what now moves  the mouth of her  to speak? giving of  weight, unloosening like  a child from a mother's
  arms and assumes  the back of mirrors. giving
  as in giving way to salt of sea and coming back with
 heaviness of a wave, lapping the abyss is what this ripe blade pushes into her skin when all move
 but stray, foreshortening distance like a bullet unwound from a marvelous catch then
 prides herself dumb from all contention, aching to part twilight are hands, reaching for sibilant days or simply  her once perfume all the world knows.

for when a season shall pass
   and in passing I have gone,
 only to announce have I arrived
      and am here,

this aleatory, the next face waiting --
   whom arrived but is in
  fraction, for whom she is that I will hold
  but is reluctant in her grip

  for my face yet unsure, is sure
  of its coming; hence the volition of fates
  a tight contest:

 for two of us we shall seek ourselves
   in places where we do not know where
   we are going, and as this goes on
   in a circle, we have been far too lost
   and wander-wearied,

  seeking rest in the next embrace
    awaiting.

try to antagonize the not-so-distant
and remember the tonal bent of a father's
rampant voice causing a cataclysm.

in front of the hospital, the moon a blue nun,
parked are the scraps elsewhere but home
under permeable dark. i look into the eyes

of whose visions i own - whose perspectives
borrowed a causation, as in when he clenched
his fist i thought of cigarette stains on my

button-down shirt as we both stumble to
the ground that was our dearth grave. i remember
you in his anger as countenance collective

and my own rebellion. his limping strides to the
automobile approximate the sizable crenelation
of your fingers. now i am brought back to Pasay

where your light is bendable mercy.
this is the face of silence, incited by a meeting
alone, a variegated road unmapped, unnamed.

inadequacy contends what intent commends.
this night demands emesis: the moon no longer
flumine, but xanthous as autumn, or a bell in

leaden cathedrals. the longest journey back
to origin is the first step taken towards a foreign
home punctured by diffident apology.

we were all in waiting for unction, congregated
in the plenary room i have made white with
blunder. our faces pale as backs of moths,

our elegies able to forecast the future,
the climate of the home burdened by tropic,
our keen eye for movement terminal with disgust,

a hand scarred by the Earth we rested upon,
asking heavens, "Why?" Response: rain dividing
cities. i think of then, this film where a man

continuously passes arrondisments, where his
days are measured by softened landmarks pulsing
with blurred faces. it was his case of aberrations.

when it was over, perturbation of vast space
automatic. a relief over the clinch. beatings
sustained over dinner the next evening.

in any other bed, the infantile stance of sleep
a wry mark of confusion. i notice the clock's
stoppage, its arms angular as if death's geometry.

otherwise it was unfeeling of feeling. my mother
forgot the laundry today, now fetid, pressed against
wall torrid upon the afternoon,

left outside to dry together with mutiny of trees.
outside when yourself happens, a conjured image
of bluntness. immutable, fixated, reminiscent

of small statue bought from a surplus in Malolos,
tamed wildeness is sound of a slurred machine
sent to repose as in, gnashing phonemes the

guttural, and the distinguished identity of the
next word draws a line connecting a caricature of
your face, terminally instilled

preserving the imprint including you.

now, I will try to abandon time and space
in this form of truancy.

what is this abandonment trying to measure?
  the abeyance of presence.

what is the measured variable trying
to dissect? the impossibility of absence.

a poem aspires to be something concrete. a poem
   is what is real and imagined in the same context.

I try to invoke Abad -- what is imagined is most
   real.  this shall be its leitmotif.

now, i imagine the horizon as a point

of origin, or a template to some familiar projection,
  or a tagebuch summarized into a fine line
of allegories and denouement.

what this line tries to prove is that

an enjambment is a mimesis.

acknowledge the sublimity of a
  creation. notice that the sequence that will
be promised is diegesis of absence as form
     but not a poem as in a poem that enshrines
lucidity -- but the lack of it.

there is only the photograph of horizon
   as hypothesis of perpetuality. this now

is a subject, a speculative undertaking rearing a
   poem -- writing as preparatory for absence,

finishing a line as pursuit of thesis, gravity of
    its heft as tabulation of emphasis, or
verbosity, which may be telling of meaning or chronology.

a poem that is not a poem,
  But poem as a form of absence

that aspires to be a poem.

what is transpiring now is that i am assuming
   an utterance: utterance as being here,

and perhaps voice as sound of becoming but not finality
   of presence, and sound as disappearance

post-peak. its point-source silence and formation
   of thought, and then a poem is written as

evidence of disappearance in deep and close
   contest with a vision coming from another

audience as an objective supposition or
   reaction that may propel an exchange

but only when silence is entertained does
  silence happen, and so this may be dismissed

as a monologue among dialogues insofar as
    only to pinpoint this arrogant feat:

i may be speaking glossolalia, or in tongues,
  and that i seek no reprieve nor vestige,

all the more response -- intone of voice
   stilling itself in the tense setting

of being gazed upon, glazed with coherence
  of senses from one identity to another say,

you hear me speak as in speaking
as baring sound.
   but now that i have spoken, i have already undone

  the quiet to stir volumes and amplitudes
to attest sound-fade as vital component of absence,

whereas this poem produces ample sound
  if you pay close attention to yourself reading

in the lull form of reading (your
breathing will have intensified here,

your reasoning will have made so much
  noise here) as i continue to whittle

away in form of verse, verse not as poem,
  verseliteration not as occupancy of space,

but all in all, a body of work
that is a visage of movement - or a trace of absence, physics of space and kinesis of departure.

