jejemon culture: did u c an angel? / stl luking / just saw 1 / any gud?

 

While in Penshoppe Billboard, he writes an ode to a sleek summer print ad along EDSA that displayed Asian models fully tanned with blondied hair: Our tarp signs, and with them the happy illusions / With which we paint ourselves.

 

In Global Architecture, a series of 9 haikus, Kilates slyly remarks on the ironies of the country's perceived economic development, with the increased phenomenon of high-rise sprawls and the agressive gentrification of our lands: A developer / Builds on Barrio Balagbag / And calls it Venice.

 

Besides noting the travesty behind the contemporary and the sleek, the poet is also a restless itinerant who longs to return to his locale and home. For one, he speaks profusely of the old religious ladies in his town in The Day of the Manangs. And consider in Garlic Stall the popular produce lined up on the road to Ilocos; the Ifugao bulul and the famed rice terraces in Pictures from Banawe; the gap-toothed Roman Morions of Lenten Marinduque in Morion; and the hut and tobacco blossoms in Light in Dintan, where: the fluttering eyelids of the wind / Becalmed among its branches, the noon / Lolling in a hammock, transfixed.

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