i have not seen it in the
surge of the next moment. it arrived like a letter from complete anonymity to the familiar gape in the doorstep.

i wish sometimes, now that i am
full with age yet none the wiser,
i were a bottle of wine sitting in hermetic space, where no breaths could go in and out of, as disconsolate light trudges the finite spaces its fingers like a taut grip to a gun, able to drain completely of its poisons.

i have you in my blood
and sometimes its immortality
coils into morbid contortions.
a rally of aches, scraping the sinews well and accurate, paring them of their pretensions, this kinship.

i have you in my mind
and sometimes when the impetus
galvanizes me into stolid incitations, my voice lifts and then vanishes into its shy desolations and without sound,
i pass through the deluge of
all this - of i being you,
and you, being me.

i have you sometimes in my eyes,
when these two brown planets
  wax in their postulations,
nebulae of emotions explode
into tiny aggregations and now,
  i am a lone star in its celestial ambulation through protruding shards of our battlements.

i have you in this warm fount
  and sometimes, like a dog
choosing its memory, i sometimes
wish to forget my station and elude its equanimities and only have in my dull mind, where all
  the bones are kept and
  guard them in the midnight where they shape themselves into
   massive morphemes digging deeper to soft skin and mangled, looking
down on me like a prey caught in a hawk's periphery and lunged at,
  where all aches are awakened
with recalcitrance, casting
  me away from my own tenancies.

i have not seen this in the
coming of the next moment -
we were firstly, laughing at
the smallness of things, sharing
light and other affectations,
until we came in the way
of our trains and closed their
  stations, looking for
a place to go now, anywhere

   but home.

it is something that has
made me once laugh.
and now that it is something
that is done to perpetuate
a divinity of its savoir faire,
or unfurl the evocativeness of
  sartorial workmanship,
it is something that inhabits
me like an imagined pit
that a body should plummet into
and crash, having fallen off
from the boughs of a bottomless dream.

like snow or silence, drops onto its vastness and fastens in it such felicitous rigor greeting it
   like an old companion, reminding
   me of these unimpeachable occurrences: as a wrinkled log is petrified, where mosses pullulate to archipelagic green, where wild ivies sprawl like children in the high-afternoon, or clandestine Paraneoptera ensconced somewhere within the triviality
    of demarcated stones in
the dark's cunning edge,

  my body knows its peace,
   all borderless without flounce
  flourishing in its still life.

water's gravity
moors me to this dome's prison.

washing me to plush blue
is the dream of hands
that puts me out of my sleep's premises.

the bane of existence tingles
the flesh and the suds rise
altogether with the squalor
of its own meaning.
my old hue languishes into
a burgeon of slosh and no friction
nor word could rupture me anymore.

and the scent dangles
mid-air, where all perfumes are born, with sorry fountainheads
peaking through the ordeal
of this sonata.
water makes music with skin
as froth takes to sea, the exhaustion of brine -
all disquiet in foreword
and finality

hung clean, in the backyard
of ordinariness, of consummate asepsis and its breakable concepts,
  ready to be worn out
by a day's grime and back to
its fate once more, all of us.

my frolicsome feet can only
imagine with their bones
the dream of what venture
requires me to go
farther to reach you.

it is with each step that
these passing trembles
conclude their premonitions.

it is when my hands wind-hover
in thick space that my mind
levitates itself and lifts to
draw with a shaking hand,
its own topography.

(x) is your place
      (y) is mine
   and somewhere in this
  haphazard equation is an
  algorithm that makes sound as
  all the circles are small
  without sides, and all shapes
  continue to break without form,
  encircling us now are the shards
  of this equation's
        fervent stridence.

   all of this is stellified
    without mind's authority -
only a heart's persistent longing
   and a trifle of courage,
  when these sordid amplitudes
    flounder to no swaying,
  there will be bridges for me
    to stride on so as to
  close the distances and
      silence the enigmas
  with their sought-for answers.

where i go
cuts the loneliest melody
of this inner twilight.

it is where hands cease
to reach for certain things
and ****** only
what is immense in nearness,

and that is
a memory.
it is a pain imagined -
constantly shining light
into its clutched darkness
and releases from its hand,
the birds of dawn - these words;
or gently sways the perennial trees
with the verdure of its spoken
word and its unimpeachable sensation burning through leaves
like the sun's peak biting off
a trace of a leaf's inflorescence,
or that somewhere i,
together in the gathered silence,
   fathers an intimation
and comes back after
    each toppled song,

to the world and its formless manifests.

