sleep strewn loveliness sink in the
silence of this evanescent twilight —

a dream's citadel superimposed
in high calligraph.
shadow's monolith dancing away
from a mutiny of light. there is a gathering
here unknown,

as the moon fathers these
intimations doubling astonishment in
all limpid signs and praised symbols.
i see now clearly,
the lighthouse belle!
i feel more evidently,
the charring of the clammy water!
i ache more freely
as the stones are put in
equipoised trial - nudely manning the
coasts of dread!

to myself alone i sing
where all fires resurrected - here now,
close to dine the coruscation
of the vertiginous star heady on its way
towards the complete blackness of god's
face trilling behind numeral starscape—

small creatures standing on the
shoulders of dreams
mounting the dwarfed ******* of
mountains and aware of the river's
errant split.

against all light are the many toppled
dreams held together into makeshift amalgam, traced in outward light is
the vestige of the unwatched now
obscenely put into picture like the wind's contrapuntal waltz against the interstices of grass feasting in their moveable glee.

o, dreams and what if they are
curtailed to the bottomless notion
of ground's innocuous stare, to crumble
underneath the feet of the giant whom
i once knelt in front of, ravished, keeping worlds together like a mothering tongue
to day-scarred kindred, these words
   thrown from the gather of clouds
      formless shapes of inimitable rain,
  
   the bells may be out of songs,
  cathedrals too, wrung out of prayers,
    oblivion yawns waiting for its
     next guest— here in the dream
  cradled in the shoulder of it
      unharmed, untouched and only
       deeply feeling for all that is
       retained, walking in the Earth.

how did you ever come to this—
is never the question,
she clinks her glass on the russet tablework and crinkles her nose
onto some cold draft.

some answers i keep to myself:

it is not a very honorable question.
a noble man might ask,
where shall this bring you?
now that you are... this state of being?

the answer i said:
after a while, i have been having
dreams of white parasols
cerements being whacked
into aching scabs on the skin
of an old tendril - that laburnum
where a pebble of raindrop
slides freely!
and i uttered shyly of my place,
i once fell in that speed
and came to no crash.
and now here are words - just words,
pure loneliness, or say, a preordained vacuity waiting to be filled— no,
wait, it isn't! a feral with diurnal eyes
never asleep, always awake!
no, still not very apt.

i have fallen like this, and it was
also i, waiting for myself
at the end of each
line, shattering at word's break.

a memory is brutal.
a chronic paring,
with knife-precision.

        •

a memory is fatal
only when it rains—
all the rooms are gray.

sangkutsa— sana'y kartada nuwebe


      stove -- so much inner blue
            in this gruesomeness,
          still soft is the orifice, maiming
         the speech whirling in warm press;

     hand -- to just blindingly toss out
      in wording it so that then this is true:
       we once had each other in the
        simmer of feelings, leaving
         our shadows crazy-eyed in
     elegiac silence.

      rawness -- boiled to a broth:
        thawing largeness, tipping away in
           and of feeling.

    final stages --- half-done in waiting,
      half-undone in wanting. darkness
       condoles with the aperture of
        clouds twitching to rain tritely
   against the tiled floor. islands of
       wet footmarks make the traverse
           viciously slippery on my way
    to your side of breathing.

     all of it -- hand's gentle breeze,
      salt of lake-eyes, melee of tactical pressures sizing down spots gleamed
       and honeyed with ires. a hiss
  on landscaped neck where a peregrinating perfume sits, feverish with
       desire and nothing else,
    blood boiling, whistling through the pores are the saltine sweat
     poised, almost
                               for the mouth's readiness
          in consummation.

the fabric is still tumescent
with forceful movements. the slight creak of music from a slighter nudge and one can feel the swollen pang of the woodworks. the china in the cupboard drunk in tectonic skirmish. the subtle audiences from the edge of the bend are still in awe from the attentive loosening of flesh and bone and secrets. the moon is brought closer to the veranda where one has peered out of with a cigarette in hand. the clothes pinned to pegs are still dwindling in the heavy air of now nothing but plainly exchanging sights and smiles hanging, breaking to dominant laughter. one had lost count of the stars lost in a nebulous braid of milky hair. a qualitative study of light is reduced to just a mere, struggling study of how things come and go, out of the windowpane and into someone else's doorstep, where sighs amble to reach the calm of beds and the craze of trances. words like these
    are not enough
        still to push you out of bed
            and make breakfast—

these durable vicissitudes —
all enduring
like brightness moving;

i hear the noise of darkness
waking the bone

of this hound,  wayward from home trailing the pursuit of this drone

hearing the stillness nailed in the
day's dormant intone—

wherever you go, i go
vanishing in the marmalade

is the cadence of melodious names
singing renegade

a song, welling up in the dark's basin,
pouring light shattered, flayed.

