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.

Later, I will write a statement welcoming the graduates in the real world.

You know, that world they never told them about: the kind of world that will compel them to wake up at 5:00 in the morning, eat, ****, **** in a limited span of time, do a job repetitively for 8-10 hours which will eventually deprives them of their human growth and dignity in exchange of a mere salary - a portion from the total amount of money which the workers themselves had essentially generated.

Later, I will write a statement welcoming the graduates in the real world.
You know, that oppressive world they will inevitably despise
then eventually overthrow.

Aye aye, capt'n!

Capt'n eh?
I do look pretty stellar in boots and a pirate hat.
I could wear an eye patch,
but make it see-through,
so it would actually be sun glasses.

Why?
With sword,
and maps,
and chivalry
and oil lamps
and distant island.
God! You're enchanted.

I'm trying to write something,
something I cannot guarantee.
Trying to make it fluid,
by containing it in words
woven restlessly
by my restless hand.
Hoping that they might pour
and traverse the spine of your back
down your leg
and make you laugh.

The light in your window
I will always remember that.
As we propped your pillow
and hid under your blanket.
As we conversed in strange languages
and laughed at silent jokes.
As we exchanged battered whispers
while promises fell like raindrops.

I will always remember us
as we locked the door
and left the world outside.
As you tossed my shoes, burnt our clothes away.
As you consumed my name
while the looking glass admired
the ways we dissolved
then inevitably disappeared.

And I will forever remember
the interminable look in your eyes before you sleep
and your fingerprints
here, there and everywhere.
You are the sweetest scar that had stained my whole existence.

Because we have cheated destiny;
and until we defy immortality.

Tear down the last gods
disregard their pleas.
We will take their posts
move close to me.

“It seems to me
as if every word in English language
is inadequate to describe us,” she said.

“We’re perfect.”

My beautiful,
smart,
funny,
excitingly adventurous,
**** **** **** girl friend.

One who writes
and reads me poetry.
Sings songs,
laughs and watches movies with me.

You are so incredible to me in so many ways.
And you do it
from the other side of the world.

It's noon
and the heat is inconsolable.
Dust conceals the birds in flight.
Car horns are inescapable.
Traffic seems interminable.
Smoke perches like hatred and blame.
Beggars linger like guilt.
Prostitutes on the subway
embrace hour like a lifeline.
Construction workers battle death for a morsel.
**
As you arched your spine
and pushed back your neck,
the light passes through your window
and illuminated the sweat sprawling restlessly on your chest like hasty scribbles.
In this broken world,
I find your ruffled hair fascinating.

Did you miss me?*

I always miss you, my love.
Like a piece of paper folded in half,
and torn through the middle...
yes,
it could still function,

but is not whole.

It's weird
how most people
looked at love

as a field of peaches
during the harvest time

and not as two palm trees
trying to weather the storms
of the barren land.

I would contain it in a bottle
with dead leaves
to remind you
that some time in the past

we're breathing,
inhaling each other's gasps.
That before withering,
we have lived everything we could.

I ache for you,
for your taste,
your skin,
your warmth.

Show me how we are made, my love.

*We are made of fiber,
of hidden moon.
In this tormented city,
we are made to dissolve,

in shadows,
in whispers,
in flare.

Dear Anon,

******* for running away. I've waited so long under the tree, when the moon was waxing and waning, and when it was full. The flower's stem cloistered in palm tried to hide the growing anxiety that engulfed me as minutes became a long procession of hours.

That was the night when you ran away with the director. And I was there - I stayed there, and still loved you the morning after.

I guess, you will forever occupy a largest portion in my mind. That no matter what I do, I will not be able to shake off the memory of you running away and of me, waiting.

And just so you know, *****, I'm still waiting.
Even now.


*Barbons

Says the bird
restless on the stem
perching on her wrist.

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.