whenever the silences
fall on our supple bodies,
it is as if we are strangers.

now that i am coming home to you,
the memories make the evenings
longer, stretching them to their
capacities.

when we are lulled out
in the surge of the next moment,
our eyes pull us back to
each other's arms as we struggle
to make collision. whenever a bendable luminary lifts to light your face in utter calmness, many stories ache to be told and now, once more,

i hurry home to the warmth
of your hearth,
tender with the conflagrations
of my heart's tillage
and all the aggregations and their accompanying pains,

i have voluminous stories to
still in your ears. these intimate susurrations.

will you listen?

learn silence
and unlearn thought's blear.

must you love.

love its workings,
  its affectations.

  simply by saying
  that to fill a heart
  with all that is clear,
  pour silence into
  the hollow of it
  until it raptures
  and emerges
  complete, hymnal.

this is how i remember you
meandering by, plainly,
like the mouth of the morning
and its slow auburn,
telling me something
i cannot understand (something enigmatic, enciphered in a cornered circle) yet prodigiously
delivered to me, at the verge
of speaking, divining in me,
an intone of solemn invitation.

a gentle foreboding:

bidding salutation
and a formless farewell,

into a toboggan of
a bottomless memory.

when things begin themselves
as fine objects, i see their
threats of fading. refulgent light traipsing back to its console.
a tangle of words congealing
to become a forest infested with
voices passing through and perfectly occupying space.

or when you open your mouth
as if you were to say something,
its almost perfectness,
its straightening out the fringes
of my soul to rumple them again,
blue head nostalgia peering
through a soft drape of water,
something as untranslatable as
the shatter of a wave with its forgotten foam slowly making its way down the stairs of jagged rocks, leaving no marks on the very core of thinking this.

when you are about to claw your way back to a memory's drop on the silence of still objects,
reducing all wounds to scars
and there will be no commune
to still its message or tuck its blaring clarity underneath tongues labyrinthine without anything to say, and that what remains to be
conceived is

that this silence
remains to
be something familiar,
like speech - or departures.

with what sense does
this sea of read
pirouette on?

the soot leaving black
blotches on the ****** sheets,
lampposts do not complain
of sudden twitches
as cacophonously, a line
of machines with their ravenous
machinisms create a seam of
crimson to a slender
rose's architecture.

i leave my engine on
so as to hand this road
my readiness,
Ely Buendia on the tattered radio
leaks outside the ajar windows,
chasing the dream of rearing
movements
as my flesh remains dreamless,
stationary.

there is a sequined gathering here.
erratic simulations of
naked eyes pierce the musk
of the austere air's gravity
of existence.

all of us
occupying space
and our attendance is our
sigh of dismay as our homes
decompose in waiting,
as our beds remind us
of our body's aging clamor,
as our ineluctable senescence
opens the dungeons of our frailties
with its trembling, wrinkled hands.

we are our waiting's consummation
as we are left here,
wary of our precise proprioception,
left in
the tongue-tied dark.

i have held with
fascination, when i was young,
  all of my toys.

a parallel universe of
  marvels. imperial is the mood
of these ecstasies!

i remember my cheap svelte revolver
  back in 1998 bought from
  the festive bazaar in the marketplace at the dreary heart of Bocaue when i was
consumed by the thought of brutal force and how swiftly, in the hands of men meant for twisting open
   the doors, welcome death
or the metallurgy of it.

i used to run off into the sunset
  toting my gun high with pride
   shunning the Sun, and the
reprise of my carousals is my mother
    soldering in her white hands
a "walis tambo" and summoning me
     homeward with a churlish grin
on my face, triumphantly ecstatic
   over my rendezvous.

now my gun has withstood the
   tatterdemalion of dog days
and in one corner i felt its
  brokenness as it yearns to
  be retired early in the peak
    of my youth. happiness wears down like a chip on the old linoleumed floor and i tinker with
  it to unsheathe the grime
  of the unspoken stucco concrete.

  i placed it in a box, my black revolver, together with the toys
   that i once laughed with
when only bliss is as simple as a juvenile love, or the easy picking
    of a santan over the fields
      where i ran off into
the viridian laughing with the verdure of the world that i once knew as something so beautiful
   and intricate.

i heard my black revolver went
   somewhere behind the macadamized wall where i dreamt of having a basketball ring nailed to.
   only i knew how to play
my revolver, and now that i am
   caught within the heaviness
  of all things that mean greater
  than all other joys,
   no other days could ever
surpass how
  i made
    a hero in myself
mighty with the tales
     that i keep.

