I fear    of becoming an animal to pin within the
       forest of your silence yet a manifest

   If I said once your accidental burden

       was my presence, which cage shall I occupy?
             To accept that  being   is   sure custody.,
To the inundated moon to a full that was only light
    when everything shook within the height of absence,
To have you a rumple on the thousand-fleeting foliage
     and have me wronged as the green is cut from the

throat of dew-soaked grass

                           a    mistake.  Now the fear of

you almost peering through the shaded hall like a fugitive
waiting for  an open space interfuses

                 with my burden. The geometry of our
   setting   has become the    shape of ruin:
      a descent. A path that arrows
                 to a consistent departure. A trajectory
    lost midway,     murdering        the forest.

Whose dreary face now becomes warmth – an ash turning
  into a single drop of water

I love and I have – and I know that when she looks
  she does not. Nothing moves the bird of her dawn but

her. Proletariats sing of steel in the night and I deaden
   within their homes. Whose dreary face now becomes

the steady light on the porch – a thigh, or a river, turning
   into a single gasp of song.

I love and I have – and I know that when she sings
   she does not. Her silence moves the moon deep within

its womb and annuls. Each moment in her shoes, she is absent,
   and I taste the pale death of her precise waist,

her sharp tongue having me curved when enough was said
  when empty was sure. I know whose face I am talking to,

but knows not what day has escaped me. The possible:
to bring her so small in my hand, and invent her this fate,

to be unclenching like water and virile like stone. I know
  the singular act of her likeness is born out of my lack:

there is a spring-clean image traipsing the water. I must chase
  where it streams, and its origins not my own.

The city borders us two as we are demanded by the daily:
  the smell of a home shoals me a satiny sob. Still the marvelous

sky, a knife, if not referring to me, the cut lily that is the Sun.
  Whose dreary face now becomes a store,

commerce, becomes the silver of hills, becomes the gray assault
  of an old cathedral, becomes the surety of a transaction

and then becomes wind chiming through cities. Becomes inquiry
  between I love and I have – becomes dearth and is proud.

   Nothing will stop the train arriving: when thirsty for a glimpse
  like mine a fountain or a singular wave from an opened window,

she passes – and does not look for me.

the   upcoming  word  for word
         learning    the  dissonance
         overemphasized –    the inventive   wrongness

to   settle   for   what has
   decomposed,    what has   nearly   drowned

a dream  with the  quickest  sense of   being

   obliterated   upon taking   it   to   the   shorelines

and now   to   materialize
      as   the   body   starved for,   following the   coil
of its   womb

       to   whatever place   it   has   strayed upon

in   the   world  that  is   a   cage
      where   breathing  are we of   clay.

I want to hurt a known face: this imperative,
drab like old habits refusing to sway. The countenance is obscured:

   no longer does the face tell me to withdraw. All the more, the static of it,
from the outset, diminishes to movement and from there, swings by,

   an alternate setting: in all of this, faces were just as a swell sheen from
the borrowed. This is normal, you take it as    sound takes, assumes form or music

   of likened endings.  I want to hurt a known face.

I want to mount it from the nape and stab it sharp with this

     imperative. I want the hollow to echo the urgency of it,     I want the blood to ripple
and then wave-like, undulate to – as we have been caught, addled by

      the sea we call as:   for the finite yet deemed lasting.

             Or   when I see you as   drawn from a line – a truth
halved that  was your  finest set,  a reality   settled     in   its   terminal

    letting out the  longest breath  /  a   detritus   /  a quiet  fate we  call

      away   /   trying    to   locate

    else you     were just    a   flutter.   A thinning   gesture.

binuwag ng sariling bigat
uusal ng dasal na ang tanging hiling ay pumanaw.

Hindi ito ang buhay at hindi ito
ang pamumuhay.

Kung dito sa lupa ay aangat, anong wika
ang isasalin sa laman kung pagal na?

     Turuan mo akong dumaan nang walang
iniiwanang labi kundi misteryo na inimbak

sa pagtiwalag sa bawat sandali. Sa ilalim ng
bawat tulay na ginagawa ng winiwikang salita

ay isang kontrata: hindi nang luluha pa
  at kung pumikit ay panibagong mundo ang

tatambad. Sasalubungin ito sa pamamagitan ng
isang paanyaya at kung makitang muli ay pakakawalan

ang kapit sa sarili. Tatantusan ang bawat kinauupuan
at itatala ang mga natutunan. Paham ang liham ng pagtitipon

at kung hindi sinipot ay sadyang isang malaking kakulangan.
Walang ibang transaksyon kundi ang palitan ng salitang

maghuhugis-kamay, hahaplos sa bawat tigib na parte,
ililikas ang katawang hapo sa paulit-ulit na katanungan

nang pagiging mortal at lalakipan nang panibagong saysay.
Umigkas palayo at bagtasin ang bagong mundo:

ang tao kung ilalaan sa tao at pakikinggan ay bubuong muli
  ng katiyakang panandalian sa payak na panahon:

hanggat tayo’y naglalakad pasulong, tayo’y gagawa’t gagawa
     ng tulay.

You are at it again, pretty sure, this time, challenging a wave, or a tension in space when from a vertical, trying to reach ground safe. You always were.

In deep collision of structures, the agent here is something that stops you from stoppage. You go, lessening the trauma, impelled by a similar origin to overwhelm and afterwards leave famished. As long as there is enough moving ground for you in a subtle field effect, it is very sure you will last longer than any rain in this moderate climate. I can imagine all the broken twigs you stepped on, making a dull orchestra out of. Your day-tired wander-wearied jacket after, and all the dust that remained within the sole of your boot when the Earth trembled – kept you still within the splintering of finite objects.

You are at it again, heeding the call of the world, assuming a shape of a moment you said you had in your hands, small enough to fit a chamber of a gun, and when fired, cuts through, is deep, meeting an attempt to touch secret parts but didn’t, only scored, and when realized,

taken as document within conversations.

How in that timed instant all was brown: I look at my hand, the world outside the lens, the river, town when after April then crossing May, how everything went brindled, cut, and broken – housed in that fragmentation are so many lives: I, awash in the many a breaking and passing of things. You remember her weight to doubt and begin she was not there, for whose security she was being filmed but my own sake, from all the appearances the distance switched to fog as I remain in immense debt to time from the then and now which made no difference, and how I associate all the hollow to a hue I fear not black, but brown in this setting – how to straighten when found in the orientation bent already to begin with and is deadened by a refusal, how once again, in the hollow of, are unexpected blurs of your own skin color echoing outside then in, in which all the trembling made you sure-footed, changed nothing in you, insult I took when I see your laughter or in lotus positions there is something you ought to give me, but didn’t.