Shadow as proof of memory: the indistinct light spilling on the tablework together with smears of water. The smell of hair on his skin now is engraved as lesson. At the tip of her tongue is strange wonder. Said this inner life when it starts to crumble, you are witnessed in the soar. Bedraggled through the ***** of the street, a hand, or a vestige.

Her bony prominences of hand kneaded to retain as memory – to be swallowed by the full procession after; stroke as compromise: as if mapping all out. This is not how it should happen. It would happen when a safe distance is maintained by two bodies: the other sleuthing, the other moving in finite directions. An end will be revelry.

– took whatever it was that cannot be contained by the body. Remember first when you took the dive
     into the water, as if never to return again, together with silent fish and errant current.
                                Underneath the blue, light still casts shadow in interstices. Conveying weight
     in water – your mouth as conduit, my body as land for the till and clearing. Or my longing. Or a soon to be discovered ambiguity. Skimming through your moving imperatives, telling me you cannot
               commit to quantum movements. That in that event, the world will throw you
syncopated images, that it will give rise to your hiding altitude and lob you to vertigo.

Detachment as question. They must run. They must remain fugitives – to be unseen by the rest, and only themselves know their seams, symmetries, contours even in absences. Even the sky now is engorged with cirrus. Soon, like half-truth, or wildfire brash against green, the pallor will deface the atmosphere and give it unction of rain. Must they be reminded that they should run.
                               But you are in a city, and it is impossible to not be thrown out of line by another     figure. Names will be given. Directories will be solicited. Voice necessary to halve
                    this blatant quiet. And then to remind you of your sudden place, they will build a map
or a bridge with their arms outstretched into the sky, looking at you with life brimming through
      their eyes – the smoke of your departure once again curling in its fetal nature
       against their brows. Everything you do and undo is a forecast of some liminal finality,
  as if all of this is birthed by the same oblivion – and that all forgetfulness feels that same in different
          cities that may or may not know your name. And that in changing season, there will
always be
        a hand that will be held even in its tiniest detail – all of the shadows once
                      cast by your small body drunk in its proud altitude – we both
know   whose hand I am    thinking of

stretching to length of gallows
under faint light of moon.
the dead buries the living.

a thing is not a thing in itself
as it denotes nothing.
like a peripatetic iamb inscribed

persisting in drivel. flowers her face
this evening. pillars her arms,
  i do not have a wife.

i do not have a love undressed
as i examine a pool of shadow
in the plenary recess of silence.

the dead buries the living
within the blue-headed noon;
fascist birds bellow over haciendas,

tuba from the dustwell, from the orchard
decorated with blood. it rings for me
a guttural voice: hustling down

the avenue of the dead. better the alternative,
the guillotine, the small beginning of rage
through the thickness of air.

a marauder sleuths as the living keep
on keeping on, as the dead resign
 a hindrance under dissonant skies.

she is not with me as all the others are.
they have passed on expired limitations;
a flash of lighting at the back

of startled hills. rivers shake cool waters
 down my sleeve and i sleep -- soon fields
will be nasal with dew and the children

will have their place in heaven. the damp
landscape will adhere to stucco, fashioned
to cerements on corpses reeking, rising

to altitudes where some birds
in spring soar, left thriving in smog
as i bid you good night, farewell.

Are names telling of something?
When you were young, you were taught to name shapes,
    count figures with your tiny, slender fingers,
      read text like creed, memorize facts like incantations
so that when it is time that you are already raw
     and machinated into the fullness of your body,

you are ready. Ready like the gull darting
            into the deep blue to filch the marine.
  Ready like artillery to fray.
                       Ready like genuflected children
    in contrition – left the peccadillo aloft, canopied
         by a thumbed down word of prayer;

Are names telling of something?
       What do they delineate? A sense of ownership?
A demystification? What machine does
               it pledge allegiance to? Sage of old?
   A frantic fretting of sensibilities? Erudition, or at the very least, obscurantism?

If we leave a thing without a name, what will
     that thing be?

It cannot be held – to what extent?
It cannot be owned – for what reason?
It cannot be classified – for what? to saturate it with comprehension
      to ensure a fate underneath a conceptualized bent
               of attestation and abomination?

         If I left you without a name and only held you in my hands like
  a thing waiting to be used, to be fondled,

            what will you make out of it? Will you darkle and then dissipate
in the thinnest air? Or will you remain? Are names exacted so that

                  when a thing leaves the body, when an abstraction leaves a moment,
there is a device we can use to drone it into coming back? So that we know
                 that in addressing it, there is a sure claim that it will move back
      and retrace tractable errors? So that in the aftermath,

                                we are certain of the weight it casts upon our sorry and aching
  bodies that refuse to make love? So that there will be words to be written
                   and voices to be launched in form of song

                 with identities assured to match the thirst?