You will remember me reciting poetry between our acts of making love. You will remember the traces of my fingerprints trembling on your temple, my mouth cloistered across your name. You will hear, again and again, my rapid breathing round your neck and my battered voice consuming the space between you and me.

The long walks, my verses, the place I used to occupy, your hair strands perishing on my palm and my disappearing warmth, they will forever remind you of the endless times and everything we are breathing somewhere underneath your propped pillow and creased blanket.

Between your fingers will wrap the ways you have read me like Braille and the countless ways I have responded fluently. They will live in your head, feed in your memory, tear your flesh asunder. They will annihilate you.

They will break your heart.

Say goodbye to Keats, Gaiman, Bukowski, Eliot, Woolf, Plath and to the thousand years I could have made you immortal and love you like sickness and its cure together. Say goodbye to the smell of the verses I have exhaled on your skin, in a locked room, to our glittering kisses and shards of hearts strewn and dying on your bed sheet. I will take the next station Southbound, with Hemingway, and will dissolve with the clouds and swallow the stars alive.

Say goodbye to me and go on with your ******* ***** and endure the fact that she will never ever write a poem for you because she can’t and you have lost me forever.

*Remember that your muffled hair,
In this broken world,
Is one of the most beautiful things I have ever beheld
But be wary of my books.
There were constellations between the pages
Which tomorrow,
I will tear apart, one by one
And stitch in the shape of legendary airplanes that one day,
As we stand face to face
I will crush on your chest
And they will explode
And dismember you.

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.

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.

Believe me, my love,
a beautiful scene in-between the creases of those sheets

And the world wavered, and quivered and threatened to burst into flames!

You are the morning sun,
the beauty whom lights this world of mine,
as you peek over the crest of my horizon.

You are the evening moon,
the beauty whom lights the sky,
every time the sun cannot cover half the earth.

A constant dance we adhere, opposite sides of the earth…
you rise while I sleep,
only passing for a few moments.

A constant song we sing, opposite sides of the earth.
You sleep while I rise,
another step for the beginning ahead.

A delicate noise,
playing amongst our ears,
strumming the strings of our hearts.

It is our ballad, this song-
one the overflows with words of our hearts
to illuminate and give direction to that beginning.
Our beginning.

Our beginning, days anew.
Standing on the edge of the earth, hand in hand,
chasing time and defying storms.

The precipice crumbling beneath our toes, as we begin flight.
Stretching for those stars,
beyond our time,
on the outskirts of the universe we know – hand in hand.

Hand in hand we venture the cosmos,
defying gravity and reason,
but with definite purpose…
To create our composition.

*The stones of the precipice falling beneath our feet, beyond the surface,
as we soar high and above,
rearranging the constellations that time has disarrayed.

I found you.

You were in every word.
You occupied the spaces,
its continuum
and truthfulness.

In the howling wind,
I push my window open
and wait for you.

You will see cobwebs and spiders
covering round the clavicles,
traversing down the cartilage.

Close your eyes and listen intently
And you will hear the sound of the leaves
being carried around and away
in that valley of questions and shadows.

Sometimes you will see broken twigs.
Everything is broken inside,
so rest assured that you can never break some more.
Someone, before your arrival,
has already did the favour for you.

All you can do now is lean over my chest
and close your eyes
and listen to the distant sound of the wind
and leaves being blown around

inside this rib cage.

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.

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.

That I will cheat destiny
just to be near you
once more.

But I think I would have to yield for now.
I can't think straight.
And struggling to keep my consciousness.
Indeed, I can barely hold unto it.

Good night.

I'll be waiting in my dreams.
In that world of endless happiness,
secret longing
and resurrected hopes.

Please, don't be late.
Don't be late.
Say you will still love me in the morning,
Before I go.

*I will love you in the morning of this day and the next.
I will love you on every morning you awaken,
and even the ones you will miss.
I will love you to the point time no longer makes sense.

But I'm too intoxicated
and every word
seems never enough.

