1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.

2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?

3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.

4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.

5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
   Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.

6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
    And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.

7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.

8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.

9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.

10  Disappearance.

I. You wrote no manuscripts but somehow, whenever I move to inch myself over the sofa, I can feel your soft blow indent me over the edge of this quiet. The quiet disquiets the quiet – is something you would have said over *******, over lamenting the death of a lamppost outside, over wanting to be stranded underneath the awning of a dilapidated canopy of trees outside. Over the slowdance and the turntable, over Belle and Sebastian.

II. I left the faucet running just in case you were to be awakened by a myoclonic ****. It helps to hear the sound of water gushing as it protrudes calmness. I would have intruded you, but your absence first lifted into the vacuity of rooms unspoken of. I inspected the impressions left on the bed and left the tousled sheets as they were. Questions discerned. Answers disarmed. Somewhere between inquiry and certainty, there is a body hauled right out of the alarming bedazzlement. We were both gutting each other as the light from the television spilled right onto our naked bodies, stuck in a fucklock. And then I got up to the slain body of the morning.

III. I muse you over Wittgenstein – separated by a makeshift bookshelf. I felt a revulsion for slender straps for watches. The face you wore that day was white. Now you’re as pale as a July tapestry.

IV. I bought new venetian blinds today.

V. Somewhere along the steep ***** I heard the machination of an arrival. The dogs were randy outside. It must be you, approaching. I fingered the slats to reveal a little source of Sun. It was the daily paper. I have forgotten all arrivals are the same.

VI. If I were to blueprint this house with my sentiments – we would be sleeping apart. Your bed, of cold metal. Mine, of sandalwood. Erasures last longer than revisions. I know your presence as the familiar clangor of the same instruments you use for preparations are the same ones fondled. Right after the investigation, your immaculate neglect transfers itself into a sly translation of perfume from a day’s work, winnowing my faculties.

VII. I made a blueprint of this house with my sentiments – you somewhere in the outskirts of town, I deep within the suburban. I have a question for balconies I do not want to answer. At what height should be a balcony situated? What if the scrumptious fall is but elevation?  Will the intensity of the Sun pulverize the very fixated shadow on the corner of my parched shoulder? If not, should I take the balcony down?

I wanted to revise the blueprint, but no. Erasures last longer than revision – I dream of cities expunged
when the day ends.

What space allows, presence threshes.
Devotions mean nothing but prattle of the neighbor.
We inveigle them to sleuth us, and now we have their
   word pressed against their neck, like a dagger.

In this weather, I have no excuse for blood.
If words were bodies, then colonies here quench before
vanishing in air, with an exasperated apparatus.

What light swallows, darkness heaves.
Devotion is the hearsay of intuit. Sensing out the farcical writ
as though embossed in flesh, here where lines split
across a sure-footed paper. The **** delimits
a famished movement. Nothing like this abstract,
if not collage.
     I know a hand’s intimate framework. Space knows not
a trifle, and presence quick with finitude.
   Here we expose margins and squint at presumed limits.
   In the deepest midnight before we sleep, we crumble at the
portent of the borrowed heat we are to suffer,

seeking underneath moderate climates, this home.
as in any other home, our feet dragged along corridors.
   wander-wearied, our place within ourselves
    we savor with denial.

A cresting wave then descends
and somewhere, distant bells toll.

It is the twilight of the palabra.
Soon word falls at last
when ripened.

Gild this image and come back
sullied. We have no use for memory.
Your presence less than total.

The mutiny of this calling is the
silent margin dividing the dark – how to awaken
the sleeping when dreams sit still as cold chair
punishes the floorboard?

This is how its ripeness was felt.
Surmounting what remains to be, a fixation
of a parched region. Grazed by the crosswinds
in front of the decrepit hut staring with some
kind of hunger for a visitor.

Failure masqueraded as conquest,
gravity of no gravity is but levitation – or the cost of
listening. No sound will be absolved.

In a short instance when to lean into everything,
the round vicinity of the ear and a plummet of hush
reaping underneath a swollen moon,

It was how it was felt, and began
a refusal worth mentioning. What’s seen by the eye
is nothing the hand cannot reach, say the horde of cirrus.
The intolerable sky tender with silence, afterwards we partake
    that one word still nameless.

Like the audible wane of a train
  outside the dank night,
  or the faces in each carriage
  blurred by the most drenching rain
 the next clear face in the dimming
  fluorescent spillage is the face
  of another. Much has been ruined now.
  What is difficult to understand in farewell?
   The stillness constitutes what I know,
   embellishing the vastness around me.
   Of which spaces here you used to occupy,
   all the others that you have left,
   leading to a possible finding, or an easy trace
   of arbitrary -- it is a blunder to seek terminal finish
   making you less than what was preserved,
   perhaps more than what meets my eye
   in sleep and waking. A dream of some sort.
   The voice breaking when heard, resonates
   with revisions of what transpired, as if to
   always flatten a truth -- some voices do this.

Unless you are here for a reason, your presence
  thrusting and thrusting, what for?
  This thing has no name it does not understand -
   its incompleteness, its sleuth for finality. Maybe
   when a hand is buried with a manifold of many
   others in the fall -- to initiate a conflagration
   is to remember it for the first time.
   All versions of the same absence. If you are here
   for no reason, then what for, what use does the
   body subscribe to?

  What about, say, the abundance of Balete had you
   consciously wearing your shirt inside out so as
   to feel placeness? What now that your hand
   fastens my entrails? There is no multiplying
    feeling into truth. We do not know that the Sun
    through the interstices of leaves is a small child,
    or a swift woman. No other answer but rue
    and rage, across our slanted shadows in the
     dank perimeter. Your eyes finagle to annotate
    the bow of my leg. Or the curvature of moon.
    Anything it has in their own, vicious sights
     grappling the flesh now inflamed; anything they
     will ravish completely and leave drained. A wrinkled body of a log, or a forgotten manuscript.

    These are all answers I have to invent. Intuitive,
    unwise, unsolicited. Somewhere, I had to point
     out the differentiating margin between
      speaking too much and conveying so little,
     and the finite amplitude of silence sensing out
     something in you, about you, and arriving here.
     Why are you here? What are you doing? What must I be when you are not?

he is inside out. no time to catch the thrill
   of a ripe morning
               knifes his way through a thick airport mass
   and captures jet-fuel perfume,
      collar squalid as brawling for yesterday,
      in front of the masses is waltz, music is    threadbare, as if left with no choice,
      extricating the sound and all that will remain
      is silence. no more will move the
           body of you, take this river.

  how do i name this assault?
       by remembering.
  how do i exact my revenge?
      by renaming your terror with something
      i have outgrown. say, a roach on the wall,
    or an intense wind turning trees shearing
       the lull.

  you should have disappeared yesterday,
   yet now back with forms these pleasures
    seize. if i were given a reason to abandon
           everything,
    there will be no assault. there will be no revenge.
        only a separate day celebrated by the vital pulse
    of a moist hour, this day, when everything
       should have fallen in place
         but refused to, rivals through settings,
     and slowly begins a rupture.
 
     you are this assault. sounds draw
     naked in the sequestered silence.
     a pigeon darts. the short bus whirs mechanical
      exhaust. hinges twinge like guillotine.
          it is time to go. it is Saturday.