timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.