I can only summon feelingfulness like the passing of a dove,
postponing its arrival mid-air, somewhere along the tucked
bramble across Poblacion, starting with metaphorical sensibility
or an insensibly bland space to procure wanted meaning.
Girls prefer roses and their bright foreheads diademed with more
flowers, and boys, their chiaroscuro or lack of a color thereof, seems
to be fitting in this maladroit contrast, and so I begin, as always,
with your very vague and caged memory. Your face, the whiteness
of snowcapped alps. Your strut, my slalom in a treacherous course
of words reduced to whisperings, to flutings. Your voice, though nuanced,
flitters with an overtone of arrogance: if sound was clothed, yours would
be flamboyant ermine. And the line in front of you before I, my arbitrary turn,
assimilates into a picturesque form of waiting somewhere in Cubao.
I wanted to smash myself with train-speed towards the metallic turnstile,
which, would then famish me even so, just as much as I wish to be a car crash
somewhere within the outskirts of your town, heavily vandalized by the swill
of squalor hefting itself like the rest of the world conscious of its viscera.
  This is how I start you – like waiting for the sun to emerge by Borobudur,
or the clandestine *** of mildew and grass, a hundredfold of images appear
before me and I cannot choose upon my whims and caprices. Are you a dove?
A spear of Sun? A thunderous crackle of an impending rain? A harlequin?
A moseying cirrus? Or just another by-stander in the crowds where I ultimately
seek your being?
      This answerlessness measures my knowledge of star, and my breath snuffed
out of me while I sigh from exhausted penchants, outweigh dissimilarities and symmetries.
A progeny from all superseding conundrums arises: are you a retrogression of a wave
back to its saltine wound, flailing in brine? Or are you just the vast sea and nothing else
on a fine and lucid day where children skip stones and chant name-callings?
                   I sense the peril in this undertaking, and much to my chagrin, I still
   do not know how to end you.

to hold a photograph in my hand
  and believe what is presented,
  take is at it already is – why not?

if I close my mind’s shuttering eye,
will you be as candid as before?
unrestricted, unsorted from the hullaballoo,

you, freer than what is imagined, closing
in like a bullet from yesterday shot out
of the sky’s contrived clearing –

to hold a photograph in my hand
and tug closer by the mouth of the fringe
as if to pour water on a broken glass,

slithering now, a shadow of moon
at the very dull end of my cup;
you are closer than any rehearsed moment

ready to catch the inner canthus of the eye:
this relentless picture-passing, tense and
fervent, avid like bankiva to air,

water to chrysanthemum: behind thick shrub
of crepuscular, an arboreal locomotion
shatters loose, your frantic figure.

to hold a photograph in my hand
and size it down to the dimensions
of this home – there is potential in this

comparison: flaring out like smoke from
where it infinitely burns, I seek an ache
and hence place a finger to shush,

to hold this photograph in my hand
and confabulate a soft blow to the gut
and feel it realer than any dagger or berretta

held at one’s life-edge: this delusory intimation,
a slipshod work of feeling. to feel it rejoin
me somewhere I ought to be back again.

Like a pack of dogs lounging
  in minutes, minutes, minutes, eyeing an endless treacle.
it’s worth the shot.
     what is?

I heard he went into a crash,
    and that Rey went into the deep blue dreaming of
    fins and fish – that *******. Brenn was up in the hills.
it’s a wonderful day to fill this space with the electric frill
               of laughter. Open that Emperador held loose in that
   cheap, slender bottle. That’s worth the stipend, in exchange for
    light – clarity, be it crass, and unsoundly. These ungodly hours
    will form a God, trying to go home, slurring, shaking in his gait,
      hailing a trisikad or a tricycle back to Philomena’s arms.
  it was a magnificent day – you know it is. The squalid canals
     are filled with the ******* under the care of a tyrant.
        Jon looks like he’s cut up for matrimony. We jeer and give out
  no jell so as to ridicule him into chaining himself to a passing.
       Empyrean is the mood now: all primed for the blackened chapel’s chase
  down the pews towards recognizing the smallest children inside ourselves.
     This moment is far from over. Like a skipping Betamax. A gramophone
        clamped in the kinked note lost somewhere in the sound byte,
  try this matrix for the forgotten. Tomorrow we will curse ourselves
      for the proud challenge, rivaling ourselves in the process.

    Like dogs in heat. Like dogs aching to ****. Like dogs
      garroted by the selfish hands of the neighbor. Like old bones
                 sleeping in troves we have forgotten.

Staccato-***. Can you feel the damnation in the
    trickling water of minutes?  This fragment considers
   revising but in the next act, I will turn you into a miracle:
        a cloud of a sigh into rarefied air, and that is all.
   The ******* of women hang in trees. Consider this statement
     a ruthless compunction. Flesh in the market, I haggle prices
         with the butcher. I’ll take one in exchange for a love
   christened with portent, I gave it no unction – fresh as a fruit’s glaze
      in spring, or the crunch of dew somewhere along Baguio in the morning,
            intestinal roads frothing with excess of fog. Consider trees
   in akimbo past your sweltering window – the panes in feverish heat,
        what are you to do but splash water? Bathe. *****. Sully.
            We have no inertia in this feetless adagio. Wind is sandpaper.
  Pain is tactile. I am a ******, paving the way, crucified on no longitude-latitude.

Spritzed me with rain, this morning.
   Rooftops unravel inner coating like old scabs
   to wounds. Quiescent mercy of the Sun
   bleared behind curtains of cumulus. There is a far
   more in-depth correlation between an insurmountable
  ex-facto and the fruition of affront:
           something a sutured lip unwraps, a sotto voce.

                                                          ­    Murmuring murmurings,
       tousled the leaves to a zither like salad on a depthless bowl:
    a coarse susurrus unattainable through lip-reading: tongue’s the
   scythe and the message that rummages athwart, something
                                 that rushes in the blood, a scrape on the sinew
                 as I coil in pain like a thing in womb revealing its fetal nature.
                              something that speaks for another one – ventriloquism
                       in its keenest sense,        speak for me, you, both of us lost
                                in frenzied translation.

Thorns. It was all thorns, this thing of a hand, making its way,
swirling across the small of my back. We are here again. In this
working of the way, trying to make some sense out of our
elicited absurdity; Names. We are both made of them.
Some take a toll in our bodies and mostly turn themselves,
a parting wave, or a hinge that does not work – closes all stalls,
the thumping on the walls, and then some indifferent silence
penetrates the two of us: aberration. We are here again, trapped
inside this console. Our tabulated quotients do not rear the best
of our equations. Now there is distance in such short space that could
hold no less than a matchflame, or a little hummingbird, prying open,
the leaf that turns with us in the ground. The rapture of freedom
does not enclose me. Like a shuddering blade of grass bowing down
to the perpetrating rain, I am within arm’s reach with the stones that
refuse to give out answers. We have burned the bramble. Our buds,
of no use. The wind blows, and that is it. No solace. Taking time
to sojourn deep into something we both know as a standstill,
a petrified tree at the bend of the road, or this  undeniable thing
                  that asks for a different name: love,      something torn.