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falling into subterranean sleep, I notice such blackness
   bypasses a pinprick of light; dreams are avenues
   to enigmas presenting themselves as someone forgotten.
sleep laves labyrinths with incandescent sequins.
    everybody is strange here, interlocutor commune,
still yet nothing I can understand – better be braille, or
    contrapuntal dance, but still you uttered nothing;
your locutionary silence seeks no contentment.

                                           i have never heard such riot
of laughter toss me out of sleep. perhaps it was our undoing,
   our deepest, secretive entrails unloosen us in such fashion
   worth depicting as obscenely courageous, the width
of arm-span the size of outstretched islands, and stepping into
   that particular wideness, are my small feet traipsing
   swiftly throbbing in the heat of choosing:
to go      or     to stay – cyclic spectacle that eschews
            dailiness that I know I may have forgotten you in faces
of lampposts, the pared skin of onion, the gleaming washlines,
     the white feral on the rooftops, a blank piece of paper,
            a munificent Bulacan sky, or any sky at that since
they are all bleached and they arrive not with wind but
    with lashes: the color of white that flagellates, that blinds,
        that oscillates in space which is then reduced to the
     back of my hand: I know this. I know all of this.

                                                we were not naked, yet something
         buried in the skin reveals itself disarmed, mumbling
             an earnest palaver of questions I have no answers for.
                     what happened? where are we? should we just – die?
                                   an echoing reverb, or simply a song – a metronomic
          carousal of swan-song I have heard before persists
                            and maybe all this time,
                                                       we have been awake, in separate cities.
this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
    light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
    sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
    i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to                            

                                 ­                        vertigo.
                                           in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
         long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
    120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
  form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,

                                          are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
    and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
      of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
     to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
     after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
               that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.
in the lighter steps of yesteryears come the name of which
I cannot remember insofar as I am awash with the delusion
of what a poem, or what to make out of a poem, or what use
is there, to heave out poems – I was then raw, supple if you
may allow, like dew on blade of grass, face front
   against the blithesome matutinal, heart somewhere displaced,
beginning to look for something the inward expects,
  as though things happen for the first time again,
  with wisdom of what to look for – resigned, young,
      inconsistent with the word, fetal in my hands: pen and paper.
a well-guarded secret
   swaying in tune, curtailed by some sort of split-second inhibition,
    trying to save face and give this blandness a whole new meaning
and arrive at two intersecting points where the lost self will be
     redeemed in finding – monologue of sorts, dark it was,
  dampened by such bleakness, this leitmotif;
     all around me purged of sound, strip to rogue without
       senses, suddenness at the tip of my body, lunging at any
feat of light that succeeds to champion this behemoth of blackness,
    to complete this impedance, a singular impetus to fruition ekphrasis,
yet not quite, deep in the study again, as though
     yesteryears are all but the days starting to disintegrate
  into tiny segments to wreak something devastatingly vague, as in,
   a language curled in the tongue, relentlessly flexed against the wall
     of me, losing yet no little piece.
S*
morose thing now,
this thing under umbrage
  of a maddened machine;
who is reluctant to give way,
an ecliptic passing of
an even madder woman.
this thing now,
under the pretense of shadow,
this form,
falling out, whiplashed, broken,
whose name of music is soliloquy,
this amorphous figure
   that gives so much    cadence
  to    things
     that    hold onto   long and monotonous
    enunciations like a bad hangover from
       a slackened night’s slug.

like the S on swooned
   or still the S on the double-grinned,
    parasol-intoned, punch-to-the-gut spoon;

or S in  seldom
     saved,   structured such  selfishness
saluting   sordid stories   soldering
       smashmouth  Suns   surrendering
   smoothly-sailing    stars,   supposing defeats
     similar to   sanguinaries such sweetness
         sings   surreptitiously
.
someplace called  space,  in the sunken word of healing,
   like woodwork inched, thumbed down to the last utterance
    of prayer – someplace called      space,  a hermetic enclosure of sometimes
     words    of   fancy like,    sometimes love, most of  the time   hate,
   convoluted   as amaranth.   in  someplace  called   space  there are a number
   of  things  worth mentioning in enigmatic form.   sometimes   no words
      threaten nuances, and   sometimes  (it does)  silence  (a)  bounteous
        dullness   of (what I perceive to  be  a fabulation of  the word)  sense.

love shakes loose, light;  which twirls  in a cornerless  square often
     dreaming sidereal circle, which rotunds sidewind to such darkness that laps
up    this  sequence:   as  sea takes to  shore,    as   people who move (restlessly,
      tirelessly, senselessly)  through    space.
i can hear a fraternization
  of doors that loutishly slam repeatedly:
just another instance leaping out of reason
   and lunging in on impulse;
wrapped in the heat of leaving, all your words
     scatter on the floor like white, mangled asphodels.

one hairbreadth heave and a cutting glance
  at space and it seemed to have bled carnations
  pried open, dissected, obscured, mutilated by birds.
bags drop like H-bomb. displaced equanimity somewhere
   between blame    and        accurate   silence:
in an instant   i believed   that   I am that sudden   word
       of  reprisal.

    there’s no   getting   even,   still   halves are separately
       wholes   to   themselves,   intact,   further apart,
         breathing and gashing    the   air.
i  arrogantly   imagine
  rain (splayed on the pavement) as something
  too short to ****** with, in plea, so as to say that
genuflecting on a field of budding roses suddenly
blooms wide-eyed skies so brazenly, an aperture that
winks not abruptly to shed tear.

somewhere along the lambaste,
humidity takes form of a nauseating swathe
of demise and immediately, in transit, comes back,
  a cold, haranguing wind – something borrowed,
something ephemeral, something that causes trouble
to the frail gestures of a rose, or a child in consummate siesta,
or simply the sudden intone of a band bursting midway
  through the sullen thoroughfare –
  
    colors seem to intensify, the world inflamed like
a contusion, the wind like a gaff maneuvering the
trees, and I, lost in somnolence, can only remember so much
of the afternoons lost wandering about nothing
when rain has happened and nothing existed before me
   but the braille of seasons and the obsequious  shadow
     swayed by nothing but light’s silent radio; much like heaven
and I, here on Earth,
                          looking out   in     the    rain;
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