good ole black revolver, 1998.

without words
and their wondrous servitude,
i would only be
and cease to become.

as in a forest,
i shall then continue to flower
in the sharpness of swan-song.
like a beast dazed
into nothing and its bafflements,
even the triviality of a lone stone
shall vagabond through me
in a thousand days that pull
downward, refusing to reveal themselves and their paradisiacal nuances. their etymologies
star their deaths to a languid crawl towards an empty page.

all words trapped, slurring
in the radiant void, unbecoming of themselves and who i am.
if i am to be without poetry,
my then epiphanies would be scaled down to an epitaph's weight and its proper terrors;
   to think that i cannot write anymore, weave anymore these words,
    reeks of deathlessness, and i,
  communing through the myriad dailiness of things shall exist only to be,
   and not become  ( as a single star is meaningless in the coruscation of the multitude - a constellation without moniker,
  a god rid of sobriquet,
as a carpenter without tools,
   orr an army without arsenals)
i am things vaguely not.

god forbid, if i am to be
  without poetry,
what will i become, unknowing of
its grave rescue? these marvels
shoot off in the temporal flight
   of this splendid fate, and if without words, then this shall only be, still afloat, a wild, directionless flight.

the eyes and their drone
seizing down
a vision -

this jar of clay
  is molded to its finite figure,
and when it is done,
   we delight in its exactitude.

it is just like any other
  languorous toil
yet i am less of what i am,
    and more of what i see.
how penetrating is the mundanity!

  these conjured appendages
  storm over this lockdown
  of phases and transitions,
  and the next thunder of words
  shall hoard in their immense
  hands palpable presciences;

ah, without eyes, what to make
  of everything? their boldnesses
    go unseen, their reticences
  remain to be something lulled
   out deeper trekking no contrivance,
    and i, livid in living,
shall only saunter through slackened space and only that -
   passing quickly, even the
shatter of moonlight and
   no words are born.

words, forever,
and their pressing occupations
of living.

the multiplitude is something
that crosses a territory.

say a hand where, somewhere impermissible, still ganders over,
warm to touch. a filigree of
fingers reaching to where
enlightenment is something so small
like a match-flame.

they inexplicably dress themselves
to the soul's penchant
and their redundancies are recurring most over tongues of flame.

sometimes when there are no
words, silence continues to
resuscitate them in their
stations. a mutiny of stone
under the shade of a nook,
or migratory horses seeking
rest at the foot of hills
where their crests look
at them painting them white
with blackness.

where words go,
we follow. even in the tracklessness. our pursuit
knows no ending, like the turning
of a day's page and its finality.
like tasting truths for the
first time, an old moon's wane.
lights athwart where they
cease to fade, a confection
of colours where all men see
fairly, what words inscribe
to riverbed quietude.

lightly, in the indivisible dark -
    without
        sound.

i wait for brokenness
    to spill your name
    outward, like water
       from broken glass.

we lay silent on the floor like
leaves in June.
i held her arms like tightly-knit stars
in the loom of the sky.
the invisible hand of the moon
enters through the window quietly,
our breaths twining, slowly rising
like dust, lift altogether in the moonlight.

soon she will fall asleep and i too.
i hear a distant crooning in the night
as she careens, pulls the covers.
through intruder somnolence,
a gentle hand whirls as the winds
of many days banner our lives -
the leaves that we entirely are,
on the same bed's thorough agricultures,
were blown apart by the wind that
has brought us together,
now apart, whispering
good night.

Should it rain tonight –
I shall escape the overbearing
hands of clouds
slice into the wind
divide the night
soul and body
rummage to the ground
and fall asleep
in one of the quiet corners
of the world
form an ocean of carnations
that would blossom in the viridian morning.
into the sun
i will leap ripe into the wind
until the horizon is incarnadine,
prancing now, in a singular stride
of laughter.

every dog has his day.
things are good
as i am not dead yet
as the people are homebound.
the same familiar palms wave
the same dogs stray
the same birds dart in the sky
there is not much left to look at.
give me a few more years and i can
unlearn this gambit,
give me a few more years and i can
learn it again

i have a voice in my head
and they put shoulders in there
two eyes, two crazed hands
pale fingers, and in some evenings
a palpable laugh. so real i can
touch you.

and you say a manifold of things,
and apart from all of them,
one that will never leave me
even with absent eyes:
   something in me laughed
   in your arms
   and in your arms we have laughed
   each other away.