      Why does this deserve a name? Why are these hands undeserving
                   of territories? Why is there dissent when there is desire?

   The answer lies in the silence of every passing day famished by
        evidence: this thing that has no name will remain

                  as punishment for being – so that when it is time to
    prosecute, there will be no
                                        firm basis for eulogies.

We have this peculiar practice, both of us. We partake in the delight of nothing.
We are two walls being vandalized. And then we are the same walls being photographed
by onlookers. And we become the complicated eye of the strangers. We become the beauty
they try to subscribe to in strange calligraphies, bent caricatures, and flagrant peripatetics.
  We have the most outlandish of penchants, especially when nothing happens while
            everything happens. Forget the sidereal zeroes of this equation. We are one
  unanswerable phenomenon tractioned by a willing cohesion. Put into mouth what fingers
    cannot do. The one in pursuit is divided by blame and the other a fugitive.
              Mind takes space when absence does its duty. There is ease in accepting
  that a body impaled in a moment may bear no gravity.
                                                                             We have disparaging repetitions.
   We invest in invented lives. We know not much from here but we know
                      the end it tries to exact in itself. The silence teems in that probability:
   all static, intrinsic, and jarring. We both know a fine day when it happens.
                         Lurking sounds of hermetic space brought to life by informed choices.
                Clinking of bottles and the silver of fish on the platter. A book stolen
from a place where everything is organized – strangely enough, the disarray people
          are capable of with their hands is not preempted
                        by a custodian. We have godless moments. Say for example, this body
   houses a river and on its flaxen waters we have already let go of everything.
                 Soft waters gnaw flesh and shadow off immediate impulses.
                                 We have bizarre practices, both of us, separate.
      Desire is dispersal. Weathering the diaspora is grace.
              We both are gilded by attendance, and in rooms fat with people we are
                                marauders of space together with them – our lives so unobstructed,
            free, and proliferating. Why can’t we house ourselves? Why can’t we cling
                 like ivy to walls of stone, melancholy to walls of blood?
                                          We have this peculiar practice, both of us. Separate. No warnings,
   no conveyed messages, no alarms. To be unmoved in moving, to be moving
                           in stasis.

Dramaturgy

1

I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.

It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.

2

Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.

3

Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.

4

Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.

5

He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.

6

They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake.  A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.

7

Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for

describe this moment by not only using one
   word – one word used is often times crippling, scarring at that,
when all else revels in the multiplicity; even one strange moment
can be duplicated. the allure different, but still enthralling.
  except you are, when one word was hurled. I have all of this
in varying amplitudes. you will take them all like a gaping hole
   in the mouth of the darkest night and overdose in light, you slung
at such reachable height yet gloating in air like you are your own travesty
       deciphered. face as taunt. hands as feat. limbs
their steady bridges.    the guise of your face, a counterbalance. supple voice,
a trembling scenario of infinitude. i hear this is a way to
       avoid hysteria, to identify

all things as nameless, shapeless if possible. only viciously imagined
    form, contoured into the vacancy denied. this is a way to mitigate
                        demands. to keep a thing from identifying itself
so when  it   comes that   these things start unmooring themselves,
                    they will not administer their potencies. so that when they come back,
  you will keep mum like white of camphor, or the black of a hilt,
        the blue of the sky – something that cannot be perforated.
    so that when they come back, the return will never carry
            their attars, that pivotal minute will never fluctuate into an hour
     of  density, so that their namelessness
                         will be easily dismissed as the expected howl of a dog
   in the middle of the already fractured night, or a cat’s enigmatic drone
                       in its concentration. So that this thing

will remain  to have no name and that when
                        it encounters itself in the presence of itself,
     the absence will be clear and the finding,
                                  a release.

one idle hand slides through the balustrade
in a hurry

my life quickening
shattering beneath the earthen ground of

this tower in this stucco-perfect day
in this wondrous moon suffused

by my dissent. it is all anticipation
and warning, all suspicion, this one

that has no name. say when space happens
a body in a body ****** in the aqueous hand,
and dreams of fish,

say this space once marred now
occupied by us, or you, say you are not to be
mistaken for my being and simply
for absence to happen

you must sway, dartle into this thick
array of contests and then

in a sharp stab of air, bleeding,
quicker than the drying of streets in April,
space will happen.