So much laughter perhaps in front
of the console

If when we hand over what was given,
we are inconsolable.

Assume this position when
reaction is demanded:

You could, a massive day.
You could, a spectral of night
daggering into the forthcoming of nakedness  that was your title,

enmeshed, and then in a moment’s brief charade,
        torn apart, contained within four bedposts and a notch
        for a shimmering body lined with a peregrine skin.

how much it cost you, putting a face in this profile
    losing the document from flinging in the last time over and over
  as if we do not die only making copies of it each day

a    page is  turned not over but crimson  with   blame,
forging a lie  about  every  gilded moment  as  if  touch could  end it so

                      this day collapsed into a breath’s span crossing rivers.

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.

if    you sing a moment   of  transaction
   or  the sudden  influx  of  a face   conjured
    to so many an  enterprise offered  for

    protest.   A hand's  insisting  tremor
   an   emptying  from  over  and  over  an  indication
   of  askance.

   A  counterfeit  I  cannot   grieve over   and  over.
   Its   renown   a  nearest   position /
               a   silhouette   from a  smokestack
      about  to be   sensed    out from a   customary
                strangeness.

         stranded in    a   lilt   of  a  becoming  word
    or   question   subtitling  a  frantic    enemy

      you --  panicking  all   across, a retailed
          fugitive   thing. You can   become   a plaza

     if   not   sing  but   exist  in the   district
  from    a humdrum  projection   fated,  tagged
       with  a  purebred  amount.  You  can
 
   will   it   so  /unbecoming of/ a   plaza   minused from     and  adhered   to   as  cacophonic
           only   in   newsprint here is  your performance
    of    a numbered  caution. Permit  you  to  be

     nominal,   going   into   without  purpose

            you   can   become   a   plaza
     if        I     pose    need  from     (y)earning

A.


  drone this    day empirical
  from where we were once  the we
  rained from,    a high excursion
   which savvy the drop, weighing in, a fault

  trying to convince   the day when Sun
  embellished from the   ravine  of your hand,
  a catacomb   secured   by the  rolling
     of your  body like   a boulder   keeping
  a minute   sacred, christened an evinced noon

   that    was  your  repetitive finding.   onto
  
    a netted    frame   caught,  dripping out of
   a felt   space in    need   for graphs  to measure
        from,   a well unnamed  which  presence
          resembling  your body,  resounding
   the     fluency of    what  the  physical  ascribes    
        an   iamb    of    a crowd  inverted,  diminishing
                 and inflected in   a day's livid sigh

     housed        in  a  jar that   is  a mouth
        words   assemble    an  ikebana willing
    a     delayed     color  that  was   a   lack.
                  held   a  device  that   was    a  sky
        or   a  gleaming  face with   a high price
    claiming       a  solstitial  --  when    I  went
                   to your   home  it was   Saturday all
   week   inside  my   ribcage  chiming  worship.

   plastered   to   a  sheen all is  equal  underneath
           equatorial   tracing    a   sphere    when
     I    found  stroking   the   innards   of   a calendar
               it   is   November.     it  is   Saturday.

B.

   he   comes  from
   low  wattage this  night's  post
   a wonderful polyp
   to   begin  a
   blight
   apparently  so from a cut blackest gutter
         carrying an ample   water  virulent
             when  taken  in  and   again   in

    a  savingslight  of     metamorphosis
       climbs   vertical   so  the winged moon
              
              is    a  black  bird   in   the   blackest
       cage /  baltic  a different  fraternity
       of    land    with   the    same   pictorial

     this   lovely  stillness   calling   it  work
   a  flood   could  mean pernicious   is  blood
              brewed   from  this climate
          it   is   here  past Mandaue hillsides   dreaming
                 if place were  rumored  as  same-silent.

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.