that laughter soft
that laughter raw
that laughter warm
  like light
  like life
  or a hand on my chest
  with blood running in veins
  together with the days
  across hills like wild horses
  and then
  gone -

to Martina - with love.
your tiny feet hang over
the modest tapestry.
you assault the morning -
   my own, rueful morning
with the harangue of your
     viridian kisses.
in stolid nights like this, Martina, the bowl of the sky
bawls in silent ruin.
    distant roars of flightless
voices fracture the night
    your dandelion smile gone
from your primrose mouth - Martina,
   full moon, incendiary star,
in a slew of love and vertiginous
    height you danced sprightlier
  than any hapless dream soldiering on in the tight solder of the threadbare midnight. Martina - you had us trembling before, and now again, as you dash with your superlative shade that fleets,
      i wake in ruinous mornings.

my timid tournefortia,
whose peripatetic scent matadors
the mad men.
whose laughter veers away the impossible,
of whose flame will gander
like flotsam in a sea of aloneness,
you are a danseuse in the
misty moonlight.

     perpetual in the night illume,
    perched in the deepness of
      sad walls calling out the
   azure. my little tournefortia,
      it was such joy to have lived
   when you have blossomed.

--- as all flowers go, you too, have gone - flagrant grows regard, like a prancing flame
    of blue my eyes are frantic and
    anew --- i seek new flowers.

we are both naked. you
     know what happened to me
     the night my mother kept
     on bellowing sad songs in
     the morose of 3 AM.
     you have all inscriptions
     sculpted into the shearing
     of the wind and my bones
     riveted in places now
     tremble as the slow oblivion
     of falling asleep scare me.
     as i collapse onto your mauve
     chest like a bookmark pressed
     in between the leaves of a
     book, there are lines that we
     recite in total silence:
     you did to me as i did to you
     what needs to be done in the
     time of our bold awakening.
     we dressed each other with
     the velvet truth of love.

belaboring hurt-bells
of twilight

outside there is a furious wind
sweeping the sour-faced pavement.
the helm of the morning
fits through the pinecones.
through the dandelion,
the diadem of some mystic flower,
the flurry of children
and the fury of the populace.

i know whence the wind stirs
cold flame from the many a dead
stones, sequined floor and the
dreary stillicide of night.
our bodies rise to the sun
that is a full woman
or a ripe apple
or a half-bitten moon in glare
and when her lips purse
there is pang in the wind that blows austere beneath the foot
of hills in ruin.

let the night come later than
a bird's secret sojourn,
or the cicada's enigma.
let the cathedral of my heart
quiver later than the unsheathing
of the night's bone
but in the twilight,
when the skies are bruised with
silence and somnolent without voice
my hands shall leap into the wind
and make do, the belaboring
hurt-bells of twilight.
no more than a crepuscular twining
of a sad vine on a melancholy hymn
that makes fuller with its tender
maneuvers, the trundling in
love's wearisome vessel.

this is now your

        a
         r
          m

      and all the fingers now mashed for
   love is an ellipsis
    
    and these are now her
       l o i n s
        and there
        a flower untouched
         by the somersault
          of summer
           and *** only a folly
            of fools
             there is only this.
               poetry of the senses
                that when we both
                 die, i have gone,
                  and she is still
                   alive.

heady fragrance of drizzle
returns lonely through
the horizon's limpid perfidy -
we have been deceived
by the many days that guillotine.

the wind's lasso choking
perennial trees
big-eyes, love-crumbs,
lion-telling eyes roar
   love altogether
a dissonant song of hurtling;

  kisses are aerials in the
      starry void
  and in your eyes are lengthening
   spiral staircases where my
  glance has grown feet traipsing
deeper into some mystic invitation, a night-displacing fire
    in the harlequinade.

the croon of some
      iron silence cloaked
   in the viridian garment of trees, the inexhaustible flambeau
    of a flower's gamble,
or red Christ burning in the pellucid waterfall.

   out there, love, amid fragments,
is a church
with slender truth-bells
     and my, take my hand and let us dash through the dark!

was exhumed by stern-faced defeat
as all others revel in victories.
i only watch the limpid light
slowly frittering back to its
console as the barkeep hands me
my 7th beer of the night

as i handed them the first defense
of the inveigling tactic i have yet
to put them through and send their
young minds to equipoised trial.

i have felt ears poor without
understanding but the welcoming warmth of the light shone against
my already bleared body pierced
through the unclear of words,
as i read them littlest of
my far-slung poems, bardic
and resolute yet rogue upon sound
thinly hanging, barely on a spindle of plaudit.

the barkeep bestows me my 8th bottle and i have felt some
slow ease encroach me with lighter burnt retreat,
as i left,
unfinished.