shine of light through the heavily draped mist

|naked|

i kneel to pick up the crimson and drain
  the thorns of your aches

|naked|

you screamed in your cornerless voice,
    the blue of the ocean peels through
     the foam and then

|naked|

like fish struggling in
      a flush of current, swaying with
  the drowned **** and the derelict
     of ships revealing old shadows

|naked|

as we took a dive in each
    other's depths clad with bravery, now

  |naked|

     to the bone, in fear of our clutched hearts, breaking in the silence,
     looking through the window
     of each other's deliquescent being
      sieving through the world,

|naked|

gravitate in me
   ever so
    s    l     o    w       l        y
  and ineffablycontinuousforgetthehaltandpressonlikeahandtoapageturning­adayandforgettingthenight,

   a featherlight detritus,
       or matutinal climb vertical among
    hills, this is you in most fervent memory:

    snowing now endlessly,
     i slalom through the obstacles
       of you without no clear sight
         of tomorrow.

death arrives to feelingfulness,
    all who wish to forget.
sometimes the way seeking the cold
   from which the sun lifts in its hands
    the heat pressed against
   the mad and the strife-torn heart
   affords nothingness still.

pain is etched in stone— all for no one
    to hear, but he who is frozen beside
    the petrified willow like a brook
   unthawed from the ice of its call.
  at the brink of it watch all birds,
    strings, petals of days and the leap
      without any sign of swelter from
    a day's stridence.

  how do they fit through the seam
    of this river— altogether in riverrun
     and aching, wind is full and stringent,
      with its figure white in moon,
       even whiter with hand-woven quiet.

nariyan ka nanaman,
  naninibasib na tila

kahapon lamang ay bukas—

kapit-puso kitang pakakawalan
kasabay ng pagtila ng ulan,
pagbukadkad ng bulaklak,
pagtawid ng bulalakaw

at pagkatapos ay akin kang babalikan
  sa kung saan ay wala ka na,
  at ng sa gayon ay aking maramdamang
  muli ang itinatangi ng katahimikan:
ang maganda **** mukha,
  ang 'di maikubling init ng iyong bisig,
  ang mga araw na nalulunod sa lalim
   ng iyong dating pagtitig sa akin
   na ngayo'y isa na lamang panaginip
     ng antipára — ramdam ko ang lahat,
  at mayroong distansyang hindi kayang
     isara ng kahit anong pagwawakas

  ng katotohanang alam ko sa pag-iisa,
    na tila kahapon lamang ang bukas.

girls in lithe dresses
  still in photographs

they hurt like daggers—

being this young
  hurts like a dagger, too as
their eyes divine something
  in me,
or their hurtling way of being so
    ineffably in place
  and i, placeless,
  skin flushed hot
   like receiving a multitude of tongues,
    this juvenility,
   everything around me is lissomeness
     just— tryingly closing my eyes
hoping to be awakened by the roaring
     of blood in vein,
  put to sleep by a lapidary brush
    of hum: a delicate soft-petalled song
       but i am a child
   lost in a field
         of various flowers.

like a forest inhabited
by varmints
are my hands
wanting that again
that close-enough
of a slouching to nirvana
  that demands a higher
  price, to have that between
  parched lips again
  even if my body
  still aches
  even if my mouth
still has in its dungeon,
   the aftertaste
like a garage for autumn
  abluted by the picking.
in this room of my mind darkened
   by a gnawing desire,
  its most secret deaths—

impending, singing and almost—
i have you now in my hands
   sealing my fate.

