deep within
  this walled, scrunched heart
  a flower (a fool)
  whose mouth is open waiting for   the rain of words - we all are.
stretching in the dark as want outwrestles need in a melee
  of hands, of populace bumping
  into each other in an enclosed
  cage like two birds wary of each other's movements,

the threat of its gate, opening, freeing one, the other, staying,
  is the lilt of a song and the wilt of its sound dwindling as the urgent questions gnaw the bone of
silence trying to wring out light in the dark's tumultuous passing
  waters turning luminosities
  into liquid under my feet.

and now, the brew of unspoken
   petrichor stirs in the ground
and the clouds gossamer than ever,
i close my parasol with my head
    into the sky, waiting endlessly
for rain to quench the ivies of
   love's battlements!

these recurring fires,
   these moments blank
with stark, shrilling air.
the already memorized movement
   of the clocks
  and what these dictate us to be.
over life's ferocious waters
   and the undertow of tranquil,
  what is in it for me, that the world continually hurls forever
  a hand that is not mine?
a kiss that is someone else's?
  a glance that is not for
    mine unquenchable thirst?
these cities tender with foolishness
these sick, marauded streets
with faithless crowds
   waving empty bottles at the sky
  like a sordid army marching
    through the marshes of this
  empty life!

what is in it for me that the world
   continues to plod with inquiries
   but does not flourish with
     answers?
that when time speeds right on
   by, the youth is culled out
    of the gardens waiting forever
   for wisdom to fall like rain
     over these scrunched flowers!
  what is in it for me that
   there are forever the shadows,
   and the gamblers, and the
     brutal game of life that we only know in death, in hate, in love? these words start to seek
their fathering answers and now we are embroiled in a fortuitous enigma that in the imperious nebula of life, when these tender loves
and lives start to wax in the same orbit finding paths, we will continue to be stars clinging onto each one to form a single light that could beat the darkness.

(Pastilan!)
    this is where
     no words
      break
      fall
     shatter

it is where now,
    a barefoot army in the wilderness
tromps the silence
   leaving it trundling
  in its wagon.

     (Pastilan!)
    this is where no love
     thaws
      petrifies
      stunts.

it is where now,
  many skeletons are
  unraveled, unsheathed as a melancholy ***** in one of
   the quiet rooms in Hagonoy.

(Pastilan!)
     dogs
      all
     barking
     trying haplessly
   to bite without teeth
    fangs yellow with old.
   mane squandered by steps
    of light.
   woebegone are the paws
     and the only thing
  we do best
     is howl
    at our
       pains.

Pastilan!

these are the tiny currents
   of how you make me feel.
   they fritter like light
    from an agape console
   and when they close us in,
   that light slowly resigns
     to its cage
  like how we first nestled into
     each other's arms.

this is the moon that remembers
   your silence
  and these are my eyes that
   stare at the moon to
    ruin it into all the noises
   the world could ever bayonet
  through cities tender with sleep.
   and this is the soul
   that will recall everything
   and forget, flinching from
   the inward-breaking, pale bodied
    concrete are the many lives
   that we break to have little,
   hummingbird knowledge
    that we are alive.

your immensely spread parasol:
it is your downpour consoling
these tumultuous iterations.

the mordant edge of your
susurrations:
it is your word painting my silence.

i have watched your slow fires
raze the inundation.
you have done it well
without trouble
without peril.

i have witnessed your
somnambular sun
mutilate with its precise dagger,
the stubborn bud of
contained splendor.
you have done it well
without blunder
without complication.

i have seen the conception
of your darknesses
and i took them as my own;
its sovereign over my
fragilities,
its tyranny over my
small territories,
its amplitude over the
softness of my voice.
i have done it well.
even with dire postulations.
even if i am
cast into a lulled out perdition.
it is like
there exists between us,
a tryst,
and the lions there lay,
roaring.

i go out seeking a great perhaps
immenser than the void i know.