(i, continually,
      in the terseness of
         things

     seek gentle reminders which
        when it comes,
      straightforward as a gull,
        that i cannot
     utter completely,
       speak into beating,
      about love then i shall
         write about it)

say, i shall plant a kiss
   in the landscape of your cheek
    and gravitate like rain towards
       your soul as we are higher
     than any hope that in the
      reticence of our mouths,
      our eyes would gain courage
        and converse a secret
     nobody knows.

or carve the words onto your bones as they tremble backward when we alone don moonlight and
    dance sprightlier than
   parting and when it
    comes that there is no music,
      your breath is the sound
    where my movement is born!
   our lips shall grow wings
    and flutter into the
      starless evening and perch
     at the boughs
        of love aquiver.

  the silence promises all of this:
     let us go!

i shall carry with me
   the steel morning as words
   unmoving in swathes,
   petrified
   in my shoulders
   and i shrug,
   unbecoming of Atlas.
   all the birds gone.
   only trees zither
   untold messages -
   all stones displaced
   in riverbed silence.
   in the night
   there is a lyre
   and the fingers
   nimble-dancing, unplayed,
   alone as wind
   fuses with ornate drivel.
   my bones rattle
   in unimpeachable oblivion!
   an inamorata weeping
   left touched without
   violent hands, arms choke
   out nuisances from
   still-sitting inamoratas.
   the loom of my hands
   famished with light's fabric,
   the children's laughter
   frayed as i genuflect in thorns
   and bleed only minute blood.
   the threshold breaks
   in the unrest of somnolent eyes.
   a somnambulist without path,
   a path without feet,
   or no journey at all!
   time's monuments leveled off
   the Earth and the clanging
   of metal collides with air,
   a senseless caveat -
   all gone, all gone!

underneath the throbbing roof-beam,
where no words
bend
sliver
fall
in the
subtly put
dark -
beyond **** light, i,
a falling leaf soldering to Earth
or a ****** of wind crossed
by brambly foliage and crisp sun remembers flesh in our arms and now, flailing to dance in fledgling
beat
  
      endlessly as a secret,
      a cajole of a finger
      into the heart of storms,
      or the rain's secret upon
      pried flowers about
       to set loose in the
      teeth of the cold wanting
       to make pale fire.

look at your
    familiar edges
    as i open you
    s l o w l y,
    delicately as
    autumn kisses full,
    the ground of no
    pulchritude,
    and smell you
    burning with
    indomitable perfume.
    page after page,
   leaf after leaf
   and so it goes that
   my love fares
     moribund tides
    of unrest.

       and in steep
   silence, the unsettling dream
   of dust in the stolid dark
   repeats like the many spires
     of day and the troubles
    of night - in my heart-shelf
    i shall fasten you to mine
     chest, dream mazy into
    the paragraphs of your kisses
     as my eyes end to read
      in their gentle closing.
     in the morning, i shall
       come to being, and read
        you again!

the dharma
       burns
       in the bone -
       love is no synopsis
       to our caged delusions.
       death, why, only a dearth
       diorama of the
       incontrovertible
       denouement.
       the unsinkable truth
       so avidly assiduous
       that if dogma bleeds final,
       our beginnings stem only
       from the rose of
       ephemeral loves
       and in the end shall
       we meet god - only i,
       in the seethe of these
       phrases, have burnt
       wilder than any light.

deep within the prowling dark,
  in the stillness, these hands
    forage the steel scaffolds
       of pain.

in the stillness --
    the rain and the floor,
      the toppled silence,
    sleeping in the flurry of
      these contestations are
    no petty solicitations.

i want for only a hand
     to pacify unquiet eyes
    dizzy with questions.

i want a kiss to take in its flight, your splinters - woodworks
      of a name's recrimination.
i want feet to stride past
    the torrents of such distinct
    cry, outward, as though an outburst - the stars wrestle the
    wind as the shadows are loose
      in their own leash.
i want only an ample body quivering
    skyward, giving in to sliver
   in a multitude of glass,
     like the tiny fingers of rain
   crashing into the earth blind
      with force, roadless, tender
   with the night's tenure,
      amongst livid walls,
and then only ripples, to pulse with the many gilt days of dozing suns until these eyes awaken to
   the brew of an unfilled sky.