so many things wander
   in the night of the world - electric
  saw of the Hemiptera's wing uncertain
   of its path, or a hand like a beast
   in the ornate flesh, the sea of
undergarment with its saltine moistness,
limbless lips frittering onto squashed out
      softnesses that remember the fervor
  of grip or the pleasures of breathing after

     the tempest of beings,
   so many things in different placements
   displacing me here,
   savoring the impact just before the crunch of the bone,
   down to its last ache between the
    gnash of teeth and the miserly space
   of cerecloth to a body—

  they are many things trundling
   in the moment and i am just as much,
  yet a passing only, scouring the walls
   of graffiti emblazoning abstract unfathomably reachable and misunderstood, lost in ineffable translation — this doting darling
    contemplates death and
i understand now, going deeper
  as fish sinks into further blue,
wet with something else but water.

stand(ing) here alone in the dark
like a head of tack pirouetting away
  to no music - only acrid scruple
    of this being with and not being with,
     one is always alone.

  space occupies the potteries in
  the garden as a steady arm of light
  stills in its mouth, a flowering dark.
  it is only 3 o'clock in the morning
   and the heat clambers the wall of
   the vacuously atrabilious moment
  of just plainly existing. the slender
  harlequin of moon, like an old lover
  having its own way with me, a child's
  yelp coming home — the hermetic
  air crushing the light, slivering it
  revealing all the ensconced phantasms
  too commonplace like a fork in the road
that i know, or the wayward metropolitan
  that teems with a concatenation of roads
  and gutters bilious with the squall of day.

  a figure moves entering a warm miasma,
   receiving the star of aloneness,
    vacillating between
  place and         placelessness
   telling this originary of repossessing
       the moon with a hand in my hand,
   pressing a question of where
    have you been all the raging while.

gOd

must have
   been somewhere else
      for he had forgotten there
  is a planet called Earth


squall of the morning harboring at bay
the howl of the wind rampaging
  through the tired streets,
  i take no sorry hints from the bends
and turns, nor did i hear the gutter weep.
  only the baritone snarl of the swathe
    of brute air through the entire vein
      of the city.

here now is the voluble thwart,
crumbling in the heart of it
   are mere species, the slavered hounds
    of being chained to verily existing here, even the infinitesimal
    were not spared in the glib downpour.
  
windows shut deep into stillness,
the automaton shadow submerged
in delirious light, as winds once again
   with unannounced perditions

   uplifting the nails, tossing the
  alloys like birds swift in the catapult
of breezy flights, lives sojourning,
     some left only a scarring story,
    or just prodigal and nothing else.
carcass stench carves its reek
      in the onlooker, the rat **** foams
altogether with the brine, a cesspool
    of unheard screams dwarfed by
      the circular roar of the grey behemoth
  showing only its unblinking eye

running, searching for a place
    to go less terrifying
         than this, a bearable departure,
   or a hopeless sling at rescue,
luckless imperative,
       today's vibrant children,
ashen tomorrow,
      gone.

my unbridled dreams of you
remain to be all celestially wounded
in this nebula of emotions—
when i close my eyes
   and take the dark like you are for
mine to own, i think only
    of the stars and the moon
  the way a man that hungers
    for a woman thinks about
   what is underneath the vestal chemise,
   yet stumbles upon
     a nameless constellation.

i need not your voice
to sway or dance,
  just the mere sight of you
   muted still in distance

a bamboo in the
    wind

i need not the air of you
  to float or wind-hover
  past the trellises that separate us,
   just the heady fragrance of your
    entrancing thrall

a call of wild in
   the elaborate dark

i need not the wine of your stare
   to inebriate myself
dizzy with the fine mirages
  of your clamored presence,
  just the thought of you
    infinite in me, pattering the roof
    under many a bed that i slumber in,
  that lewd yet saccharine rhythm
    announcing your coming

     and going,
  like a nascent furl of smoke
    from a match-flame gone,

   eloping with you.

