I have no interest in anything
insofar as a warm pitcher of spit.

there is a lineage of a plainspoken truth
that agonies itself, a slow ticking of clockwork.

all the pubs are filled with
the ugly and the beautiful.
so much the naked darlings,
so much the people writing,
and reading poems wrung dry
like unattended cornerstones.

when the flower dwindles,
the petals begin to shed.
I see people slower than drizzle,
tread the long line of existence.

as I write all words washed away by the shore,
all separated and lonely,
deeply departed as a parting hand of a wave,
all people continue their sameness.

inside me, a well-placed margin
divides flesh and bone.
overwrought the soul, untended to
like drops of water from a spigot left open.

sound of silence like the reproach of fires.
my mother loathes me for my heavy drinking.
my godfathers attenuate the smoke furling
above my brows back to its fetal nature.
somewhere, somebody is making a killing
in front of the billion-blooded.

misshapen. lungs struck harshly by a barrage
of quiet. i can barely keep my soul together
past the horrible billboards of EDSA.
the lampposts, the sun that looks like a lazy eye
magnifying everything that hurt.
I thrive with faces whose existences have nothing
to add me – damage further
I keep working up the old moon’s wane.

we will all fall to the ground,
we will all have our skin scraped out
of the body
and we will hear the paring of the flesh
sifting away from the bone
and it will hurt
like old haunts revisiting us

not because we are out of choices
not out of weakness;
the simple truth that teaches us
to be kind does not have its same potency.
there is an epidemic of death
crawling past hills crunched to the death
by the unrests of horses.

pain sends its
tired battalion of people
lining up across the turnstiles.
the ****** utter
the flimsiest of moans.
the soldiers beat their
wives to the ground with nothing
but bare-knuckled discomfitures.
I fear that soon enough,
what keeps the walls together may soon
touch the end
while I assault the windows

with photographs of slow mornings
reduced to slower evenings.
such falseness teems where
truth should have prevailed.

someone’s time is up
and death strays in the room
proud of its stench championing the perfumes
of boys and girls in the flesh -

we’re all next,
first one to go
finds the impasse all the same.