-- a drunken reprise:
   sound of bones crackling
    upon stretch on a limp chair.
   the continual attendance
     of the dark:
      the bottle is streaked with
       pale light.
     unquiet, remorseless,
       thick in secret:
     to drink alone, in unmistakable truth, as i gild
     the immensity of impalpable
   currents moving in swathes
   sudden without weathered image.
     the table's pressing mysteries, the barkeep's maledict eyes. the vagrant wind going in
    and out of panting doors tired
  of the coming and going.
      the night fans, and then flames with auburn fire, and around
   it, miseries fandango through
  the crepitation of drunkenness -

i singe brighter than any
    conflagration, and in the belly
  of the dark sits a god, grieving,
   announcing rain earlier than
     the heaving of trees and
    acrimonies:
  there is ease in between
   burning and ablution
that pass on the soliloquy.
  
       this is the recurrence
  of new familiars, forging without
    hope, rid of blame, rogue
      with only little identity.
    true-telling roars bludgeoned
       into infinitesimal voices,
    to drink alone,
        the wine
            of
              the forgetful.

angels brought home
wired to some memory.
the sea tethers itself
to the wakefulness of beds
as the blue head of
melancholia peers through
derelict foam.
i will bathe myself
frayed into
these waters
and emerge
the victor -
as many a name lay defeated,
stony and silent, pale and white
with forget.
what i came for here
  has already elapsed
  as sleep only is the many pages
  of slumber underneath a somnolent
  done of some peril. untouched
  as a sterile book.

no man figures saints.

   i lift my glass and drank
   as the erected monuments of
   some fallible memory pendulum
   and then topple like oblivion
   in a glass case.

   we defer significantly waning
   luxuries of time-keeping
   as we both pinnacle through
   the mountains and shout
   names unwilling to have faces,
   eyes, liaisons without warning
   and then FALL. CRASH. Break.
   now, habitual clock-arm meshwork
   slurs a tell-tale forgetfulness.
   i am now accompanied by the
   music and we dance in separate
   stages - a standstill in
   imperfectly drawn sidereal
   circles.

pure eyes mapping out
    secret roads

swift onset of kisses
   colossal than
    still-seeking monuments.

supple enjambment of flesh
    fuller than moon.

only her one side showing
   in influx light -
      eyes yearning to discover
    what is behind mystery, as if
   to say what lies in front
    is subduable with openness.

       these thoughts naked,
        as we are both nailed
         to the same tapestry,
        clothed in honeysuckle.

i know not how she twists her
aches into the reprise of her
heart's persistent pleadings.

   her hands touch marred walls.
   her swift glanced put to rest
   some lost vision waxing in
   weathered trellis
   which music ****** her ears
   with temperamental ballad.
   how my day slowly unravels
   itself from the cocoon
   of questions
   and answer metamorphosed,
   a fluttering butterfly.

but i know when she moves
i feel the Earth move, as in a club
of wind pursues the willingness
of each leaf leaping from their boughs.

but i know when she converses,
the quiet rests its forlorn mouth
and shudders to some acquiescing commune.

but i know when she loves when
she does not love me, when she hates so much with her furious heart when she loved me still
in imperiousness solely our own,

   there was a language only i
   know her lips mouth to soothe
   the paroxysm of consternation
   and lullaby me through
   the wakefulness of all things.

dripping and naked
underneath the dome
of some outwardly pouring
wet measure
of lip-meander,
or
as if caught
like a hapless prey
stripped of freedom
fastened to liberal lattices
of a kiss and its lunar cosmogony -
and perhaps
a farewell to the gush of
wave carrying with it
gossamer bodies of tiny memories
worthy of forget, worn, lauded
by sepia hue
exiting languorous doors tired
within cold threshold

sweet science of love, unrelenting
afterwards, so strongly bold before.

where does a flower
   keep its flaring memories?

in the petals, loincloths
   light-skinned in
   resplendent ephemera.

or in the thorns,
    prickly music of
    an esoteric cadence
    without falter,
    blood upon blood,
    flesh upon flesh,
    ash upon ash
    tumult of pains and the eclipse
    of a broken archipelago.

in the stem,
    bending to the oppressing wind.
    like your body upon my body
    swaying to the sound that no
    ears hear underneath rivers
    and the sorry tale of
    weightless drowning no eyes
    ever witnessed.

