a    man with his
     heaviness    weighs the
masculine     waters

    be    like stone
its depth    of concentration
  
   wherefore     birds  lose
  sight of their    rapt flight
above    waters    stills a man
    whose mirror     is not of   a mirage
but       a    man   flat against    the seductive      rose
  
   to     hold  his     breath
and rain's      supreme bullet
       are    but simplistic    maze
again     the   stone cannot  reveal
the     man   in his  proud   geographies —

      such   trouble   of mortality
begins,   a wrest     of bones,   the volcano     defined    by  such earthenware
whose   metaphysics   unalphabeted
  like   fellows    going back to god's    arms
   sitting      well   with
          red    roses.

farewell and farewell—
so this persists, the night
unraveling
its exigent face
as delicate as daybreak.

each window shunned, each door
left open for the wind of your red feet
to enter a plenitude of vagabonds,

goodbye and goodbye
and nothing has ever changed.
to remove yourself from me
and retain, a dagger:
to seize with your hands, my blood
and to bathe your body, with
new darkness.

to move away from me
resounds a bell, a prayer's end,
the birds are in their clandestine,
the felines are in their rendezvous
and your body assumes
liquid measure, surpassing matter.

let us not converse grief when it is
fancy to speak of embrace — you
are a rusting machinery left in the
ferruginous dark.

so we have never returned
and i no longer grieve you:

you are as untenable as a fixture or
a sepulcher.

i desire for your
  inner light to awaken:
itself, a budding flower—

growing roots in my silence,
  foregoing the panache of air.
your petals assist my peril
into a curtain's closing.

what transparency does my hand hold
clearer than any day when you
look at yourself within my eyes,
dizzy with the image i give back,
  a startled child?

the Earth's jar topples, waters breaking free, loosening its girth wily against stone, rinsing us both with purity.

the lament of fixity
gazes on stone, its death-fires  encircle
the slender body of the doting Sun.

this is our time spent again
when our days obdurately say
that our inimitable skies smell of
wet willow—

our time has come to sleep.
the soggy horizon closes its eyes
and darkness enters like a thief.
aureoles criss-cross into
touchable delineations.
i am closer to the Earth than I was once
before you, bared to profile
like a fruit pared by your teeth.

what awaits in the gleam of one's
waking is the fruitage of nondescript music flowering in my ear:
the curved entry of your breath,
receiving it, my ear's bell,
shaking the cathedrals and by the pews
of my somnolence,  a trespassing whirlwind, a dewdrop, trickles of flame.

are there lips, with there power enough
left to clench in their growing?
this den of such tender love,
when i roar ardently dressed as
  an admiral in sleep's sea,

i, mounting the waves of your body,
  dream of lions.

your furlough, even
across the world

so beautifully ****
made immense by the primeval crush
of light.

there are places in the world
filled with soundless bones,

women in their lifeless braids
and swell sheen of moon

this bane of such swollen river
aching back to its source.

it is that your departure has the
scent of olives crushed against
the squalid home,

    and that your presence never
lights an incense,

   like death wafting searching
for flesh, or a lone animal
left cut in the wild pursuing rescue
with a hue of damp mauves.

It should’ve been Bagan –
she always loved Bagan,
Myanmar.

look, woman.
I am a dog outside your home,
overwrought and disarmed,
hunting for bones.

inverse moon over Pasig
tonight and I am on
my 4th bottle of beer already,

barking without teeth.
raged behind the typewriter
with nothing but a visibly

veiled waiting
this stance so
obscure,
so absurd
like the abrupt life
of candle-flame.

I was the lover
and you cared for flame:
now the fire is dead
and there is nothing left
for the sea to lambast,
erased by the shores of feel.

symphonies out on the streets
like leprous children scrunched deep in
the mire of the streets for alms.

it is now my 5th bottle
and I **** on the stone-gnome
in my mother’s lawn
and she will know of the reek
of this pungent disbelief – scorn me for
my heavy drinking

but what is a man to do
when he
is as destroyed
as

the morning

outside?

quite drunk in this evening tender with rue – there is a gentle hand
that whirls against the bougainvillea.

things remain to be constantly in the tranquil as I am not
yet shaken in my fragile frame –

the leaves rustle in the 19 degree cold moon,
the beer bottles emptied, stacked beside the receptacles.
she and I could be dead, and it took me 3 years to know this:

there is a photograph of her thrown somewhere
behind scraps of metal, caged there, like a jailbird
in a jailhouse, screaming blue against redness.

I had love, and love died.
you neither flinch nor move at the very slight of me,
passing over the porch of your reading.
the thing that once moved now festers
with stillness, and so many vibrant explosions begin in the sky
and there is nothing discernible in her abject eyes.

I remember driving past your home in front of
a little, quaint house and I swore that the even your voice
speaks to me in evenings full with the thought
of never knowing you again.

you are so real like the horse that grazes the field
underneath umbilicus of power-lines,
yet so fake and feigned like the truth that tries
to assess itself , crawling mazy back into my drunken arms
like a child startled speaking a thousand things
I have already no use for.


sometimes the sun is like a house on fire.
sometimes the simmer of onion smells like ******.
most of the time, the look on my face, half-drunk and half-believing,
looks like a night distilled and fractured by voices.

I will never ask for your hands to touch,
I will never ask for you body to make heat,
I will never ask for your footsteps to chime in grave music:

I have my own defeats to keep me
that way: toppled and scrounging for light.

let me be.
I have seen many warfares and not a single shot of a rifle
has broken me into the man that I once was.

I drive back to you and it is never the same:
it is banal to say that you have yourself
and I have my own, deep in study.

let us drive back to roads whetted with kisses
and from there, start to disentangle
like leaves from boughs
deep in December.