mata ang may bitbit ng
dagitab ng bawat sandali

at waring mga kamay na aba,
ang karagatan na may kalong na katahimikan;
sinusuri ng ilaw ang lahat,
mga palad na nagdadaop.
ang halakhak sa sukal ng gabi.
ang batong binabalinguyngoy sa lalim
ng bawat pag-tingin

itong mga kamay
tanaw ng mata


ang alaala

the droning image before me,
a wetted silhouette hushed in loincloth.

all are tiny currents with their immediacy;
confound careless grace for warmbound sweat
of the swollen world in the heat of an uncollected moment.

dartle I may in delight of frenzy, cold air nibbling
at my feet. river runs pale in the narrow grey-faced street.
knee-deep into the water of no rain, simply a dream

of wide hours. mind you in the **** of minutes
and fine-tune this machine infected with body english;
basking in the flood of midnight – this swirling fish

in the permeable navy: a nautical breath tender in its rasp;
a trifle on the things and their undulations. remember you
in that stolen night, face to face with walls their blackened meanings

faces pining away in transit – if the plenitude of voices
in the station would merge and form a whole new world,
are we to drown in the sound and emerge mute with wonder?

I squint at the city across the balustrade, its sibilant air
of disgust – I recognize mooned tapestries and see myself
as one of the lights, the appropriate tension of hands that

have    their own silences held to themselves
like how I ***** you in light.

I take this benign hour, simply disappearance,
before you – you have allowed entry uncompromising
as rain would, a cold envelope, or the waft of foliage

the impenetrable silence persisting within stones unturned
and trees impaled to the Earth like fate would decree
a sudden glint of circumstance.

the throbbing room of grace that folds a hundred measures
realizing it was easier to say nothing

and witness the rest of you flicker.

the rest of the lights before you
slid into erasures. we have become
everything the city is in its precocity;

from the wind that gallops, the dog
howling into a crossfade, even underneath
the already dead lampposts that give

in to the velocity of such departure,
a divisible line. a border I cannot cross.
I dip my body into the thick dark

and become bendable light through
the crevice of doors. the gnawing silence,
your leitmotif. something the wind is still

all beautiful things passing and I become
nothing more but a dank memory in the muck
of forgetting – whatever it was, that I conversed with,

stars their dereliction, all across the flagrant void,
I am beating with more life than ever,
dancing around your leftover moon.

affixed there, its insignia of silence,
   the river-memory of bleak stone
   in waters raging

all at the vandal of the afternoon.
  running dog's the swelter, a salvage
   of iron in heat. the revolution's an image
  of the child in all of dogdom

when anger breaks loose a fettered dove
   here, or the crisp agony of bannerets
   shoving a name worthy of forget:
   bawling enigma from here to there

all the tension of wires, umbrella-heads
   are people, drowned in lambanog.
 our mirage drunk somewhere in intestinal
   roads flushed with the swill of bile --
 moon's the face of ******, stars
    their ****** patrons. squall of wind's
  the pernicious call of morning starting
   washlines, groping dry,

   an unpossessing pale ******. somewhere
 in Quiapo, someone's a Jesus-monger, ****
         of the Magdalena, or
    an inverted crucifix treading its way
   past hills without geometric memory.

  mine's the next station, yours too,
  thumbed by a tired machine: this etcetera
      of coffins squinting at their faces.

he wipes his glass clean
she wipes his glass clean
his  glass   hers
  to see    in
       the fold of   her   being
she   sees   to it  all clearing;

  and things to fulmination
committing a steady ******   into
   the   silence, this   afternoon

I think to   myself

   wardrobes  tossed
hers,      somewhere there,   in oblivion
    temporary,   absolute,
  zeroed in, sexed up against   walled-up contention

  our  legs  a tribe
of   hounds,   our   fingers
     feathering  light    through   his   glass
  she    wiped   clean
     with       her      emissions
                           eyes    wide   as morning

somewhere by a mountainside,    horses
   ride   into    the Sun
and he   thinks    of  
      repetitive  lapping    of   floundered  waves
to    bite shore
   and she   thinks   herself

           a    verse     punctuated
open    still
           to  
                        revisions

is it too much of an onomatopoeic dissonance that this is synonymous to
   regret dubbed as slouched nirvana. Across the bonfire, there’s volition
   as glare, light as judgment. Why they call her
Luningning, I know not.
      Take excess for jaunts and flesh, and pay no heed to illusions. The mirage
  on the wall is but fire-dance on the bitten lip of true company.
                    heady static pierces pinecone. Soon the moon will sink like **** to ****. Or felled star as tripled glaze of salted lip. Or the ****** of the butterfly.
     Are we here to metamorphose these tiny susurrations into a commune?
                     Dank and stale as ****-laced pavement, the whole world now
    spires in uneven strobes. The last song on the karaoke as memory. The knead
      of temperamental air on the scalp. Take pork rind for bread, intemperance
    as tribute. The night dons its silken robe and shows her pair: two moony eyes
               piercing the noise.