silence is a balloon in my hand. an erratic saxophone with notes as blue as doves
            strangled in noxious space.

            android Jesus, not quite the shadow, verily the toppled light
   renaming things underneath its parasol – hundredfold of monikers
    and a solitary weight of love.

                  this is where the blood starts to make sense in its cold shrill:
   a dagger making its way towards my back. here are few routines of ablution;

a conflagration of bodies. razed sandalwood. first to go is gravity. last are the bodies
    helium-gorged, afloat – there is an immense price for solace.

                                cyclic spectral          cyclic spectral

   there’s man in ox but never an ox in a man. can you feel the tenacious drone
      of the oncoming storm? can you feel the Sun so sick of its diurnal labor?
                            can you feel the tantric *** of dew? its sensorial fissures?
             butchered serrations of grass are like torrid piles of moist ***** ready for ******.
            
   again, here comes the quietus. on the loathsome table lies the shrapnel
     of last night’s carnal invitation. a moth not named Marieta circumnavigates a bayonet
                       of elastic fire. here comes the marauder of quiet again,

     in my hand, a round, red, silent balloon – I let it go, in such relentlessly hoodwinked
              pursuit towards a god that may or may not know how
                                to dance underneath the bludgeoned beat.

life the grandest stage.
     life, gelid waters – I, the pompous admiral.
life, thorns withholding enigmas,
     clenching the true blood of flowers.
  life, the flimsiest avant-garde.

  our measures
  conceal all our knowledge,
    our fondness of exactitudes
bludgeons us to back to our smallness.

  the heart, like a riot,
  will always scream blood.
  the soul, like a jailbird,
will always carve a song.
  the mind, like a grave,
will turn soundless filled with bones.

  some will beat back to the same old music,
  assaulting the others with a concealed knife
gutting all of us as we lay still – the rest shaking around us.

  when I was young, I was unsure of myself
  and now that I have aged, it is all but the same:

I am a horde of drunkards.
I am the incessant pendulum.
I am the night-watch
and sometimes I am being watched by the night itself.
I am the loutish vandal on the wall.
I am hot, steaming music I am an earful of ***
I am a handful of hollow I am the dandelion whittling away
in the garden of full women seething with woes
I am the catapult of air from the sling of trees I am a somber god
I am an ungodly god I walk over toppled waters past genuflected hills
like maddened horses screaming victory
I am a limbless beast crawling back home
I am young I am old
my blood ravages the sinews of my body – I am a binaural cinematheque
   of slow minutes I am a mausoleum of chiaroscuros
I am all pleasure pleasure pleasure
I am just as ****** as everyone I am sour mash stirred in a wide-mouthed
      glass clinking together with this heavy slither of attendance around me
  somewhere in Pasay
I am love I love I am hate and I hate
I am forever the lion that roars at what life has done to us
    and they will cage me soon when the roses shy away from the deliberate daylight
and when all of this is through
               I have only just     begun.

taut the barb which my heart
flung away and adorned – such language is black while
many others have their places that silence
   had fractured.

the punctual shadow of the night,

                                   I converse in them
   through the pulse of the roots and their
   consistent counter-beats.

the many others, whose centers encircle
    heavy in their viscera:
enisled as a conference of birds
    in plenitudes of brindled mouths – the augury
that sees itself, my full being – this nocturne
     of stone-flight. the cosmic working of the sky
that hands me, a necklace of stars which implausible pearls
   simmer in fond gleaming: these foundlings that are
         dreamt away, and named innumerably across
   many other anonymities we recall with a throng of sound.

   in my hands the night folds like an origami
   conscious of its florid ikebana,
       as there could be another splendid thing
          like the calm: glimpsed, coveted like the light
   of all things grave in darkness.

such-a-deep-and-comely-thing
so-fleshless-moments-are-going
shari­ng-something-the-silence
and-the-quick-quiverings-of-flutings
whe­n-nothing-becomes-the-heart
like-a-jungle-stripping-the-panache
o­f-the-viridian-softer-it-is-the-truth

of-the-navel’s-blue-pursui­t
in-the-caterwaul-of-bodies-to-a-spry
plaything-summon-a-laughte­r-blacker
than-ravens-in-the-thrall-of-the-beset-moon
and-the-hom­es-fat-always-with-such-tender-beatings
it-is-the-time-of-the-her­on
it-is-the-end-of-the-susurration
when-the-unswift-hands-of-all­oys
sojourn-and-still-something-a-dagger-in-the-mire
of-the-cloud­-that-egregiously-whispers
a-long-possiblity-of-dreams-and-their-­palpable-weight
(say-it-will-perhaps-contention-of-pulseless-awak­enings
   when-it-was-such-truthfulness-that-when-the-heart-sings
    the-mind-stirs-and-the-hands-dance-to-roundtables-of-mirth
     twitching-such-belittled-locomotions-when-it-was-fashionable
     to-have-adorned-you-the-love-and-not-firm-obstreperous-meandering­s)

darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

beloved    I     dreamt   of you
      dreaming   atilt against   the lilies –
the   dawn   with   its mouth
        tottering before   like   an animal
   shying away from the   automaton sky.
     it     is    in your hair full   of evenings
      I saw the   moon not   with its  tail
  but with the   hooves   of the deathless    sea
      of this droning   silence,
           not with    its stride     of    sidereal measure
but    the    mount of    it past    a thousand  days
       tainted   with    crimson,  it   is not  with lithe  hands
of  churlish   girls   that I have    plucked you   out   of that
         garden but   with   the immense   hand
   of   such obscure   understanding  from sleep’s peculiar
  mouth   made divine    in me, the   word that   christens   what
  felled    star rises     from    the   palm  of such   darkness,
    
     that    in   the immensity   of your   sleep,  I am but   a bird
passing     athwart the    windows and   yearn so   much   the breeze
   that  touches   you    in your timid    sleep
           like     dreams     like     *****       like    sirens  
                  like    love    cunning   with   its     fluent   spires
          of   perfumes.

gOd put a smile on your face
      your eyes (half-thrush like two beings in the dark
and a gladiola of light spurns to chide in its bickering excess,
    birds, birds of morning and paradisiacal streets half-wittingly
       fork to single-handedness, a star is uttered and altars sing
           rarely-beloved, a dance-song of soul) and their parenthetical
    rush to what continues to live suddenly as if to say its conscious
       death is a room without flowers.