with what you had in your hands was simply

an ellipsis to emptiness. Hands can only carry
                very little weight.

and to have been caught in a virulent string
   of your Decembering noontime air – was it,

just birds spry and singing or was it
a wreathe of girls surrounding the *****

back to how it was to create light out
   of primitive engines?

once it capitalizes, we are caught in this
small circle. often retained, the detritus of

such duel: once ripples are May and
  initialed the reprise of springtime,

yet here we are only tropics, and cancer,
   and the heat is too much as to bear

charge, your tired, sleuthing dog Django.
   rasp for the lift, was it before the collapse

when both a yawn and a dance trembled
into   /stillness/

ano pa nga ba ang tangan     ng haraya
kundi ang langitngit ng katahimikan,

na sa isang sulok lamang ay mahahawakan hindi
ang puso: sa isang iglap, pagsasatubig.

puspos ng liwanag ang lupa. Muling pagtatangkilik
sa sukal ng dilim.

hindi alam ng hangin ang pangako ng paghilom.
hindi banaag ng kahapon ang bukas.
pipikit na lamang ba’t walang pagtangis,

na sa dulo man ay marapatin, kung tayo’y papel,
     ay mapupunit na lamang
ba sa mga kuko ng marupok na sandali?

that moves from its mooring: it was from interstice
          to intersection somewhere in Poblacion.
          I was once there, looking for loose change beside
          the market. Quickly I began as though an impression
          was made past the kiosks dense with the matrimony
          of the tabloids and print: its dearth on the streets
          of Plaridel. Mud caked at the grey backs of gutters,
          a spectacle
                                              of leaves on the ground like deft
          hands place them there for empires.

         the first that I touched: wind,
         last: your face, wind was it only that you and I were
                          never off-tangent, always, minus the blindfold,
             seeking endlessly as though things refuse to be found,
              pulsing in the heat of hiding grace.

      
          and goes back to its source: something too splayed for science,
          only too easy with a child’s fancy – chauffeurs playing checkers,
          crossing each other out within conjunctions – much you or I,
          our weights syndetic and our weightlessness, imagined – as if phrasings
          loose like waters from the spigot left open: mother arrives, haranguing.
                       like how it was simple for the wind to remind us fit to this
                 meet constantly receiving your incidence, and my place stilled
                to familiar topographies.

          a window is left open, with its hands in the terminal of silence
                holding light like obdurate stone; the surrender registers
                with grievous art, you curved like a bent question mark,
           or a swollen oblation borrowing its sheen from the ****
                    of bobbing beacons – the candid Manilascape you kept on
                           fevering for              like an open sentence

               only to find its birth.

this tired militia of existence.
the burlesque jeepney stallions
   its metal anatomy. its belch-***,
its slur of alloy clanging like hundreds
  of men for tacks buried deep
    by a cornucopia of strikes –

thus is the heart, a boy in his seventh year
  dragging along a kite;
the soul is a bus ticket torn by the conductor,
  thrown away into Novaliches.

to wish it true, its gliding silk
  of air – it was only beginning

when people meant we are finished,
  we were only just starting

tonight as the night wills it, a boy

   fishes for brine in the shallows of dream
padding the small of his back
with a hunt of green: his equal self.

   the day, loose in the wind, perfect as perfect
   can be,
   yet still not quite, like when mother said
   the light dies, its low wattage in the hour,
   the prize of the candid moment: dimmed. darkled.

my derelict third year in the drone:
a way to assuage what it feels to

function. to breathe mechanical air.
the rambunctious scent of morning appears

ill, confabulated, lysergic at most.
ladies in lithe dresses pose for pressing scenes.

taken photographs held up in loose light.
pelvises unloosening, ****** on the thoroughfares

fishing for trout as men, men as flowers,
lackadaisical graffiti dropping like simian jaw

upon visions of thigh. everything signatures a suture
so precise like a repair of the lip,

or the rapture of birds in impossibly blue skies.
news was that a fortune was coming in,

and I slept within the masses; dreams deliberately
vandalized and fragged.

they said it would be
marvelous. they said it would not ****.

i see a woman
in her 20s. falling subtly, a gingham dress

sexed if not pullulated by flower-heads,
she said it would be darling

my third year in the machine.

still as cold chair,
the sound and the unsound.
the clearing
wanes.

i think of nameless streets
and pry their memories.
when a steady hand reaches
for air, it is an effort to rename things
  their shabby selves. their yearnings
  crumble underneath awnings of a new,
  wounded moon.

   the   light   through
the    room, and the   shadows it pours.
  its working, a quiet punctuation
in  mere sentences   our own  silence,
  shattering at flight's first   thought.
 gravitations   may   be  heavy.
the   height   verily   not   its measure.


transitions   piled  like  old records;
  trailing the monsoon on  our backs,
 the persistence of daylight  and   coffee,
    plodding  in  heat, its vertical crawl -
   this metastatic fall.

i dream of old structures. dreaming
is the product of stasis. a consequence
of movement.

    dreams can only be too real. there is word
 that it thrives where it is assailed.
     an act of the body, conversing the limit.

there is principle, there is mad luck on the streets
 but then again, i have neither one.
i assume the idleness of poles underneath the roof of a cafe in Poblacion
   and wonder where all my poems go,
 the value they impose -- only there's implosion   and not   so much sense
    so i go out to seek tenderly in the night,
 a cheap moon trapped underneath the bottle   of a pilsner
   as i hear one  of   the patrons call out
  my solitude like a ******* on all fours;

one afternoon pursues a following.
  i have wasted my time writing and stopping
 to   watch   stray hounds   pant   and
     ****    on the hot asphalt of Plaridel.
the   papers   retch  at tyrannies.
    hands   for  mechanisms  configured to
  a heady bias of  probabilities.
 the   house   next  to me is  being
     overhauled   and i  imagine  the incredulity
of   things  not their own  meanings.

  a pair of old Chuck Taylors on the bedspread,  a decrepit  bed for making love
    or passing time or  wasting the night away.
somewhere, someone  is  reading my  poems  and  weeping at the  cadence.
   most do not notice -- it was the caprice of things   not mine to  commandeer.
   the sound  of  stone masons hammering
boulders double the  melancholia.
   the deliberate sieving of  sand and  stone
      felt like   sandpaper air.
 the matutinal  sky split into dire condition
    much like  mine: becoming   and unbecoming.

all the   ******* are out in the streets
with ladies wuthering in high strides.
all the priests are in their rendezvous,
killing buddha heads.
the police have silenced the sirens
and behind pairs of old navy blue slacks
   and mobiles covered with dust,
the  captives scream mercy.
all the ATMs drone the pither of metal mouths.
a widow in Bocaue holding a picture
  of the departed.

i look up and see my face in the sky:
  if only i could **** the man and be the man,
fill his shoes with flesh, his movements my emulation, his enigmas my clarity, his day old denims my best dress.


more than beer and cigarettes have done me in and more to myself much no less
   than a cat hit by a speeding bicycle
  somewhere in Padre Faura.

madness hurries like a lover and hands me
   a picture of the moon.

i've got something and that's good enough
  as the police leave the grime of times
   and evict drunks off the streets of Malolos,
  as the priests step into the showers, naked
  and bloodied just like the ordinary man,
  as the cat that was hit
      by   a bicycle
   goes   back   to   the dark
  licking   the   salt  off the wound,
    bone fractured,    still alive on the  hot roof.