I jump out of the windows of my sanity
  just to go back into the utter shamefulness of the page.
- self to self, Feb. 2, 2012 (drunk and shattered)


i have gone back to
where i do not know,
but i know my place
in this finite moment

there is an echo exhuming
the silence,
minting something in the soul,
flowering first in the ear,
and into the overgrowth
felt by the shaking hand — this andante
    of a following.

i come not with light,
only a twist of a shadow.
the night is absolute with
garbled song
and i struggle to understand
as all other slept on such lissomeness
of beds that i do not know of,

i know not where i am.
my body has already gone rogue
with its proprioceptions yet,
i doubt not my place
in this moment — this poem.

my bones break from the sheer weight
    of the imagined moment where
  
  you trill on my bough
  like a wan heron
  or the immense warble
  of a bird

   or say,

where the eternal breast of
  the shore is touched a hundredfold
  by the wave's quivering hands,
  where the salt is poised in the bendable
  light swaying in the water against
    the high noon.

what moves the sea
  is what moves the fruition of
   my being to where you are,
near or away, still like a photograph
    close to my chest, nursing your
   warmth in me, like a fire to
    a hearth but you are not with me.

this is the loudest of all your silences
and to allow you to thrive and thieve
  the moment from beginning to end
    is a tremendous task.
  to let you pullulate from the first letter
   up until the (exalted) last, to permit
  you to brood and intrude like a stranger
  abounding the train at midnight and
  a shadow alight in the next, aching stop,
  to watch you move and regret your
     motionlessness as i hunt for a trace
  of movements in the last room that
    you have been in and to desire you
      still in the following room

  only to find that the voicelessness
     in all of the world is the loudest
    of all the silences.

be on the qui vive when love
  is flyblown-piquant in the air
  that we breathe,
         shall we do splendidly here
where we once cried for benediction
in this station where love broke our
bones and laughed us away?

there is no retrieval of the memory
in the siege of nostalgia
when the past comes back with
the fracas of one hundred men marching
underneath the flagella
          of stark moments—

the streets will soon be named
after deaths, yet not one bears
   a trace of you.

i am the father of these words yet,

these mischievous children
run away in the loquacious dark
chasing lithe-clothed, supple-limbed
girls whirling up and about the prairie
of these versifications without home
     in mind or remembering —
(the home of my mind wary of
the past and its old cobwebs,
or the slaughter of ordinariness
with a dull blade poised to cull,
these mindful creatures assassinating
diaphanous muses disrobing themselves,
serpents shedding their integuments.)
   oh and when they return home sullied,
after a day's squalid scamper past
  the muck, the twitch of atmosphere,
    the horizon ladled with clouds
  in white metamorphosis, i remove their
  clothes and send them to the fences of sleep — impish dream-callers,
  yes I am the father of these words
and they flourish, swelling up, learning
   to harangue their own father, sending
    him to borderless retreat.

o, this sea
  of living , mortal blood -
sleeps in the silage of
    gleaming flesh

us, the brute million,
    enisled here, fish roaming
  up and about hurried currents,
   a muddle of breath aloud
      or a hoard of a dream,

  we, wet with continuities.
   ah, populace, maddened
    furiously sauntering
    back to homes.

Catullus, you have lied.
You have lied, all of you.
You Shakespeare, have
fabulated sleep too in the
delve of the word.

Neruda, you have lied,
And only Ibsen braved
the fault of men:

I am alone
You are alone
And the quibbling breath
of this life will flower
inanimately in your ears,

and look below us!
a goading fall,
a threatening lunge
oh, vertiginous is this death!
i shout your name
and wait
for the quintessential echo:

a small muteness.

for you, dearest, ever so shyly
i, (almost always) silently, sloshing (pertinently), will be like water
falling and falling repeatedly,
(like falls from felled rocks,
  this foreverness of the dive)
rinsing and rinsing multipliedly,
(like rain tainting the already
  stained glass in Barasoain)
freely, wanly, (like my hand
  seeping through the aqueduct
   of your body or
  traversing the source of this stream)

but there is a brightness unmoving,
   high rise of heat,
  like water
     i have dried out.

the ides stupor
leaning into the wall of this
grave sunset.

give me once again
your voice
your shy voice
like a banca
waiting for the moon
to sink below
its dome.

give me once again
your *******
your lithe *******
like genuflected hills
waiting for the sun
to sink below
its dome

give me once again
your being
your agile being
like wild horses
running into the sun
striding into the moon
waiting for me to sink
below your dome.

she says
i should neither touch her
light-plastered fringes
nor the sibilance
of eyes.

it would be unwise
while i am amidst
the storm of laughing
if you say
that my heart
does not shatter
in our despondence.

