driving at Kennon (treacherous zigzag
   resembles hopscotch with death)
as i play Morrissey on the radio and the
woman sleeps, sometimes waking up lamenting the death of moths I ran over, splattered on the windshield, "Poor little creatures!" she said. no, baby, i am the poor little creature and so are you,
    relentless against the dark
  past Urdaneta — her being mineward,
i play with death as i turn the headlamps
off (pure blackness, nothing as if falling
into a bottomless pit as void sits on its
throne waiting) and on (all white as pains
  now, trucks flare up and down the bend,
  the tumbled boulders keep meting out
   some forceful way of disturbances,
  our collapse, the afterthought of it all)

i sensed from the beginning that the
old moon will wade out and soon the sun
will throw dissipated shades all across
camps with bonfires dead and stilled.
at the height of all, it becomes so
hot that the birds leave the trees together with the flowers and the Cordillera cannot cry any longer.

my woman wakes up as if rattled
with different pains, her face floating
past the mountains dreaming at the verge
of birds in the morning—
and it is twilight and still the same birds,

now it is the night and you
cannot see the birds anymore,
neither a hint nor a trail of
where they have disappeared

like the glory of Rizal in Luneta.
the lightsome globules in Paris.
the lions of Manila, now a town full of cowards as alleys fill with ******,
the kids laying flat on their bellies
as the lawn takes its revenge
on the rest of the surrounding,
  
         beheading the tree, and the
       birds fly farther and away.