but you have left
as all the others did --
only a few remained.
yellowing letters with words growing thinner and thinner barely
hanging, loosely against the mouth
of the fringe.

it is not enough that you have left.
it is not enough that this room
shouts enormously with its
darkness pressing against the venetian and i cannot see you anymore.
it is not enough that i hear your
footsteps mince away towards the seep of the door where your departure has overstayed its welcome.
it is not enough that there will be no more mornings to delight in - only nights where i scrounge for light only to find that even the things that glint have no use anymore.
it is not enough that we have screamed, yelled, bellowed our names at each other in love, now on hate. it is not enough that your once callow eyes are now lion-telling and mine, vulterine.

the arrival is just as swift
as the pulse of leaving and now
in the next room are so many women,
and it does not help that there
are also many rooms fraternized
altogether, filled with more
and more people.
the fuller the earth gets,
the sicker i become,
and the more stricken i become,
the more i remember that i have died wanting more deaths.

soon i will find your debris scattered throughout the streets
made for me to walk on.
a strand of hair, a pair of shoes,
a dress you never wore, the telephone like a petrified train
in the station of my hollow being,
and that it would ring,
i know it too well,
but there will be a strange voice
at the other end that will
pierce me back to remembering
how you sound and i will take
it, i will take it for
for the indictment nears its brutal straightforwardness:
it will never be you waving
at the other end of the street
together with the ugly palms.
it will never be you
in the dress, it will never
be you on the passenger seat
peering out into the world with
eyes beating the darkness of the freeway with the many exploding lights of who you are
and what you've given me with
what was left of you,
and what i've given you
amid this thing of being me.

it is never enough.
it is never enough that
i know this, and it is never enough that unknowing you is longer
   than how we have known each
    other when our voices are the
    only once that dwelt within
      ourselves.

in the bleak --
the span of your forest's questions
i cannot shun with my hands.
it is like naming the trees in the
morning and almost with ease
from the bend of the boughs
to the song nearing its end in
the once-told twilight
of the never arriving,
forgetting everything
in the night as the space widens
like an eye awakened to
new pains yet old truths.

underneath the sovereign
of which darkness remains uncharted
is the single candle
burning, intent to squirm back
to its death.

    it is sure than when our
    eyes meet, in knowing this,
    there is ineffable readiness,
    than when i try to remember
    with frail knowledge the
    sorry names clinging to elegiac
    leaves zither no more,
    you are ready to forget.

in the stern per-second
  a full bloom
   ushers

neither fire
    nor blood

but two
    sizable lips
   purely almost kisses, dank like
    a rose in the rain, keeping
their moony arc hidden in
   the daze of a color's prime

to make yours naked
    with a smile by a hurled
  word from mine to yours,
   what beauty of it?

there are many others--
  flaxen hair
  dew of earlobes
  riverbed eyes
  sinuous fingers
  tiny feet

  take all of them
   but never
  your smile.

i love thee
  poetry.

whose hands, steadfast,
   catatonic waters past
  end freely in dusk,
  carrying me over
  life's ferocious waters,
if not death.

whose slender body is
  to make love, make fire,
  sinking in a leitmotif of
   seraphs unknowing sepulchers,

  which ails me so in the night
  drunk without stars shall i seek
  the dharma burning in the bone,
   the fanfare of mind berserks
     the thorough ablution of
   the mind's useless wanderings,

  i love thee poetry,
   its rescue, its curse,
  its waysides - i love them all
    nothing but shorter lifelessly,
  a brief night ended in the
    bat of an eye.

to accept our nameable days,
   the plenitude of them,
  means we are to be forgotten;

to come in flesh with
    our words and clothe us with
      them, will mean that soon,
  eyes shall, through malleability,
      unsheathe us all
    to our impurities.

a gaping orifice is in the seascape
   singing elaborate music,
  and to gyrate to this
will mean that there is a hand to
   hold until the songs fade
   to their closing.