in the hands of the wind
   is where they are kept.
   moonlight shines its
   perihelion mouth across borders
   of untouched reminiscences
   and we have called them names
   and similar aches as rain
   dropped like a net of sadness
   or the debris of a ruin,
   betrayed by the thirst of our
   lips when we longed for the sea
   and failed to heed its
   cerulean calling.

among the tense blackness
of night,
take me as river
takes to silence of a lark
a-trill on quavering beat
and consider
in arm's light mid-step
slowly rising to no more
than a drop of bleak bone,
the evening's behemoth.

a resounding collective
behind a closed door.
a soundless sound.
an organized chaos astounds
this meaninglessness and puts
in it, two hands rubbing each
pressed on impatient bodies
primal without signals
as vibrations prickle through
feeble walls.

i hear some defenseless mess
inwardly break as most of wrung sunsets reek in rain-swathed air.

in here
a cornered hummingbird
of yearning
listening even before i spoke.
drinking in quiet, the water
on the tabletop
that begins to arm itself
with fringes of light
and if not for my mind's frolicsome
fingers send back to glass
for someone else's mouth
to touch...

(i, who have died, making this)
   looks at the mirror
     of this
   and sees clearly
       tastes freely
       hears soundly
       opens delicately

    a god in form.

    now the windows of my
     soul are open
    now the doors of my
     heart are unlocked
    now the roads of my
     sinews undone
    now the home of my
     laughter loose in
      the wilding air

(i, who have lived, ending this)

    still sees a god
    in the many haloed hours
    i am truer than any water
    sloshing against the blue
    dream of shores,
  
    now my feet tread softly
     the illimitable earth
    now my hands rest like
     children from a day's frolic
    now my heart is wan as
  a seraph's musing is sepulchered.
     now my mind sprawls endlessly
    amongst cathedrals sleeping
     immensely in the night

(i, becoming a god,
    in believing and denying this)

the heron
of your arrival
lands squarely
its talons set
on fields of
awakened grass
as the slender bell
of the morning
shouts into clear void.
its unequivocal voice
shatters the windows
of this home's numb silence
where mouths play back and forth,
the jocose allusion
of a blank audience
where the laughter sledges
an amalgam
of fire ferrying proudly
over a flight of moon-stream
that stretches its white bones
in a quotidian gyration,
fanning out these
  words almost as if infinite.

sly as intruder air
        piercing the helm of noon

when i remember you
        worlds come out of my beat

when i forget you
      these worlds puncture themselves in a slow unison of dying, reverting back to its
   state of unearthing

the dark holds itself back
   to wash me with light
    squinting through ajar windows.
  and now this,
     thrill-seeking hapless thralls
    of distant embrace
   and now this,
      the span of a wing's flight
    fans itself through elevation
   until nothing is within reach
  but trails of an elusive visage.

daylight frets,
trembles, falls
in a vertical climb
pressed against
pried open lilies.

the svelte upholstery
of dark vanishes

as i swim like agitated fish
through liquid measures
of minced light
through the small hands
of the world
like rain through the lips
of serrated grass.

daylight morphs
a half-concealed stone
into eyes sizably owned by
the spread of mildew
transmogrifying its secret
into a single beat
of flame.

-- dizzy from the silence
     as the rain translates
     the sky's pain into the core
     of a leaf's inflorescence,
     tucks underneath a stone's
     tongue a secret, springing
    from a cornucopia of questions.
    if it rains more over
    the tormented town,
    will God show its face
    in the puddle out feet trample?
    will an angel collapse
    as a single drop of honey
    moves through the lambast
    of a monsoon's arm
    in the wayward atmosphere?
    will its death grow wings
    and carry all of us,
    girdled to its chest
    like how the infantile morning
    is painted in the quiet
    mausoleum of our pains,
    and into our tender lives
    waiting to be examined?

to pour water
into the velvet lip
of a jar
or the lobe of your
pale ear dwindling
like a bell
        unsounded
      in the consolidation
      of both the unclear
      of words and the
        unsaid

to pierce the silence
with the stem of breath
and break the curved bow
of the moon with our hands
that fritter against the meandering
of our eyes leaning against the walls of returned glances.
to postpone a voice
   mid-birth and embrace
     encumbered enigma.
to sing deathly dreams when
everyone sleeps dreamless.

to pluck the strings of
  a guitar
  and pain in the fury of love
and its accompanying bafflements.

to have ended the fire like
   the brief life of a match-flame,
  and to want you again inside
   the windowless room of my mind.

to this
        and to
               that

like a map that's hastily drawn.
i have felt myself stride
   like a wounded beast
  inside the bramble of
   obvious hesitations.

      what to do?

sitting underneath the dome
of the contemplative sky,
this much i remember:

shy as a word without
a song
naked
when i first
thought you to be

daring as the moon
accompanied by a song.
translucency of want
leaving no marks
on the soul,
braver than any honest light,
are these words
that hauled you out
of far-flung vision
and to realness
   solely my
    own.