a delineation of a thing that was once
   thriving in threshold accompanied

by its tendency to wane: sound may be an
     analogue of unheard, as sound is impervious
to quietude but quietude conscious of sound
     and its potential,

that quiet coheres to its inclination to consummation,

this completeness so emphatic,
this allegory as
  absence the somatic, axiomatic,

indefatigable machinery of a presage,
   or continuity -- this poem that is not a poem,

but an excess of sound, a body that
   deserves end,  a punctuation.
     verity of this argument in basest form.

this body of work as absence
  and its completeness, volition

of its enigma: is this the end
  of sound or your silence summoned?

to drag it back, its recalcitrant body,
   is form of revision, then possession

of an absence, a recollection that will have granted
   seamless entry and translation

which passes on from its origin to
  a new clause -- to end it here, now and pass

over as readable only in the background that is
   an embellishment of absence amongst

things in exclusive continuity, to have this produced
   in space as empirical of absence,

and to punctuate this, a mystification,
or say, acceptable fabrication,

to read and extricate as acceptance of an absence
   as form: this poem that is not a poem but

only a physicality delimited -- to speculate
and study
as disbelief, and to have done such simply

demystification of its transition.

2002
Dearest Klara,
  hope you enjoy
the poems as you dream to write
      one poem
happy birthday*


There are still many books as though
   parliament. A miscalculation based on coordinates
in a wry scene.

Two bookshelves creating a labyrinth, enough that you
are alike. Juxtaposed to scent are many words
and the day is almost done. Ignore fragments once,
but never overdo. I can outlast moonlight’s procession
into a dark cathedral by the window.

On this side – reason; the other, hesitance.
This is no heist. This is what belongingness refutes.
What willingness bandages. The absence of sentries
  made for easy rapture. You slid your hand into the dusty
fort and in between them, the paperbacks ached.
  “I will do it.” and after that, cursed at the farce.

Slid into your bag – you, surrounded by the tense air
of silence. A dilettante at being a fugitive. What is it that
you stole?
   Your body, elsewhere. Flailing. Failing. There are still
many marvels in the scene, but says precision is key.
Cuts as if contravention. This was as calm as painting a child
  in his early years, the hue of anomaly.

Quiet in amplitudes doles out a mystified sense of completion.
I can hear an ajar mouth unwind a soft humming.
   It was time to go – tomorrow when we rise with no memory,
  it will be all but one and the same fault together with many others,
     as if your face that day and your image now
          compels me the cold of a foreign city. Riddance.

I imagine        you naked
I imagine        you dead in faint recall
I imagine        your hands the gun metal
I imagine        your teeth the fence guarding flesh
I imagine        your perfume, your mother’s wake
I imagine        your strut a dance to J. Alfred Prufrock

I imagine       you singing from each to each
he puts    it like that,   and you have become overwhelmed
      by passivity
             as   in    a salutary
as capitulation
                      as the Earth surrendering to rain.

I imagine        you clothed
I imagine        you alive in the demise of day
I imagine        your hands studded to the hilt with lacquered sorrow
I imagine       your teeth gnawing my skin to suture
I imagine         your tears, the sea in front of your mother’s grave
I imagine        you
          ******* in the silver  head of morning

Falling as recalcitrance of movement – seeks completion – yet the ground
   ballasts.
            There is no path that leads forward as I live backwards.
    There is poetry in the way
              a woman carrying a bilao moves away from the vicinity.
       Sound departs.
I took a deep drag and fell into a thick web
    of smoke, recoiled to fetal nature, into the womb of my unbecoming.

       What seems to contain endlessness: dark.
What punctuates this claim: moonlight.
      In a house that continuously aches,
I am grateful for windows.
                             Night-erased repeatedly, the dance of blades of grass.
       There is more stasis when words flay
                 themselves to pass as something more resolute than there is
     the kinesis of life’s steady abbreviations. We shorten like this,
                             when we curse the destinations upon movement’s mindless
                approval.

We collect ongoing afternoons
                         and cohere to trees. Say falling like you mean it,
     the way we commit to breaking though unwanted, feared.
                 Feel the hands accumulate warmth when propped
  into the sun’s permanent daze – face becomes glare,
                            a day becomes a scar.

This    is  where   I do  not know   what moves   to become fully   stationary.
     Days crumble like this.
   In a poem that is not a poem.
   In a sound that is only sound and not music.
     In a dance that is not life, but stillbirth.
   In notes that are purely rambling, not reportage.
     A voice that champions a fiasco.
                             This is where the   throbbing  afternoon becomes   a part
       of me    that falls   into   a chasm of   a fateful night,
                lassitude    of   debris in  tow,

                                       starting     measures  everywhere  we   left and   returned –