trilling in light
is the colloid of breath
foaming in the silence
shrapnels of this mellifluous
separation - we, flawed,
dawdling is this punctuation
of you and i
are no more

because you do not
gape with the voice
of sweetness like a cigarette
receiving the shadow
of my once dark being,
yet, someone within me
whose hands still carve
the figure reminds me
of
you.

oh, what darling things live
   in me continually announce her being:

   the indent of my hands
   the grit of my teeth
   the ache of my bones when i move
      far away from you
   the intimate commune of my mouth
   to the supple fruit of the world
    and my mind wandering
   what to make of nakedness when
    you have displaced my weight
into something air's deft hands dare carry!

  we are only afloat in each other's
   fervid atmosphere.
  there are spaces i yield when you ******
    forward, killing the fires that live
      in me,
    the silences that confess the
   mild affliction of the bed now void
      and impression-laden,
   how swiftly i was taken away and how
      plodding my return has been,
   not so much now myself denying
      the imprint of such sharp moment
    weaving your truancy

  that whenever we make love,
    there is something in me that dies
     repeatedly, even now, alone
   underneath a latticework of dark,
   for love clung rather ponderously
         stifling all words quivering
          and panging and there is now
   you, rolling together with the continuity
     of these words, thralling me to
      one more embrace.

Dramaturgy

  there is more to understand
  in this fire of a thing --

  hauled out of the dark is this
  lightsome body, a tumult
  of a moment shaping into something
  true and seizable.

  in the siege of this haloed hour,
  we, in the dark, ***** still
  these passing moments

  the rise of your heady perfume
  choking the smoke billowing,
  curling on our brows
  raking the tranquil in this moment
  of askance,
  wringing enigmas of their
  sublimities,
my body bettered with graciousness,
   etcetera, etcetera

  of letting you go where you ought
    to be and to take you as a useless thing
  demands to be blandly usurped,
  
  that no superfluous beauty could ever
      configure our analogue adjustments,
  and that there is more to this fire than
    just the heat of it, the drone that seeks
     with a morbid following,
   or the brutal truth that

   a pain may never be shared
    or equally felt, poised in solitariness
   and delighting with wine, lonesomely
      yet never despairingly,
   a silence that brands our souls
     with bounteous canticles of how

    love's meant to be done alone.

slackened armature where
flesh once was,

brought by the
moment is a flurry of once kisses
dampening this limpid bed

  that we will once again paint
  with the lacquer of the white noon,

  leaning closer
  is this heady fate of stone:

  i must

     unlearn the work
  of your hands, this clay molded
  into something ominously touchable

  forget the rudiments of soul
  that i once fastened still and straight
  with the weight of my tongue tasting
  the sweetness of losing myself
  in a thick crowd of intent murmurs
  and then finding myself still
      down on you, ships anchored
       to pure linen of sea with hands clenched to a taut grip

    drown the silence and seek
      roads in an uttered word's dwindling
      light - this gladsome dark now
   spreads its wings and then sings
      a frightful muting each to its
    own questions owning up to
     the answerlessness of all that has
    left me still
           down on you,
       clambering my way up
   yet deeper i am, felled
      and only so
      ineffably little, like a moment
   still heavy,
   still pressing on us both
    and separately.

swell of silence
  and the wrest of stars,
o'er the river my heart sings cooly
against the face of the
        somnolent moon.

my heart is etched
in the sand and the dunes
tender on in the tense heat,
and underneath the bowl
  of the afternoon, the shadows
are stripped, shattered are they,
  mending to pieces;

i see here clearly yet no sign
  of you. birds are ailing in the
distance, the boulangerie of clouds
   and the automaton trees,
  yet no you, neither an espy of you nor
     a spry child hiding behind
a flower,
      still no image of you
  here, i go mazy now, into the
   fleet of hurdled moments.

