you will only look for which road i have
passed, with girth of oceans startled
to hip-curve, bow-legged darling
hiding behind pretense of rose frailty.
when words ripen, they fall.
from vaudeville of fools to silence
in all its exactness, i take my place
amongst people in stations, machines
adorning rotundas, courtyards to a flourish of twilight-bells, the men with retinas spry behind cloaks of smoke—
plain, **** drunkenness assaults
the billion-blooded sea, each line fraught
with inebriation: a god is borrowed with
what light fruits from a slow nature, quick
to burst and torturously maimed in stride.
fated to arrive at one morning —
being in total placeness and making merry
once again, the dreary face waiting at
the portico of days collected.
when these words start to wind-hover,
a string of birds will appear clearer,
mounting umbilicus of lines.
as in hounds shear the metastasizing dark,
going back to chagrined kens,
i make truth out of the tragedy:
trace the source of this stream and find
my trampled body, floating with
the sandalwood. when the still, clenched hand clock-punches,
make real the insignia of my arrival:
words start with limbs to cross
this scalped Earth which moves suddenly naked, leaning in, gropes you
in stillness, resuscitating the moon from
the working of insolvencies we rear
in derelicts of days.
drags it closely to ends — left trundling
in woe's wearisome vessel. and if in
this newly thatched home it screams,
let this voice deftly shred
so i may once more lie straight to your
half-illuminated faces, a call i
only hear.
A poem about getting off work, writing and drinking. This was read last night at a poetry reading in Makati.