to become love means to be aware
   of what our hands can do,
   what our bodies can flinchingly
  shut with their capacity to
   mend distances,
    what amount of words could
  hurt, what silence could scar
    and what nuisance could
  stir mundane abstractions,
and to become presence
    means to embrace our departures, why a thing ceases to
  stay is a question in the pristine void and beats back with a voiceless answer: love, and its
   telltale askance!

  to become and simply be,
   coming to be and ceasing to be,
what to make out of it,
  that in the flesh and the indelible mark of loving,
  its rampant depictions are all
     but ash.

looking at you.

  the wrest of images
  which imaginary kisses
  have real warmth,

  and that i,
  dazed into a normal thing,
  demarcated in the abyss of
  this lonesome wanting,
  have been reaching out
  into the palpable distance,
  your image elusive of my grasp

    like a thing
         that refuses
            to be
              pinned
                down.

light breakdances
   seascape as wave labour
     on no man's end.

there is defeat in common grasp.
  what shall we do to keep our
  hearts from breaking?

  to make tractable the creature
  or to cast tacit upon stone
   a noisome mutiny of cicada.

this is where no words shatter.
this is where no fool's beginning
is the end of men in sheer wonder.
this is where we stop our
hearts and deny them of their
    pains:
when the moon plunges deep
  and breaks into a song of star,
through trail of air,
    the morning - all friction
      yet no sound, shouts
heavy without artillery: frangere.

I.

you would feel it.
   the bones of it.
   the drone of it.
   the arms and the fingers
   and the inscape of things
   and the sheer weight
   of it.

the mind seeks to inhabit all things,
nailing them to their stations.
indicting them to their prisons.
casting them to their sullen exiles
while the heart
       does nothing.

II.

   the hand's meager unraveling
    is its realness
   not its assumed truths.
   the parcel of the mundane shifts
  its weight across people-rivers,
  as light roves in secret strobe.

   you cannot feel it.
        the heat of it,
    nor hear it,
         trundling in its train,
   dwarfing in yonder light,
    controlling its rages.
   you can see it always speaking,
  as nobody hears a figment of
    a shadowed creature when it
     is cut in the tough ornate -
the body tries,
      the mind is asleep,
    and the heart is where all
  the frays take place.

i.
  this is where all wars
  are born.
     when the mind starts
  naming its possessions
  as the heart is
  silent with its
  sullen iterations.

  this is where all
  the forgotten revel
  in the song breaking against
  the premises of remembering,
  or say,
    dream's erratic fabulation.
  this is where you lose
  name and touch and relevance
  to things. this is where
  around me, all the mouths
  shrill in commune and i am
  left baffled in cottonmouth
      reticence.

ii.
   it starts with a syllable's
   ebb as it tries to paint
   in the canvas a face,
   or a mulling over.
   or the reel around
       the thorny fountain of
   desperations and youthfulness
     dried out in speckles of
   river-run laughter.
   there is only a candle there
  but the light splatters everywhere like true blood of
    murdered flowers on walls
  thick without sensations.
it begins when the heron
   of your coming trills on
  the ganglion - cathedrals start
  a bell and the resounding of it,
  the shattering of it,
      the music of it!

iii.
     death of a man is the
   life of another, yet shy in
  its genesis, brave in the exodus.
this will soon grow
     arms
         and feet and will lunge
  out of each pained window and
    then sleep in musical beds
  oblivious of a body's retreat.
   and from whence it started,
  it shall end here,
it will blow out the candles here,
sometimes sing to itself here,
    and perhaps pass this on
from here to another's,
     without promise.

daylight does not
   (and perhaps) disrupt me
   as roses are put in
   pressing questions

  life is neither
    an ellipsis
      nor movement

   and death (cessation
                amid
              words where a locutionary, alone, dropping
     into the world
           sends us to places
        of silence) is
       nothing but a remembering
   of this and things anew
    yet old with pains
       (tender
     with parenthetical kisses.)

