To watch with intent but not desire, his life passed
     him on as he tries to explain which one he
     would take to the afterlife if there is such,
like a convergence at the tip of the horizon or a
     humid evening in Pasay as pyrotechnics scrape
     sky fashioned like acrobats. The breeze he needs
     no longer. And then begins to disquiet the quiet
    with the heavy burden of which he will then forget
    when he starts to move all of a sudden in space,
       capitulating afterlife again if there is such,

 and if everything takes a sojourn into the bleakness, must I remind you that you are all
     variations of the same absence. Remember when
you had your name carved on wood as attendance
    but not for long. You have escaped, locked in the
       arms of a life that you thought was yours but
     still isn't, leashed under the Sun. Bodies pulse
  then fluctuate but not a sign of life. Words function
     more in stillbirth. Never forget, as a dandelion
     hovers and puts a smile on your dreary face,

and a question in search for all available and naked
    answers. Principles undermine caprice. Do not
 adhere. Must I remind you that you are
       someone else apart from who you think you are.
  You have yourself straightened, tucked safely
       like intent, not desire in all its voluminous and
     vehement speeches annotating something unknown
           to the behest of ourselves. If I were a house,
  I am gratified by windows -- your mirage there
       transfixed in a secluded spot, looking out
   brimming with life as curtains oscillate as the
      Earth breathes with you. If I were a house,
   you would ransack everything with a sly mouth
        packed with powerful narrative. How you
   have done over, leaving everything undone,
        moved off-tangent, under impossibly gray skies,
    brindled in prayer. If I were a house,
    
       doors slammed, speculative fabrications sleep
  through evenings and mornings until no difference
   is met -- you meant a word as if it had a lock
       and the key, somewhere cold in the air of
             sleuthing pains making me so, less than
     this and more of a fractured house.

Nothing like this assault.

In here you were gradually
introduced. The keen sense
for identity realized,

the distance that was a sullen
word for madness, a tender
perimeter established.

The calm wind as not-so-distant.
You in your plain clothes this afternoon,
lost in a commute of phases.

This weather schemes to be
your leitmotif.  This is of no
identical ownership but breakage.

In here you were met with constant
delimitation, yet always you are
as you always were, perhaps,

quite unsure of the next face
dislimned past the delicatessen.
The barkeep yesterday wiped the glass

clean as I watched from the edge
of poor furnitures. You, sudden,

of no warning, no clear word
for objects, has objections for marvels
made clear still opaque in the eye of you.

That when you were brought
into the world, I had you coming as
soft blow in the wilderness

hardly tractable, all by yourself
as I witnessed everything, past dead
underfoot, being all necessary

to yourself,  as you always were
in various settings and adjustments.
You were sure of the unsure and I

am in the middle of things
feeling the winding of it all, the breaking,
and the passing.

Nothing like this assault.

i pass on a story to empty barstools and
     cathedrals -- that i will remain as
      inconsolably so

  and ask, shall I be free so as to
      suffer myself?

 admitting i am shaped according
     to your demands,

    where, first there is you and the last
 always the prime of days;

where mapping out or telling a thread
   is inclination to never mind

our place. the need to bury you
   in my own Earth, willing to make you

meet a darkness which you once
   were as if to swallow the entire verity

of common peril. this perish, this drown
    first before displacement, to conceive

the evening within stories you have
    created beginning with a sharp departure

making your silence and abandon final,
   myself less than total.

that when i look at you, i want to burst
    into meaning like stone being taught

to speak, as much like your study as comparatively
    a bluer dawn rising from your feet

you passed me on as someone else, a makeshift freedom underneath an impalpable source,

that i am sick in your densest volumes
    when you speak, all the more when you dont

realize that I am trying to gravitate you
  into something, say to allow me into remembrance

and you, an insistence to function in void.
    that whilst you remember, you forget

   that in the tense moments I am trying to unlearn
you, as if there was only I,

    the city we were both in underneath a senseless moon, and whatever it was that i saw in you

 in such an imperfect night -- taking all your debris,
     the body of all this sliding into reticence

  as detritus, the unflinching weight of yourself
     as time stumbles to shuffle absence.

 strange now as the morning peers through
   the wide aperture, there is only I,

  faced with rivers as transit; when there was once
I moored in place and you have learned

       how to walk, and further away.

Bare-breasted this afternoon facing the Sun
   northward

   there could be more places for heat like this in homes
so shattered, their faces of malaise – a hundred days of gambol
     boys in their sanguine shirts; the myth of sun
                     is truth of soul, or moon

            clear vantage of something – neighbors leaving
radios wheezing in tetchy static,
  dogs panting in dry ***, lawn the verdigris,
                   the marauder in the market, all moving towards

even sounds shorn out of the daily are pure:
           the prattling neighbor again back in the foyer,
  the revolution of an old van and the dismay
                                   of a septuagenarian, the harangue
  of a mother, or somewhere, the marching of
                 soldiers shot dead – sun’s always painting pristine
  the milieu, so we can see now past the papers,
       the truthfulness of atrocities;

there came by you,
        in your full brightness, blotches of sun – untouched
by the heat, you’re passing and passing – in transit, nothing is snatched
    as the neighbors beat through.

From the dream you
were |  emerging from  the
    natal hearth |
you go, shedding from the sound

Change the currents |
   their immediate implications |
surreal to touch, a smile stilled lucid as the eye

Sees more than air the nasal
grass | trying to
           speak to  trees |
connecting inner consolation

   Of both waking up |
to a dream so realized, and |
   sleep’s confabulations no less

Than joy | wordless|
  beside every
                      widowed morning.

timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.

digress from this river that flows into a straight line. the following here
   will be that there is another body waiting at the brink of
      another figure lacking in speech: brook as excursion.

this plaintive leitmotif this afternoon. everything smells
        of old furniture. something this is trying
to preserve wrung out of suspicion, shorn out of air
        and unrest. when I begin saying it, and when I become
what I want to become, I will fold you in a manner

of houses. tell me of the footfall before I plunge.
   outside my home you will be waiting

for a question because you liked the idea that
       askance is the heart of all assertions.
and I will slowly begin to realize that imagination
   as machine, has not failed me.

when moved by the sight of you,
   gradually dissipate.

when halted by the inching step of
   your basis,
take a moment as evidence

and use as ground for furtive contest.

when there is evitable cipher of silence,
     I will phrase gestures into something like a metaphor
would induce

    when there is meaning, there is the moving away
and coming unabashed, pendulum your way into two walls
   as weathered as this house. Your face, a thousand adorations.
                  your heart a truism in the heat
   of naivety in place of a wild embrace.
              your hands this evening, tremulous, nervously seeking
to be one with my measurement: this thing that has nothing to do with me,
      except we have such fondness over allowing sorry states.
that we have use for what we have no use for. This thing,
   a fragment so foreign to me,
                            like hearing my name disintegrate, as if a thing
     of obsolescence, as everything is.