-- the moon hangs like
   a pendant over the supple
   collarbone of the night.

  under my raft is your
  ocean raising
    the reticence.
  calligraphic and all graffiti:
   sunshine walks
   with elegiac primrose.
   moonlight's facade
   dons harlequin mask sprinkling
   with its white hands
   stars with anonymous eyes
   examining ichthyic gravel

     an unearthing, only moribund.
like a question dangling like wild moss on grafted lips of concrete,
        revealing all
        but only too little
        is understood.

Bellisima! ****
descending on the table, a crash,
a severance, a banquet.
   the linen is white
    aflame,
   a pond of light underneath
    sorry elbows and frantic
    fingers (thump!
               thump!
                thump!)
   a dry *** of inquiries
engraved in heady crepusculario.
   twilight's fingers chiming
     my heart - lute, mine strings
  outstretched to breaking (a tremendous pang!)
   but the sound it makes
    is a coveted amaranth.
dark outwrestling
     dark.
         in front stretches a
     white river of wine - we will not last until light seeks its
      calm home
       but we will stay.
    we will remain tasting the brine of what immense sea,
    licking the salt off of the
sweetness,
    gnawing, falling off the
   curbed bone,
   this p
          o
            e
              m ...

love concocts
  a slow death.  the night
          chronic with melancholy.

     somewhere in the world
   a man, contemplative,
   underneath a lasso of light
    peers through the window
      without a word,
     only an insignia.

    we are
    only
    tender bodies
    in supple movements
    trying to weave out
    timid moments
    trying to shatter
    the inertia
    of being
    here.

i rise early
and join
the conference of laughter
as my room is clambered
by dappled light.
silence
beats back to glass
and houses
a wild flame of dreams.
  it is like
  my time is up
  and the portent of approaching
  moments divine themselves
  in the rain as i peer through
  the window and see myself
  aghast and burning
  underneath a deathless parasol
  of hands.
to see your dream slowly
tip away and jump frightened
to infinite smallness and then
slide, slouch
in the distance --
to revere in its
fading, romanticizing it
with hendecasyllabic recollections.
to be left with nothing
but a sharer in the moment:
a day's end.

i have already something
  new and sublime to say
  about love.
as two people on the bench
   where the birds are
unashamedly perching right by,
  pecking on the cheek of the world
soon enough now, the hand of
   which mad drivel shall tear
   this photograph in two
  and with a hand on the knee
   as a gentle stamp to
  a reaching-for-and-out epistle,
  we are far away,

and love is as sad as the
   flower that has grown
weary of waiting for the sun
   to fulminate altogether with
    its eyes staring in the
   veranda of hope wide-awake.
  and love is as short as the
   sudden jolt of bones, atremble,
  as though you have fallen
    completely into,
   but have only fallen out,
  partially, one foot first
    out the yawning door
  and into the heavy premises
of a heart's trying forgetfulness.
  to have heard once, the call
   of a tame voice through
   the wild hand of trouble's immensity, and to have held it
   once so shortly bold thereafter,
  with leonine eyes i see only
  a small distance i cannot seal
    with one kiss. i need a hundred more of you and a thousand more of this before i can fill your nebulosity with a million star-like
   kisses traced only by the
   white hand of time that continues to punctuate our
   sentences right even before
   our lips quiver to speak them
  softly like how i first sank
  in you and you in me, a flotsam
   of memories.

i have something new to show
   about love with mine eye's
  unresting shutters capture
moments held loose like a mother's
   frail child,
this photograph with your hand
   on my knee,
  cleaved into worlds from the
  silence of our eyes and
  only longing
     speaks so much the straightforward,
     we are far away.

caught in a sidereal
   glance
  little eyes
  have their
  immense silences
speaking to me
   like the secret language
of twilight.

pressed like the many
   spires of questions.
a restless wallflower
   impaled against
  a wall.
   beating the undulant
back to my shore,
    without a gesture
  nor a voice,
    a wilderness of complexities.