i shall speak in an enormous voice,
  seeking through the oneness
    of many beginnings,

    a period,
    an end
    to all ends,
    
     foregoing its
   strange intent.

     and to put this to light,
    when in multiples,
   a fountainhead.

like rain through sweetness
  uttered above in
  steep vertical,
  
  i am many arms
       many fingers
       many feet
       many eyes

       many arms of stems
       that graze the wide-eyed
       morning are my arms
  
       many fingers of grass
       weighted by dew's
       volatile stupor -
       my hands and a sea of
       touch alone wired
       to the same rain's phalanges

       many feet of dancers
       through vertiginous music
       as the moon, our audience,
       peers through the window
       don moonlight or no light
            at all

       and in the same proscenium
       are many anonymous eyes
       for stars,
       of many lovers,
       in becoming one from
       the manifold of love's
       surging amplitude,
      

       my love has made my form,
        and these are my
          movements.

it is just:
  an utter illusion
  to a no heart's control,
  reckless without form.
  weighing us down to
  a clenched fist's nothingness,
  and then comes to tremble
  everything that it announces.
  the wind breaking loose
  in love's captivity
  and its faltered exactitudes -
  all of us,
  blown ceaselessly away
  by the same wind of it,
  that pulls us back,
  scaling us to
  love's nakedness.

i have in my hands,
your round,
virginal fruit
and my eyes pare
all clothing
  reducing you
  to obscene ******.
all your juice
  trickling out of,
slow is the
      slither.
pebbled body after
    pebbled body. builds
its pace plastered to wall, and then swiftly runs
    with full gravity.
succinctly, a
   sidereal persimmon,
until your peels wear
   me thin and your flesh
  rots in compost,
my mouth
savoring the emptiness.

rose alone, cannot grow.
my hand on your hand,
the twilight of this
inner whirlwind.
palm brushing off the dust
of a dream,
your tear on my cheek
slenderly needing all of my rivers,
is your reflection,
my tender night,
      rose alone cannot grow.

i watch the tiny hands of rain
fritter back to your breast.
i witness everything seek its
asylum, in your arms, where
no love breaks, only sings,
laughs atremble,
  and i see all the roses, alone yet together
in all-consuming silence, needing
  your transmissible voice to
make resonant, the day or
    the bend on our roads,
like saltwater, like complaisant
  air meaning only one word
through all the roses that
   spring in the field
of the ephemera: your
too sudden image claiming
no sound yet all of my language.

i love the music
      of rain.
  it is like you
  are nearing and
  i, behind walled silence,
  waiting
  for the sound to
  billow immenser
  until my worrisome
  body bursts
  with a certain gush
  of anticipation,
  and it is you
  in all that is the world

and when i peer through
  the window, the earth
  is soaked with grace
  as the trees are stuporous
  in their roots,
  as the flowers bow
  in acquiescence
  and the peripatetic air
  foams an amorphous figure,
  your silhouette naked in
  immersed wonder and when
  i close my eyes, only exists
  your touch and i am one
  with the world dripping in
     wanting, trilling and naked.

this marauding dark.
  a bleak behemoth ---
  the head of the chimera.

  integer by
  blind integer,
  life's
  absolute emptiness.
  a sidereal zero.
  caught in the web
  of a relentless
   tarantula.
  this
    dead end
      or this ***** in
   the armor.

  life's what you make it.
  i make it like this:
  intractable like a fiend,
  these words unsheathe like
  rusting swords in old scabbards.
  i astonish death with smallness.

the way i
     do things
   is my way of
        undoing.

        do not take me for
         a fool - a flustered
      butterfly's well and
       love is not,
    thinking the paradisiacal,
        soldering to the squall
     of a senseless moon,
       all of me bursting
      into all the fraternization
   of stars and then
        the squalid dark --

slowly moving are all,
     and what slithers in our sleep
shall purloin our senses and in
  beds of old haunts
    will all be pure motions
    reckoning the void.