how you fade out in me:

to the last strand of intruder hair
on the cold tiled floor
no lift of gleam extols
yesterday's rumpled ticket
to a cinema
the blast of light on your
beautiful face
your keen eye on the smolder
of the word
up until the final
worn-out, knotted breath
and the tear-stain when it
started to rain and our parasols
were rid of their jejune roles
and i leaving a space
after the air prevaricates
the braid of trees in summer
still hoping
still hoping
for
you

the idle mountain of laundry
  in the corner smelt of saltine sweat
a shadow deliriously starved
   on the bedraggled linoleum

simmer of onions, the feral trample
    on iron, there is a proper pang
  in admittedly blurting out
       Never
   Again
        Are
We
      To
   Be

   falling into the well of the ear
   to surge anew, a slovenly love,
overcast of the body now gone
    and only fulgent lamp-like brightness
   unmoving in its resort
       tells me something hazed
and invisible enough to be seen
   yet painstakingly entering are these
reminders of the remainders - the only
   resolute and reachable object

  is this photograph of your
  once bright smile
  illuminating all mirrors
  dizzy with the image of myself,
   alone and bedimmed

words breaking free
   from the cloud of the mind.
   the clout of the imperative telling:

  this is the wind blowing from all
  directions hoping to touch you
  where you sleep,
   rests its bone somewhere where
     no cold shivers the ground,
   somewhere familiar
   somewhere where both you
   and i have found each other
   two separate birds joining
    in the morning

     Magdalene wears these words
     melancholically
       hand in glove and earth
        in the mouth plump and tender
       like bosoms of full women
         eyes of men having their fill
       of imagined sensations in the flesh
       tingling forever throbbing
      underneath the white moon --

     until then the many loves
     will read this hoping for a deliverance
      the bow of my breath aims true
        but the precision is falsely taken
    a sidewinding serpent,
      a riotous guerrilla in the bush,
    hinging the heartland
        a poem washed away in the river
   as women rinse the clothes of men
     singing songs of despair;

in which surface shall i dwell?

  all the silences have broken loose

  and my body is unhinged by
  the bookish dreams of fingers.

  the stones tumble and fall
  in purer silence -- this distilled hour,
  where all the voices are webbed
  into speculative schemes, abstracts
  the truth.

  found ready and welcomed are the
  shadows that eat away in ******* light.
  no words succor me,
  no touch soothes me,
  no waters toll to quench
  the tragic grasp of all the fires
  and their murderous immediacy.

  the streets feast on the meaningless
  refrain of recall:
  such lines,
  i cannot remember the sound
    of my
        own name.

what use is there,
  my nimble hand?
  what journey is there
  for my superfluous feet
  searching for the dead
  in the tropic dearth of heart's
  liminal forgetting?

  like famished vultures
  traipsing in the membranous
  sky and the illimitable earth,
  hunting for the defiantly
  ephemeral prey in the autumnal
  tang of the mild afternoon,
  my heart, my poor heart,
  no flame aroused.

all i see now are the silent ruin
of words teeming with wisdom
in every trail. you are gleaming
in the moony boondocks,
Ibabá remembers you as you were -
timeless and ruminative,
pursuing the source of rivers.

our sublime versifier,
the crucifixes now tremble without
the fullness of your flesh.
each page is turned without
the hover of your voice yet
stills its resonant message in my mind's premises like redolent graffiti.
striding river-pace,
once in moonlit Orfeo
graced by your sibilant being,
leaving only the strongest of impression
on the surly couch, a toppled glass
of Shiraz remembering your attendance
leaving the clamor of the audiences
real to touch, elusive in thought.

before the war was the ever-present word, and after the fray was
the armistice of the Sun where in
humdrum Sampiro, your fire's genealogy
is in the hands of the muse!

idly go the hours, wading everlong past
Calle Herrán - the bells of Paco Church
tell in this imperfect hour
the roads where you once traversed,
travailed and perhaps beer-maddened,
putting a face in the metaphysical!

in your banquet i partake
the wisdom of your wine
and the reason of your flesh -
the gods delight in you,
  o, Manila of all Manila.

superimposition of celestial ampersand:

a continuity of all things
  stars hanging loose in the pupil
of this deadbeat word.

typhoons in a swirl of tempestuous ballet,
dogs shivering in the blue cold,
biting their canine integument the way
scarabs would, sinking in a temporal flotsam-way within tectonic display
    of text

hectares of blank stares bringing
to life lysergic field of black birds.

