is it too much of an onomatopoeic dissonance that this is synonymous to
   regret dubbed as slouched nirvana. Across the bonfire, there’s volition
   as glare, light as judgment. Why they call her
Luningning, I know not.
      Take excess for jaunts and flesh, and pay no heed to illusions. The mirage
  on the wall is but fire-dance on the bitten lip of true company.
                    heady static pierces pinecone. Soon the moon will sink like **** to ****. Or felled star as tripled glaze of salted lip. Or the ****** of the butterfly.
     Are we here to metamorphose these tiny susurrations into a commune?
                     Dank and stale as ****-laced pavement, the whole world now
    spires in uneven strobes. The last song on the karaoke as memory. The knead
      of temperamental air on the scalp. Take pork rind for bread, intemperance
    as tribute. The night dons its silken robe and shows her pair: two moony eyes
               piercing the noise.

still as cold chair,
the sound and the unsound.
the clearing
wanes.

i think of nameless streets
and pry their memories.
when a steady hand reaches
for air, it is an effort to rename things
  their shabby selves. their yearnings
  crumble underneath awnings of a new,
  wounded moon.

   the   light   through
the    room, and the   shadows it pours.
  its working, a quiet punctuation
in  mere sentences   our own  silence,
  shattering at flight's first   thought.
 gravitations   may   be  heavy.
the   height   verily   not   its measure.


transitions   piled  like  old records;
  trailing the monsoon on  our backs,
 the persistence of daylight  and   coffee,
    plodding  in  heat, its vertical crawl -
   this metastatic fall.

i dream of old structures. dreaming
is the product of stasis. a consequence
of movement.

    dreams can only be too real. there is word
 that it thrives where it is assailed.
     an act of the body, conversing the limit.

there is principle, there is mad luck on the streets
 but then again, i have neither one.
i assume the idleness of poles underneath the roof of a cafe in Poblacion
   and wonder where all my poems go,
 the value they impose -- only there's implosion   and not   so much sense
    so i go out to seek tenderly in the night,
 a cheap moon trapped underneath the bottle   of a pilsner
   as i hear one  of   the patrons call out
  my solitude like a ******* on all fours;

one afternoon pursues a following.
  i have wasted my time writing and stopping
 to   watch   stray hounds   pant   and
     ****    on the hot asphalt of Plaridel.
the   papers   retch  at tyrannies.
    hands   for  mechanisms  configured to
  a heady bias of  probabilities.
 the   house   next  to me is  being
     overhauled   and i  imagine  the incredulity
of   things  not their own  meanings.

  a pair of old Chuck Taylors on the bedspread,  a decrepit  bed for making love
    or passing time or  wasting the night away.
somewhere, someone  is  reading my  poems  and  weeping at the  cadence.
   most do not notice -- it was the caprice of things   not mine to  commandeer.
   the sound  of  stone masons hammering
boulders double the  melancholia.
   the deliberate sieving of  sand and  stone
      felt like   sandpaper air.
 the matutinal  sky split into dire condition
    much like  mine: becoming   and unbecoming.

all the   ******* are out in the streets
with ladies wuthering in high strides.
all the priests are in their rendezvous,
killing buddha heads.
the police have silenced the sirens
and behind pairs of old navy blue slacks
   and mobiles covered with dust,
the  captives scream mercy.
all the ATMs drone the pither of metal mouths.
a widow in Bocaue holding a picture
  of the departed.

i look up and see my face in the sky:
  if only i could **** the man and be the man,
fill his shoes with flesh, his movements my emulation, his enigmas my clarity, his day old denims my best dress.


more than beer and cigarettes have done me in and more to myself much no less
   than a cat hit by a speeding bicycle
  somewhere in Padre Faura.

madness hurries like a lover and hands me
   a picture of the moon.

i've got something and that's good enough
  as the police leave the grime of times
   and evict drunks off the streets of Malolos,
  as the priests step into the showers, naked
  and bloodied just like the ordinary man,
  as the cat that was hit
      by   a bicycle
   goes   back   to   the dark
  licking   the   salt  off the wound,
    bone fractured,    still alive on the  hot roof.

Someone will cross, kiss as if it
   were rain and tough stone as if
  it were love,

and all futures stir, taking prescience
     away making all wounds dumb
   in foretelling, time taken like an orphaned
 child from abandon

the frivol of rescue is the promise
     of its danger

making nights stranger than they were the
   first time, room made bare and wider again
with its shy deceit of furtive silence

  you, conversing in that moment of sleep's ravenings

the terror of its lightness: the frothing sea reaching for salt, circling the toe for words
   left in tongue's misery, clasped and irretrievable like the vanity of naked principle
    rushing like tides in between
   bone-spaces;

there are only 5 seats and on each end
are metal chapels. time slows down like a slug
climbing a vertical wall, or say, a drunken man
  making his way towards the oblique recess.

the ignominy of an exhausted carburetor
is the orchestra for the night.
lots of women go in and out, out and in,
  whichever is first, but the last is always
just as bland as any other truth:

we go, each foot splayed to cover measure,
  and in the flash of a scene, gone.

I watch their skirts make gossamer tune,
like some flotsam or a poised note being led
  straight to a trajectory disappearance:

the idea of the image is to glide
over them, over flesh,
over this fetal smoke that I will soon toss
  right into the womb of nothing

and fall flat as a key from a tone-deaf cathode,
a spanked melodrama of television with dull cursive,

        or as lithe as justly, the right camber of blues
             ripping straight through my day-old denims,

peering through the tease of a thigh’s penumbral shadow,
the sound of the world being dragged into double-doors

       echoing a metonymy: *silence the interlocutor, her mouth
                          full of birds. Dark birds.

Her body was motionless
and her face was supple and sweet
she was warm and tender

Sleep.....

My lips, close, yet not quite touching
a whisper, my hand softly embracing her body
her hands and mine....

Sleep... a soft embrace....

Narcolepsy* hard and heavy watch me fall asleep
            Lulled to bed in a cunning thread of the tangled web we weave
    I dream in pristine colors, windows of my mind anew
No fingerprints or ***** looks or evidence of you

         I find comfort in forever wherever it may be
        I may have left my home but it will always stay with me
                 The smell of all the smoke with the sound of all the rain
   On constant playback every second deep within my brain

        I found that time is all that matters and everything else faded
        I spent years and years learning how to forget everything I hated
    I've only gotten older and have nothing left to show
              Except a ringing alarm clock and blood on my pillow

     Narcolepsy** hard and heavy watch me as I sleep
     Another pill, another high, another date to keep
      If I shall die before I wake, I hope that I'm with you
    Then it won't matter where I go, cause you will see me through