I have deceived the fairies
and made a beautiful cage.

There,
in flame
and on the wreckage of the world we will dismember,

we will dance
and flaunt our hair strands.

The fireflies will sing.
The stars will fall.
All the flowers will perish.

We will eradicate the sun.
There will be no moon on summer.
We will swallow the sea.

Come closer.

Disappear with me.

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.

That sometimes
words are not enough.

Most of the time, actually.

Because people need reassurance, always.
And not just the ordinary kind
of reassurance.

It must be the kind that is certain,
that is constant
that never falters.

The kind that is strong enough to weather life's series
of resonant, unending storms.

It should be the kind
that people can hold on to, always.
Most especially in moments
when every bone inside them begins to shatter.

I close my eyes
and I feel your voice draping the wall
and I remember your arms
around my arms
and your legs
around my legs
and your warmth
around my warmth
and how beautiful the light is
and how wonderful we are.

I never fix my room, no, never. On every corner, my books perch, stacks after stacks, like hungry butterflies destined to inhale the delight of only three summer days.

On the chair sleep those clothes I was wearing yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and last Monday and weeks ago, like fallen unremembered friends. It still has the scent of the woman sitting next to me on the bus, beside the window, her fleeting heart and endless readings and the way love flipped between her forefinger and thumb. That was the type of love that not the world could interrupt; not even the hundred years of common existence could contain.

It still has the sound of our broken steps on the pavement, the feel of the scraping wall, the drunken scent of the stranger I ****** with. His skin against my skin, his mouth staining the length of my neck, his hair wrapping my fingers, my breath on his temple, his leg, my leg, his arm, my arm, the stars dancing and our warmth defying the curse of human mortality.

Scattered on the floor were the paintbrushes, unwashed palette, stacks of newspapers I use to cover around my interminable uncertainty. I hear the wall, almost every day, discussing about my inferiority complex, about how it impedes me from creating something original, something infinite, about how it trails behind me, gasping, grabs me from behind, locks me in then eventually enslaves me.

How dare they are to go about the spectrum of these endless wanderings, these filthy fellows who knew so well that I never comb my hair and that I have always, always, hated the boring Murakami.

I never fix my bed, no, never. The propped of my pillow, the uneven creases, they will serve as the living reminder of our final encounter. I must have disarrayed the bed sheet – I cannot remember exactly when –but I have no plan of rearranging the constellations any moment soon.

My blanket swallows me alive, its edges draping on the edge of my bed, sometimes flipping reluctantly, savoring the vacancy of the afternoon, the way the light scars my books, glistens my skin that I have strewn everywhere for the mother of otherness to eat.

Most of the time, in my sheer insanity, I set my room afire.

In flare and in consuming woods,
your kisses fell
like elusive embers.

In that flickering labyrinth
of watered avenue
which floods out of your chest

and poured unto mine,
beating faster,
and chasing the sound of your gasps

The sunbeams fell.
And all the leaves yellowed.
And all the years ceased.

And time spread its wings
Where we laid, spent
bodies strangled against the flowing current
Of both our hesitating and certain flights.

Then slowly, very slowly,
the sun burned itself
into cinders.

Because in every fleeting encounter,
we watch all these.

Each and every time.

I went home last night.
Bought some *****,
and brought another man
I met in the pub.

He was so unlike you,
you who opened all doors.
He was scrubby
and rather rude.

We lit the cigar,
inhaled the smoke,
exchanged lies,
got high.

As expected,
we had ***.
That kissing
and fondling

and all those things
I need not elaborate
for the exhausted bedsheet,
and propped pillows

And crippled blankets
all looked at me,
accusingly,
asking where you were.

In a hurry,
the legs of the ant traversed the length of the electric wire.

Half way,
the animal hesitated,

turned round,
met my gaze,

ceased walking
before finally walking away.

It must have understood my plea
to be left alone.