shadows assume our parks.
silence heaves our decimal places.
observe me when i utter a speech,
  yet in a quickening,
     i have already unspoken.

i hate
   and i love
as life and death
   pull
  a long-drawn tide
between
  body and
    soul -

there is not one
   love in this world
  of mortal men
that could enclose me,
  as loveless as love
could be so dearth as to not make
   roses grow - hate with its
ferocious hands, swift-bladed,
   cutting all foliage at
  the garden's edge.

i hate
   and i love.
forgetting's hands
unsheathe the moon like
  a bare bone.
i hate, i love,
   and if you ask me how,
  i do not know.
  i only feel.

it is the dawn of this inamorata.
  
          love is
          the dew
          dropping onto
          the soul,
          takes in it
          silence would,
          a cacophonous
          trace of song.
          love is
          written,
          for love is
          born
          to the
          structure
          of a
          rose.

it is the dusk of this inamorata.

          love is frittering
          back to the inconsolable
          noise, trickles
          back to rivers
          and onto
          the unseen,
          the fading out
          to smallness
          of which flame
          lets go,
          a solitary ember.
          love has emerged
          with hands empty,
          poised to cull
          this structure
          of a
          rose.

getting real, no mere,
yet first, we shall

utter the unspeakable,
sculpt with our eyes
the faintest image,
hear silence's roundness
circumnavigate our mind's
trying verseliterations.
dream a dying thing;
a facelessness
nor a jell - thinking the
unthinkable,
so that in our desperation,
words morph into
anticipated things written
in lighted calligraph -
and with these, things unmoving
shall grow hands and commune to us
through transmogrifications
and cling onto us...

like a thing drowned in love,
or startled, whichever.

a word's rearing
in light's mid-step. foams through
brine and saltwater's tedious
and redundant swarth.

an all-ending music:
silence
is
all.

it is where i punctuate you
and another syllable begins -
it is you (eros
     in
       thanatos)
others,
   slinging, meaningless.

two hungry hands
in a ***-lock.

and the other two
roam like
superfluous men
in parks.

when she is on all fours,
she is
metamorphosis
and cocoons out, madly,
an assaulted butterfly.

heaven in the flutter
   and lissomeness
   in the tremble, poised,

  taking another being
    to dawn.

i can feel its presence
and we need no dark to
grasp its attendance.

a rudiment:
darting through,
my death, imagined.
rivers continuing,
pressing stones now atilt.

memory's rigodon -
  heart and mind,
  puppeteering quadrille.
this is where all of ourselves
  go, purloined, deep
   in rumination.

  the passing of all things,
  taking with them,
  our laughter. and it continues
  in our body, endlessly taking
  space and displacing our
  inward-breaking haunts.

  it is no fate nor
   solitary consignment:
  it is natural,
  it is default: pain is.
  and wherever it goes,
  lovelessly, we are
     dragged
       along.

Life is our existence's continual essay, and the words we still in its premise are the repercussions of our dailiness. Should we find ourselves trapped in a moment, that is no period, no decimal - that is an ellipsis. And to continue on in the spire of our days, is our living's magical working.

let us not be devoid of value.
let us not be mired
into the stillicide of night.
let us

  become.

let us

   think.

let us prosper,
  burst
  with a light's amplitude
  beating the darkness.

let us become flesh
  and not the frailty of bone.
let us become the memory
  of our hands
  and not the pain of their labor.
let us not be the languor
  of air but
   the promised swoon of it -
this appassionata - this
  coming to ourselves
     in union with the soul's
  furtive hieroglyph - we will
  understand this when
   we cease
       to be
       and finally
         become!

