I.* there is no thicker undergrowth than feeling. first to go is reason, everything
    else levitates into something graver than say, one foot deep  in the grave
     and the other somewhere off-tangent like an offbeat adagio zigzagging
      into slammed slalom.

II. the crush of oregano against mortar, and the clasping of a hand. carbon monoxide
      fades into air as youth takes on momentousness. take for instance this once soft
    hand like a breath of cotton in a precipitate noon: once whirling in claustrophobic
      space, this slight inch of feelingfulness is dazed into the span of *Maya windhovering
       somewhere unseen like paramours *******.

III. from the window you can feel the bluster of falsetto disintegrate at its slouched peak,
       and from where you hear it, a dance thwarts itself like a cigarette ember
       convulsing mid-air – that slow, repugnant twitch: that is you, when you first
        broke your silence in thick shrouds of disgust over strobe-lighted simian jaw.

IV. what else is there but to take this sour ocean in front of me and decode something
       the blue always means mellow but the froth of white something the tragic caprice
        of tropic: some nights, they remind me of bodies careening repeatedly; some days
                    they just are, like you, just are, like a riot and only sound, or sleep and only
          reticence, something short of wonder and terse with reply.

V. there is a cluster of harmonies flowering in my mind when the sensurround of din
        starts conflagrations in the ornate dark of ear. my limbs snake in the garden
        of plank, my shin bitten in sharp reiterations – my mind crossing the equinox
         looking for shade, or possible, a parasol underneath the crimson of rain.
           say this is the sky, this dense space when I motion both hands into a length
       not an inch could ever devour. suddenly a boy made out of a man, flustered
        in jangled arpeggios and unapologetic thought like a letter of debt opened,
         paying no heed the mind and only what the body dictates: a smash on the
    escritoire or vigorously scratching scalp, reopening scabs and watching
                old blood ooze dry like a lightweight webbed impression
  of       a    dreamy legato.

VI. the night deepens with the warmth of its black upholstery – we do not know
      when to stop and bid for home. last to go is will of force and first to arrive
     in the bleakness like a recalcitrant thought often straying outside with the
       strut of a yuppie, fervor of old haunt. i conjure an image over the cold chair,
    its steel framework thighs untouched, its four decrepit legs the foundation
       of something that refuses to admit its weakness. the very base of what would
   catch the anchorage of my gravity, the very heart of all, and the flattened back
      with a vandal that says “Soleil was here.” the liver shattering in the trance
                    of everything.

VII. night is stupor. i am the lilt of words from a rambunctious machine.         there seems to be an afterthought that separates
                       a concept of vastness and the tactility of narrow ether.
        a word is uttered in extremis - something heaven eschews
                with its bright, arrogant face.

The immediacy of the ambulance turned speech into stone,
  and the gyratory red and blue which is still unknown to me
  grips with bewilderment.

Passing your decrepit home in Santolan. The slovenly lawn
that welcomes an oncoming figure, sometimes I.

The love will stay there,
deep into its sepulcher – fingers of grass sprawl in arbitraries;
answers unknown to ourselves, questions leaving
themselves carefully placed in irrefragable order,

the brooding future that strides a fugitive,
straining our place – the warmth of its absence
oblivious to us like a pretend fireside casting shadows, aslant,
on any figure trivial to us.

we begin to shiver in the blue of night, darkening around us.
the moss-grown silence securing its station somewhere unseen,
but felt,

like this individual morning.

the car outside. you in your plain clothes;
I solemnize over this slow hill of flesh
when you lay down after the dredge.

it was your old automobile. somewhere in the
console, piping in the shell of night, your once
swift-footed self.

it was for Mico, you said.

this thing of time that was once early.
you in your white shirt with blotches of
yellow, like some aureole-bitten lip of bougainvillea.

some cold smitten flitter peering out
of the window of your gray head, your sage,
prattling about its conscious footing, this automobile.

are we but disputes and all that sense,
eluding us? somewhere in Malolos, the fatigued
machinery with its lilting rotor

modulates a once wild memory:
you, still in your white shirt. two bodies
drained of inertia – otherwise occupying song and silence,

our volition nothing but jarring (unmindful of its scathing dialect),
our terms to ourselves fabulated, the savannah drunk
in dappled light that evening – in front of the hospital,
mum as a nurse.

