your home filled with vines does not know
it is alone — it seeks to become a diaphanous fold of trees, a violent vermilion of skies crushed to clay.

its arms hold refuge, a delicate heart.
the formless shadow there and the unguessed sensorium of furniture —
they do not know the touch of ruin.

underneath you, i am.
soil crumbled by the hundredfold of your
weight. in the air singes the burning of days, punching a hole onto me like
a globule of diminutive fire rife to
cull the vineyard of my body.

your home does not know
the dream of its weight. the anchor of its pillars gnash the acidulous trifle of hours.
doors, windows, cupboards still — every aperture gorges itself with the water
of your footsteps.

your home does not know
that it stomps stonily against an earthen fruitage: my body beaten to a pulp.

each tempered by slivered moments:
slovenly on the floor lay tethered,
both, separate,
honest light.

when it is time that you do not
see anymore, the shadow of my passing,

when the twilight gives rise,
a felled star in the world,

when damp kisses are beleaguered
by the driest of lips,

out of merely, a wide-eyed vainglory,
there will be nothing that all my songs
send a dancing, tiptoeing light
careful to arrive at one day

when you face is held with utmost care
and my hands not its owner,
but a handful of names.

when it comes that we are two fish
struggling in a current's dream —
not a single twitch is born. you will slip
past the interstice of love's net
and i cannot see you anymore in the
depthless blue.

the intelligence of stone tells me
nothing but silence, hemmed in
to a great monolith of daylight.

i exaggerate, the sinking of ships
and amble blindly with the whole of
my motion, like flotsam weary of its
  preordainment. portraits sow themselves
battles, cleaving them minutely against
  the simmer of quiet. when it is time
to let you go, i will watch you leap forth
  into the ripe air like a child seeking
home, reiterates in flight a height
  i cannot reach for.

when it is time all of this,
    mote it be, clenches in thinned streaks
of turpentine, all of my walls will be clear
  and not a sign of your colour
   will scream pain like a tortured vandal.

I take this mangled body of iron,
  its acoustic of all malleability.

the flattened world outside
sings something so slender, a structure
    of a rose.

as long as there is the fierceness of these words,
   they will leap forth, a defenseless vault,
and cry a breakwater of rivers.

these words like caged birds peering out
   into the ferruginous world consummated
by the oldest of thrills crumpled anew – fledgling beats
  of dance, this hysterical morning that slinks to a clasp
    of slipshod music.

when it is time for all of Earth to slumber,
   I am the drapery and all unknowing eyes,
         my children.

When your dance a bounty, yet sing
they fail – I have learned to love,
worrisome mother and adorn you:

such a kiss is planted
a rose on the plump cheek of children.
your girth measures unflinchingly,
the laughter of the world around you
so small, kept in a dark, blinkered box.
your parasol smothers the light
cast unswervingly on stone.
who has long kept you in the caliginous womb,
with all the light that spangles through?
who has snuffed your little arms
and dressed you for everyone to see?
when you are quite flamboyant for
everyone to feast on,
what word passes on as salutation?
when you are festive enough to revel in,
what pagoda tries itself to the life
allowed to gleam proudly?

women, men, children, and all -
frolicsome around the darkled bough
smitten by the frayed sight of believing,
sifting from the way our hands
craft things the dispensable glee
of glasswork: the world is Murano.
and my eyes have seen all flourish
in a darling ebb of curbed felicities – the diaphanous
clangour of steel and shadow.
the slain orchestra of frogs in the crush of rain.
the detriment of the Earth curled like an infant
in the womb of the dark.

     - oh trees and their wondrous life of green,
begin to question the wind and its tourniquet;
shadows drunk on turpentine, the spry wilt of hours:
what is their final duty?
   if our laughter is slain in the perils of night,
how are we to become them?

suppose words
are water and our bodies, wells—

flat on our bellies, our unsuspecting laughter supersedes their suddenness.

too late to unsay the space they occupy.
they arrive not with wind galloping
through trees.
they continually commit a nuisance
to us here in this decrepit home,
christening us with depthless sleep.

— what transpires beyond these shadowed moments unlearn the hairbreadth syntax of their perilous measures:

even the morning has no promise of May.
i say that in wide-flung hours of April when leaves begin to smoulder a cluster of red in the brindled breast of foliages, and rushed like lions to a slaughter, paring the flesh from the bone, these words unsheathe us more than the Earth shedding its skin — a dull synonym of how we are pressed against walls, our bones outstretched to breaking, ourselves displaced somewhere where the air of rescue does not wholly kiss us.

there is no image fainter than what was painted. no machinery can outlast the weight that is carried —

persisting lovelessly, a ragged meadow.
clambering ceaselessly, the warmest of bodies recoiled in melee.

suppose words
are such black-red thorns becoming petals and stems merely lovelorn, joyful to the eye
and hands are moons the bedfellows uninvited, you hiding behind shadows
    of changeless flowers:

so much the quiet way of this fate
reduced to hair-trigger.

thighed and pried lilies, dew slips frightened to a mist of trouble;
morning sleighs its brilliant face,
  such a luminous beginning to a dislimned end — far less touchingly than
a lullaby, this hot water music scaldingly
  presses on naked and whispers to them
  a new name without forgetfulness.

the weight is immense — anchored down, full of something in excess. there are doors that wish to commence oblivion, windows yearn to squint at the Earth so timidly muted in the body.

suppose your body is a home and the night subtly the wind that blows,
topples the roof-beam —

may your sleep be still and unshaken,
  your unperturbed garden slouches with a bounty of emerging flowers;
may your windows to the soul
  be always ready for birds that secretly
move in virulent strings of melody,

  something the world sings screaming
of life, something the stone of a fool
  so supple in hearing, something
the heavens hold together with the
  purest hand, something we precisely
    dream, such that we

        suppose you angels
  and us, the witnesses.

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.