and then some

equal number of evocativeness:

continuing on into the ground
are the bones warm in their compost.
the sudden fragrance of rat ****
appeals to the masses.
too much laughter in flooded thoroughfares pockmarked by
the vehement jam of staccato jackhammer.
choking us is today's headline
in supreme obbligato - its stench
reeks of libidinal perfume etched
in the flesh of the rigmarole.

one filthy day in Manila.

billboard's calligraph --
past the haze of Manila infested
by car sprawls and belching machines.

magnanimous treatise of tarpaulins,
people chin-up asking God
with askance

something like this
"o god make this bearable
like a mound of fresh fruits
from ****** labour."

maniacal sensurround:
earth-shattering frequency
of footsteps trampling the mouth
of monolith shadows - the peak
of this quake is our complete silence.

rain's catharsis in effect
sousing us in the blood of unreal light.
this diastolic shrinkage
jamming the beat of constricting vessels.
the adrenaline surges
within the dermis of this pretension.

a collective of tired beings heeding
the recherché of voice metamorphosing
into form, a dagger-butterfly
paring us skin to bone, cranial
to visceral, soul to nothing -

catapult of a trajectory spit
plummeting in eased-up pace
from Taft Avenue flyover
to a subjugated wagon of scraps
and empty wine bottles.

today's paper reads:

"Palace hits hiring
   of **** dancers"

fancying to fall right in the
spanked curved of this
insatiate melodrama - something
  prayer could not save from
this land's mutinous ignominy.

   we resume to fulfill our madness,
hundreds of tack-headed people
  rolling down the streets of Makati,
drenched with rain's trilling aftermath.

squinting to look at
  no sun, only the grieving of skyscrape,
thumbing down unidentified objects
  in the depth of loose pockets,
    desperate for home.

a word from thy mouth
is the spectral arrow
from nimble bow.

risen are the caryatids,
unsheathed are the swords,
molested are the gladiola
by the night's harsh *****;

the proscenium dislimns
as the iron curtain sea drowns
their blasphemous orations!
the thespians alerted
by a wordless hunt

   as i rise like the dew
  lambasting the autumnal grass
   bedecked by glistening wheals
    of ripe luminosities;

  this damp hour, the mercurial
     assault of declarations,
  fastens every word underneath
    tongues of river-deep stone.

in adroit flight are these words.

drunk with the proper   tremendousness of rampant trifles.

they will soar like rigid flame
as the tacit air agonizes in its
  grave failure -

i am saluted by moths
weighted by the dusts of sleep,
peregrinating around
my mortal fire - wings unclipped,
they pine away from the heat
of this wonder they try
to unwind like tough scabs
to erstwhile wounds.

prescient science
nor foolish aeons cannot
shave this wreathed land baring
the enigma of its history -

the thrall of poetry's pulchritude!
the way it makes its way
like a conference of beasts
  roaring innocuously,
  or simply a lamppost
brought to life in the night,
  imploding in itself,
  a burst of primal colours!

Pasay's no conversationalist,
   unapologetic.
  
      "Way sapayan, pastilan"

Ravenous snarl of
      the carrier
     The refined grit of
        rusting fulcrum
          The terse hammer
        malingers,
  The pompous talk of
     carburetor
       and the flagrant burst
         of jetwash,

    i am never grateful for these
      subsequent cacophonies:
   a steel orchestra. i could no
   longer take the metaphysical spar of this hunted dialogue.
    darkness weds the synagogue of
      shadow and soon,
    we will all drown in the rain.

land's moniker
mulls utmost care

     Kalinga

branding the ox
      of men with glaringly

  immaculate chiaroscuro,
atop hills flourishing
with the fruits emblazoning
  reticence.

  chase angel-ward, the synopsis
  of meaningfulness,
    jagged, indelible accoutrement
    akin to the brand of
         chaste heritage,

   galvanizing this epitaph
     with aesthetic nativity,
  gallant mambabatok - fill my bones with the ache of your past,
   carve in me what the rippling
    shrill of air has toppled
      in the highlands

  you have us shaking the blood
    of this archipelago like boughs
   breaking free from water's ebb,
   frenzied by the river-warm
    serpentine embellishment
   the strike of the thorns
    mints in our untouched bodies!

   altogether in this numerous hike
   we go in pursuit, hunting the
   nibble from flesh to bone,
    revealing the rebel, body
       to soul.

