because our dreams of leaf-canopies and lignin
arrive at a certain variety of green, we will zither
anew with song

here in Bulacan; all the leaves are capsized
brandishing inflorescences as naked as
  the scent of petrichor girdled
on the cobblestones: they are forsaken not by
trees but by seasons only, a twofold deliberation
of caprice: there is only two of what is spoken.
   such is the warmth and coldness,
missing their obvious targets, hesitant and abstruse,
  scattered and at long last, never collected

deftly camouflaged in the familiar drapery,
“Tantusan mo!” as they cry for marks to remember,
we touch the cicatrix to measure with our jagged hands
how much we have forgotten.

what we cease to remember descends deep, as wash-hand basins
concur such depth,
into the well of ourselves, later to discover such
perilous foundling in the squall of either morning or evening,
   still devoid of sense: still arguing whether there is much
to reconcile with what has been found and what has been pictured
   now, altered by such loss: this is danger, and so is nothing,

swollen and tender, the waters of the estero reek of such
remembering – we cannot ignore its perfume, oddly taking the shape
of the next dagger slowly making its way towards the back
of the skull to pare with river-run precision, what we all
try to hold back inside; so as if to say,
             “Tantusan mo!” to remember
where     we last    took  off,  like a heron,
   or a  bird, wary of distances.

our most frail signals surrender us to movement:
eyes and their gesticulations carry us through foresight and after-sight,
   sometimes the latter, which takes on space yet not so much space,
     and the previously bestowed upon unction that supersedes
       reckless meanings.

    syntactical is the source of rivers,
   concatenation is the body of mountains:

      clocks mean nothing to predate and antedate – now is the time for
            such realizations.

  I do not know what is it with the trees that moves me
  to bend, and I do not know what is it with heads of flowers
   that makes me fall in love repeatedly as if to make no sound as a thief
   is entering the premises, or an unsuspecting cat dropping
    just beside the all-titanium bicycle: desolate, on all-fours, no metamorphosis
   happening, just flagrantly stagnant in form.

I peer out in mornings in search for a curve of a face,
  or a flutter of an eyelid, all but marvelous insofar as they all remind
you of a picture painted somewhere beyond the mausoleum ******* clad
    with pressing scenes but away and moving, always on alteration,
permitting to speak clearly something so breakable and false: a day’s turning into night
                         sheds its skin and now without gleam nor white even, a child smiles
     at me without      teeth.

it was raining that morning – so much the effloresce of colors
making their way back into the sky; there were the strangest forms of
clouds, their bodies assuming shapes and geometries, obscured angles
like that of two coiled lovers on a bed, whose bones ache the septuagenarian
but still at ease when it comes to building fire; no birds were out that day
and the busy binatog vendor blared into the streets like an unwanted nuisance,
it was already afternoon when you had your eyes wake up to mine,
your simian jaw curved to a hook of the C in crescendo, your voice the twilight
and the familiar passing of birds, the gush of blood inside of you;
there are such speeds that ultimate a crash, or a fragment – the semantics
of motion do not appeal to both of us, but we ceaselessly exist in those
moments when all of your movements summon, say, the sea, but that is a metaphor
used overtime, overwrought and taken out of its blue – say, your grandfather’s pendulum
watch impaled to the wall on a heady standstill, face to face with a linoleumed wall
that shouted its age – its superficial maquillage falling out of its slenderness
fashioned to secretive ******: something both you and I know, something that does not
come well with age, something that only some shadows choose to eschew in light.
  in a faraway place, there might be parakeets but this time, underneath the cusped sky
and the parasol that was drenched by drizzle that we let dry by the doorstep,
there is something about the gnash of rusting metal-work that tells me time has its own
way of claiming things, renaming them, and bringing them back in awry stances nestled
in tight, wrestling nooks of space, dark and dust on ground – keeping us leaping in place,
    swift with dreams of wings and aviaries, be it elocutionary with farce
or just keeping it real by the unreal of our imaginations – like birds swell in the sheen
  of the sky’s flayed bone, sliding in and out of the fringes of the aureole until such gardens
  are flustered with monochrome: this perfect dagguerotype of day.

exhaust of night's guttural snarl
  sleep, with its fixated eyes
  break the silence's dagguerotype.

edges of the moon fringe
  until its fingers sort out

      plenitudes of configuration:
  ignition upon contact,
      consummation upon acquiescence,
 pilgrimages within unmoving juxtapositions;
    suspended on intimation,
  void's hands swirl in depth
        lithe like a leaf, falling intimately on
    the ground:   my body's collapse
       to surrendering machination.
   it begins swollen to the full
         and ends, aching,
  yet unfazed by the untenable quicksilver
      of mind's pompous meander to a field
 where it so subtly blows,
              the wind in all spaces.

i   am   going
into    the    limp    dark
   where   silence   recites
a brief  candleflame
  
    it is   as if  these cavernous   impulses
rush   back    like  children
     whose  heads   are diadems
and   you,   their   mother   of   spring’s   masterful
    hands    neither  went
      nor      came

to   a   dream
    of
        roses  which
trudging    kisses   smite  the loam,
    giving  them   reckless meanings
yet    all    the   same

   in    death
and   in    beginning,  in  these large minutes
your   eyes  contain
such    light   which   all  things  darkled
    are    born anew
with   timid  
       names

think  I  shall  be springtime; such   clumsy
scent  of  the world   collapsing  not  with  nets
but   hands  not upon  trellis  but    bodies –
    sleep    shall   carry   us  to  inches
of  terrible  speech    such somnolent world senses
    quietness   in  the  rivers   of   our blood;
how  murmurously  veritable    moment
     leaps   forth  ripe  in the   air   of such  splendidness
when  it   was not   mountains
    but    your   *******   deep within   the    Earth of  me
and I  rain    cleaving  the   scent   of   the world
    into   two   separateness   until   the
enormously     ****   moon   plunges    within;
   I    shall   be   a   tree
and you, a rose    or   springtide, or   everything
   that
            blooms,    withers,
dances – new  beginnings;

i went with you towards the waning of the old moon,
enclosed in a season, stricken with half-glow, i went with
you to a blue enclosure, whose hands cannot bridle you,
as they, hunters all, would a thing that refuses to be held.
you happen everywhere as though secrets alighting pursed lips
and fragment breathing, springing in with the indelible hue
of autumn, yellowing all around me, where I join you, someday,
where trees bend slowly towards a reason, careening and pulling
back days  that closed our eyes and carved in with sleep,
like a prescient dream where all but motioning parts of you
     join from all separateness as though
                                             you were still here and never departed.