you pass on the keys to him,
learning new language. by the thousand strophes
of this lurching sea with its plodding delay,

your once bright bone, quickening in slow delight
now, as his face obscures yours with wonderment,
this evening – both of you in your denims,
   all three of us in a huddle stamped
  with heavy understanding.

the world around me, in the world of men
   studded to the hilt with green (scorches silence, the time-corroded
     hands that mean to caress) – it is because in birdflight and bird-knowledge
I am with them.

    their beaks excite, the flair in their physiognomy retain importance,
  it is    in   their   vague   meters,   the measure of    roads  remain
    undefined.   the world  around me,   in the world    of men
        flayed    to the    bone    with the   color     of     green
  (its   congenital     quiet,    its    growth   like  the   sea,   a mound  of
          island-woven  muses rising    like   caryatids )

   in    such   loftiness   I  can   endure
God’s    hand   through    the    rind   of   the limit   testing
    pain’s   territories   with    His   bare   word;

the   world around me,   in the midst of  all men,
    perished in  the   voyage  heeding   His   footfall  outside,
smiling tenderly     proved   through   incredulity,   His    masterfulness,
  and  I,    in the   world   of   men,   have ceased   with  birds.

Light unloosens itself. Space slackens.
A figure of a shadow I have conjured before
anonymous eyes. Lapping up the waiflike bleakness
of their elliptical faces.

                               I must teach the trees to let go
of autumn, and relegate spryness to the hearth
of cold without merit, this slow, claiming mutiny
with its face-oval peering through windows multiplying
lovelessly, a crunch of a leaf, suchlike, flourishing
in peerless company. Before me, the sound of footfall
preparing to make sense, a rotunda of bell – that movement
of somebody done for, so ****** the scald welt of ******,
the belch of the world like a pore clearing its squalor.
Or the toppled verdigris of gull.

    Autumn’s greater extension, the abeyance, smilingly
a facsimile of crowds – its roads adorned with laburnum
singeing through the morning’s cauldron, a waft of bald terrain
inflamed, drawing with absence
      a crippled drip of rain back into the world’s dim address.

We have now become this bleached wall exposed
to graffiti; you and I, lost in a vector dwindling somewhere
between flight and ground-woven footing.
Like only such delicate secret opens to tongued up
and thighed upon space – only nightscapes the air dares elope with,
but isn’t that what absence hands over, a roughed up winding
moonlight suspended in crunched ether, or something else
that bade sibilance of speech rammed in preterit?
A blossoming descends in Maytime, besmirched with dreams
collapsing on obelisks. The moment in which I thought you
to be devouring space, nurturing a whelm of heat squalled and
intent, fanning a spleen of intimation, riveting a conflagration.
Else it was before, sulking in the finagling quiet: truths hauled
out and carved to foists,
      much room it was to differ a voice and fragment message,
      staring at this world the first time and the last – all at once
      in that rampaging instance, the rest of the world pinned down
                                                        befo­re me.

There is an inch of sleight in this house – this cold chair,
a burst of cologne clogging a 20 minute stride. The stringent
air tonight blusters deeper than gashing sheens.

The little dryad of dew outside and the cadenza of frogs
after lambaste of rain. Whenever you sing, your voice
communes an immense pain, something unconscious of its
gravity, something that levitates back to momentary ululations

swelling in the grime of times and heady chances. A long stretch
of a day submerged in silence resembling a howl underwater.

There will be many sorrows and they will take form of doves,
assume the skin of the populace. They will come in a volume of
names pressing the linoleumed musk the way the body turns
maneuvering over the saltine, the mattress, juxtaposed to a lover,

a brusque aroma of coffee brushing away the calm demeanor
of the morning, dragging along the weight of its lassitude
towards the sprays of fern opening a dense ornate of forget,

you, in all places that pulse without recall – an obtuse
fish feeling its life in a surge of blue, overtime, finally knowing
    what it means *to sing and drone only words.