the line between dreams
  and wakefulness is          thin,

in Ghanam North.
before me, the landscape rogue without
heat lays naked, ash-lorn-true all around;

cold pure, and air distilled
night keen with its eyes strobe around
  revealing drowned pine.

the wall between the living
   and the dead is              frail.

the diaspora trace through names
  what is retained: vestigial, frightful;
   a stone’s throw at the nearby mosque
  crying in prayer, bellowing through the ashen
     quadrangle, a dazed interlocutor.

moving past things unmoving.
the astragalus feels the slow tumult,
   silence as remnant, trilling,
                                     free, carrying a message,
         *Ta’ala.

It seemed so much as no new and uncommon thing
   that what passes on as only a disappearance,
   is but a temporary postponement of something
   long withheld in feelingfulness, in treason of one’s
  desire or simply, a hand which is there, or kept in a pocket
   scouring for loose change, a hand which, somewhere,
    is known in accurate proprioception: refusing to be held;

  I swim against the current not
     for the water behind your river
     that dreams of fish

   I wake not underneath the bowl
      of moon slated by sensorial howl,
     whose wounds are white like
      a face once held in between palms

  and sleep almost endlessly, together
    with everything that twitches, slewing
  to avoid collision, alliterates to blur meaning,
     sways fervently to addle meeting

until we let loose a sigh, and unfasten ourselves,
   dropping pace and both our eyes meet.

In some odd, conjured up way, I might say under
a lethargic light of a dream, as if a housing roof-beam,
that underneath it (mine, of course, the dream), you are
a carefully placed furniture and around you, children scram
for joviality, passing and crossing the shadows that blot
on the floor, where most of your stagnant life, you have breathed
under me, in the same net of which nothing is cosmically related
in some way or metamorphosis, under me or you so quite new
possibly, consciously aware of each other’s settings and adjustments.

Amorphous, dove-form, on rink;
I was once as free as the wind,

and I consider the day’s unremitting reminder:
bent light – falling flat on my dull skin.

Wryly enough, the mornings are pried open,
remorselessly, like a note discovered obsolete in secret

gaps: why would such unopened unraveling
be secret? A persistent memory?

I gaze by the barricade, children fluttering
almost in flight at the city center’s space,

possibly conjuring themselves up as birds
or words freed – such scene requires several audiences,

whereas adjacently crooked, I stare inanimately,
which requires no spectator, possibly dreaming

a shadow, an old man wiping his reading glass clean,
or the squalor of the heart decanted in the heat of transitories;

acute on the night-watch, I will rejoin them
like old haunts finding new-fangled skin to scar.

you cannot escape poetry.

there’s poetry in the uneven streets of *Salcedo.
just to exhibit, ogle at the preen park
  and watch the ravenous trees write in a treatise:
    only shadows are engraved. gravity, their paperweight.
there’s poetry on the oncoming figure,
  a woman in a pencil skirt, disfiguring herself
to pick up her wallet – she wrote herself in cursive,
    cruising in front of the aperture, a form of C in crescendo,
then jackknifes back to slender posture reaching for the sky,
    arms to sides like armaments poised to strike.
making itself known through whimsical imperatives,
   the wind that bludgeons the trees, and smites the poles:
      written in hieroglyphic – the fall of leaves and the felled
  ash of morning, deepening in its station.
you cannot escape poetry
    whereas, I start remembering you without consolation.
  the sudden onset of your memory thrusts through
       the escarpment following a steep descent towards
           my body, a figurine, without water.
you will die here. and from what has been retained,
      will arrive the inescapable.

Heed tetchy static, roving around McArthur.
I can feel the steady impulse breed flaxen flumine.
   Songs tumble notes as ladies sing blunt-mouthed tune.
You croon with them, mindless of the force that tries
  to break free past the console. Your voice is analogous
     to reticence. I hear nothing, feel everything underneath the lazy glow
of the sign that says Yield plastered to a decrepit signage past the
        posh city buoys of Jupiter. Everything comes to a halt
in the remote red light district. Somewhere behind those thick walls
   that enshroud the fumes of tantric body heat, I can feel the ground
    stop in that disconsolate delineation: morose and encumbered,
    outnumbered by the cognoscenti that filled the streets unwilling
  to give us directions to whereabouts we rarely have knowledge of.
   cigarettes rammed deep within their mouths, masticating the cloud
     of nicotine as though it were tender meat, I hear the radio go
      ballistic past the sign now that reads Exit.

For instance, recall daisies,
or if you have not seen one, so much the better.
Paint me a crass picture and sleep
on the shallow crevasse. Stilt through
the orchard and search there: nothing still.
Even the nothingness is form-fitting, and thus,
your vestigial image of daisies. Mold something
out of the vacuity, and there a retrograde sculpture
will wind back to clay. Cornerstones have your name,
and your name even so, has taciturnly placed stones.

Stones. These tiny bodies that lay, undemanding,
scourged by the rapid passage of a carriage.
I wait there, with them, still thinking of daisies.
I know of a child, cylindrically obtuse, in front of the mirror.
Have you seen yourself in the hazy windows
of the Metro? What do you see? I still see daisies.
Or people with heads of daisies. But remember your
forethought of daisies? They are nothing. I am a beheaded daisy
in the lackadaisical wind of Summer. There is nothing to gain
here but the sadness of cold passing. And the child that I am speaking
of, his name, Magno. Sturdy like the rucksack he’s carrying,
lovelessly trundling altogether with the pipes and the
handrails, almost signaling the alarm without warning.

This uncared-for sultry evening decides to splinter
itself against the masses. Again, the daisies appear to me,
this time, in heady form rogue with peripatetic fragrance.
Magno used to unearth daisies and give them to her
mother when he was stiflingly young – he hustled through
the carefully placed furniture. Whatever happened to him,
I know not. And just like the daisies we have come to know now,
trains that do not belong to anyone, and the daisies too, that go
unheard of and unknown to the behest of the city,
have gone into the subtle beginning of everything
that once started in itself, the form of splendor. Nothing.