Camillo Antonio

Biography

Austrian citizen, born in the Philippines, schooled in Manila and at the US universities of Colorado and Georgetown. Worked with NGOs on grassroots projects to develop entrepreneurship among disadvantaged groups. Managed UN technical cooperation projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He is a committed lyricist: a Filipino Austrian writing from a transcultural Sino-Hispanic and Malayan background. His poems have appeared in Empty Set, Filipinos Abroad and subdream. Collections have been published as Caminante Songs in the Leporello Poem Series, on CD and radio-aired. He has participated at the Naropa University Summer Writing School, poetry schools in Vienna and Prague and at the first International Poetry Festival in Prague. He integrates anti-racist and migrant groups in his performance poetry and directs URBANOMADMIXES, a multicultural band of poets, dancers and musicians who perform at international festivals and support an outreach youth project in a refugee camp in Kenya.

Poem

• Looking for the Glue
  (In a Catch-22)

  There’s leaving for
  Re-living more
  Strained coalitions:
  More packaging
  Re-packaging
  Hardened positions

  And we wonder what’s new
  When we look for the glue
  In a catch-22

  Some in think-tanks
  Summon the tanks
  To get their ways through
  And others strain
  To train the brain
  Whetting one’s own cue

  Bali hai – Bali hoo...
  What¹s the clue – where’s the glue
  In a catch-22

  Decapitate
  Exterminate
  A majored bush-game:
  Disarming here
  Re-arming there
  What’s in the new frame

  And we wonder what’s new
  When we look for the glue
  Bali-hai – Bali-hoo
  It’s a catch-22!