My internal landscape was once a wetland. Grasses and herbaceous plants sprout from the ventricles of my heart. My rib is a birch tree, a deciduous hard wood crowned with thin leaves. My veins are wild ravines. Inside it is the torrent of rain water that keeps me alive.

My heart is a beating water lily, eternally blooming on the lake of my blood. I was a sullen mist, and I loved it that way.

But they mistook my solitude for loneliness, the crowd, the clever engineers. So they loaded sands on their trucks, sacks after sacks. They opened me up, covered my wetland, and built a city inside me. They paved roads. They constructed buildings. They opened cafes and pubs and restaurants. They turned on their neon lights.

A rave party is inside me at night, and they won't stop until I am filled with cigarette stubs and empty bottles and used issues and half-eaten plates -- litters and grime that I have to clean every morning of my life. My gutter is overflowing and they call this happiness.

I call this wreckage.

I moved close to the bed, pulled the sheet and laid down. I tried to remember my by-gone world -- my birch trees, my herbaceous plants, my wild ravines, my water lily -- before I was converted into a rattling shell called Happiness.

You wrapped your arms around me and press your face on small of my back. My spine was a hard wood once, and every October it shed its golden leaves. "What do you want?" you asked.

The neon lights and the avalanche of noise from everywhere drowned my thoughts, and all I can do for my defense is curl my mutiliated body.  "Love me until the end of everything," I whispered. "And understand that this is not a plea."

This is a burning desire to have my wetland back.

When I die,
I want to be clothed in black
and look stunning.

Afterwards,
I want my body cremated and my ashes scattered
wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere.

But before all that,
I want my closest friends
to read their eulogy.

I will sit in front or in a corner,
and listen to our ancient stories
Every word of it.

I want to know
how they would
remember me.

I want to know
if I've been good, over all,
and if I have been worthy of this existence.

Like a regular human being,
in the end,
I need to be validated.

For now,
let me lay on this bed
in an old house in an old room.

There is a certain tranquility
in watching the low sun passed between
the small openings of the capiz window.

There is incarnation.
There is finding again.
There is hope.

No matter how tiny
and bleak
and almost impossible it looks,
it exists.

sheds nothing
but pretense
and unrequited love.
It's exhausting, really.
Your sheer lack of substance.

Girl,
Angels do not have wings
Demons do not have tails
What they told us
Are plain *******.

We,
otherworldly creatures,
Are larger than the streets we've roamed
Are greater than the books we've read
Are deeper than the oceans we've swallowed

Are longer than the nights we've sojourned
Are scarier than the monsters in our head
Are vaster than all stories
and possibilities
and gloriousness combined.

So tell me, girl,
who needs wings and tails
and a god that fails
When we're grander
Than life itself?

Why do you have to fall
and break your self
on the cold, cold
pavement?

Do you want to walk with me tonight?

I'll take you out;
we'll find stone walls.

I'll compose poems for you
and recite it in low, husky voice
while the wind trembles and
the pebbles shake beneath our steps.

I promise we'll stop when exhausted.
Catch our breath.
Laugh around.
Throw banters
to the stars.

Then maybe --
maybe --
kiss.

The night will adore us.

Come here
and lay with me
I will show you
the narratives of the dragons
of the horns and the tails
and the tide that will rise above
the corruption of all heavens.

My affection for you
will rise above
the corruption of heavens
and drought of all the seas.

I get obsessed with ideas
adventures
people
territories.

I kiss them
mark them
own them.

This is my personal demon --
this ceaseless desire
to roast you

over
and over
and over.

Uncertainty --
you never know
how it roasts me alive.

You never know
how it tatters my skin,
gorges my flesh,

powders my bones.
How it reaches through my veins,
clutches my heart,

and despoil
my godforsaken
blood vessel.

No,
this rough oceans
slips through your stupid, little fingers

because you are so busy
confining yourself
in your trivial, pathetic world.

While you stand
on the threshold
of agitation and denial,

I try to resurrect
my hours
that you have spoiled.

And I do this while slowly --
very slowly --
hating you.

This is my elegy
to every second
that you have

murdered.

You are
the bitter taste of coffee --
a lump of spite
and insecurity in my throat.

You murdered everything
long ago and turned us into rubble
yet you have not really moved on
from your paranoia

and cowardice
and bitterness
and hesitations
and poetry

that reeks nothing
but unrequited love
and cheap hunger for
pathetic attention.

You may hide behind
your computer screen
yet you cannot arrest your insecurities
from transcending these digital borders,

polluting my coffee
and forming this lump of spite
in my throat
demanding to be noticed.

Please, do us both a favour --
dissolve yourself into nothingness
and do not, don't ever
live once more.

While the afternoon is glum
I would draw my chair
and write my verse.

I would choose the words carefully.
I would calculate the space.
I would blend the atmosphere in all perfection,

and I would prop its truthfulness
until it is strong enough to stand beside your name
under this overcast sky.

Give me this feeling of elation
And I will prolong it
By not possessing you.

I will indulge in this feeling
Until it disintegrates
into nothingness.

You will evolve
But still,
I will not possess you.

The last time we were together,
I was sleep
my arms wrapped around your chest
holding you close
and not wanting to let you go.

That was before your flight to the United States
And you woke me up with a kiss.

At 2:37 last night,
I was haunted by the thought
that you are no longer the same person
who will wake me up with a kiss
before his flight to the United States.

There is something peaceful
in University of the Philippines
at the end of the semester
after the rain

with nothing in it
but the sound of the night,
the occasional bouts of lightning,
the crunch of the footsteps,

and the passing vehicles.

And darling,
I would like to walk around the campus with you
while everyone
is far, far away.

And comfort me
why some poets
are not as beautiful
as their poems.

And in retrospect,
You will find
the good things.

You are very wrong.
Love
Is not all we need.

We need time.
We need comfort.
Desire.
Intimacy.
Anticipation.

We need understanding
And someone
Who can actually understand.

Upon laying down,
We need an actual person
Who is still interested
In touching our skin.

Inch by inch
After everything.
And love...

is not encompassing.

This space
between you and I
is exhausting.

No coiled, inseparable bodies.
Just this space,
and cold academic tasks.

Yes,
I desire intimacy.
Like an actual human being.

And right now
you were somewhere else
Eating lunch.

Body,
please rest.
You've been tormented by Mind
all day
all night.

Happiness
Is too safe,
Too ordinary.

It deprives me of my verses.

So, I went to our old place
Days after you flew back to the US.
And all I can think of
are the various ways
to brace myself.

Then I opened the door.
Then I smelled us.

And that was life
this afternoon
here in the Asia Pacific
in our old place

with all our dreams
and all our books
and our tiny bed.