enduring quiet -
hands clasped sealing all tyrants,
a tumultuous poem.

i am never travailed
by all afternoons
goading me
to

the door of poetry.

all of them sleeping heavily
shelves, these gods
where i imagine my fates
far-fetched,
perched atop an illusory cypress
like a dove oblivious of home,

Villa
 de   Ungria
        Joaquin
            Gonzales
  ­    Tiempo
  Dalisay
       Abad
          Lumbera
     Gamalinda

  these imperious tyrannies
   sovereign in speech casting
   my storms to drizzle alone,

  where all these words go
  where all these fates wander

  i know not.

     all i know is continuing.

lighting with my eyes,
this inward sanctum

hair, her black river; my terrors
congregate. strobe of aurora
strokes auburn conflagration; my
secrets aloud

her eyes now are birds floundering
in vast oceans of tawny bodies;
onerously present like the
gladiola

where warm-blooded stallions
gallop the sinews of this
straightforward physiognomy.
******* are islands thick
with fleshly origin,
  
navel's cave oozes foam
of brine, sweating in the heat
of this frail moment where
my tongue conquistadors
exploring varying perfumes,

caught in the latticing shrub,
this gossamer pearl, furious
with godly ecstasies no heaven
could tell within the bat
of an eye or the heave of seascape

relics of soul hidden in all,
mine to quarry in my hands so
little with uninterrupted thrill,

  i love thee, all darkness.

it dawned
     from the half-bitten fruit,
    this boorish serpent,
      this inner foreboding
          of flesh tingling tempted
    out of frame.

     sin takes to blood, the nail
    sifting the flesh, birthing
         the bells of the word

      fracturing our silences
     displacing the void into radiant senselessness -

       this heart of Pilate
     where once in front of
    this purloined innocence
   the temples crumbled to ash
     of all beginnings

    telling us all of our
     preordained peccadillo,

   unannounced wraith pouncing
   on each to lurid each,
       biting more from the world
    and its land that remembers
     the till of feet welcomed
      by diadems of flagella,

    love have we not, eternally?
      no singing seraphs wept
        as the afternoon erupts,
      a fragmented word: love.

Mine eyes retain the scourge
      of love

       blueness bites vogue sun
  scarring moon-clusters in
    unyielding boughs lamenting
      this sidereal zither.

Mine eyes burn pale fire
     through chaffed hands pallid
      markings wall-scrunched
      and depthless now

      names wield swords as their
   sharp edges bequeath wound upon
   wound taking helm to helm,
        no shattered voice of pain.

  Mine eyes still these urgent
    importances distilling the
     crucial hour's wane - unreliable sundial seeking the sun
    to scale shadows telling time

     Mine eyes know
    her nudeness vague, her bareness clear, her voice splintering the woodwork of soul,
    keeping it in a jar,
    
    urn,
      rotundly incarcerated there,
    mouth sings lip-meanderings
      multiplied wolves at
     the door.

white: whips like its many
      a name,
         divines in it still,
  my eyes pure engulfed in
      the silence;

       white: which sound
     spills the sud of women
      sitting by the river
     looming clean sheets purulent
       with the Earth's gruel;

   white:
   oh, by the
      window,
   heart's ****** tillage or
      a word unspoken sinking
  in postponement, a moth's
    glide in perpetual motion

    white, many days,
      fewer nights,
         earth sways to crystalline
a tear to light a face
      of beauty once
      tarnished black with
          the blood of roses.

look what happens     in a speed like this
    85 on no freeway stalwart edifice of dark only trees like round tacks on square holes a dog on the road like a dead log
  
  look what happens   In a speed like this
   words or no words noise or silence
   sink or swim veracity or mendaciloquence
    little by little minced choices to
      marrow in bone without remains

  look what happens in a speed like this
    100 on no freeway pavement folding
   origamied shadow in a corner drenched
   in the pit of this dark dog on the road

   i ran him over

  look what happens in a speed like this
  so impeccably timed faster
  than a butterfly
  or a switchblade
  a shot of morphine
  a drugged-out drummer
  pummeling staccato beats
     or the unread word of the beatnik
  the dreamy dilettante

i ran him over
     dead, peabody in the cumbersome dark so small so small in a speed like this.