i am amongst them - peerless stars
suffusing all,

in ethereal blackness, love
rises metamorphosed, winged,
  aflutter and a fixed glance,
  it is now the pristine moment
   to go:

   lured into familiar warmth,
  your *******, the breadth of
     your arms, the girdle of
   your weight that hurdles
    the gravity of being here.
  and that as we move closer,
   (in waiting stillness, we
  are the workings of something
   immutable like stone, a clasp
   of hands, the clenching of soul,
  or the always in-hiding dream's
    amazement) i can feel the
   heat peak, tip away and seal
     my fate, unpinning my wings,
     bracing the fall as the
   same stars yield the sonorous and the reticent altogether with
      anonymous eyes wielding
   ceaseless blue stares nailing
     the blackness whole into
   the night's tapestry.

body haul
   in slouching orbit.

   x sight. jesus christ in
              staccato
    running through desolate pews,
     bicycle on sinews of blood
       scraping macadamized walls
         rearing pains
   everybody's a stranger
    in the celestial hall.
  what part of this do you not
      understand?
   i will say it without saying it.
  everybody's a
      stranger. arithmetical concatenation of stringed lies,
       chalk faces smile at me
   through heads of tacks;
  midnight's passover:
      before dawn, its eyes
     squinting at something
   named demolition -
this evidence of stolen-into-place.

blood now is the accoutrement.
night's tenure is the morning's
leasing: what will continue to
  light like a beacon in this
    vicissitude is the flash
    of a *****-nosed nozzle.

no sound is heard.
no bones were felt
trembling.
all the voices were muffled,
thrown into a makeshift exodus.

the pains will be etched away
like moss unraveling the secret
of wall upon wounds like old scarves.

but the ground,
which has girdled this resounding feat, will never forget:
death's squadron enters. harbingers.
what has hidden them in the lull
has now sung severances:
a distance closed
by a fusillade
of bullets.

awaken love in me
gently. fallible.
     spontaneous.
     alive.

laying beneath the sense of each
word is the armistice
  of mind versus heart
  of body versus stillness
  of sound versus silence
  of distance versus proximities.

this long-winded gasp of breath
     holding on to gravitas
     keeping things in their
     designations.

or this desperate hum of quietude
     yearning to be noticed,
    concealed in immense portage
     flowing to be bequeathed
     to cupped hands and touch
      a face callow. mild. tender.
  
like water falling again
    and again in repetitions
     memorized - permitting
   desire to utter plainly rendering love's easy, breakable structures.

it is many things
     solitary -- through ripeness
    and rawness, through the
      locomotion of dancers,
     and sensibilities of
     quiet tongues.

it is the many things you
    give alone, its persistent comma, its continual ellipsis.
    the inundation of delineations
and the gravity of its punctuation.

  with its fingers meandering
to touch a soul's lifted ether,
or simply to hush and still
  repugnant waters - astonishing
all nebula with its largeness.

it is so many intentions,
   yet, a single iteration.
  inveigled are the white shadows
of walls streaked with black light.

  what
     is
       it?

it is perhaps an impending collision,
   to no soul's severance:
it is the meshwork of grace
     or foolishness;
  it is the working of the word
from so many lovers and singlehandedly nailing us to our
    stationed cicatrices.

love's epigraphic, weightless,
   no more than size of
      a captured wave in net
  of stone: concealed in an eye's
     limitless space.Q

looking at you,
a succinct tiding's working.
like a consenting tryst:
let it float with a voice.
like remembering the dagger
that has bestowed the cut,
or the dew that has, with its
aqueous hands,
drawn the grass closer to
the unearthing of things.
or a kiss and its deep scarab
in the red hue.

just
let
it
do
what
it is
ought
to
do.

this here
is written
in millipede strobe.

you mirror
the one you
  love.

it is when her hands reach
for unresponsive things
that yours too,
quavering, unknowing of the expanse
of things that seemingly draw close
in killswitch pace
that you find yourselves
dissipating swiftly like
snow tumbled across waiting tapestries.

it is when her feet go without
saying that there is a
clandestine traverse of unspoken
truths and disrupted images,
that your find yourself waxing,
beaten away from the track of
the force that beats us back
to glass.

look at us - with eyes in the
doldrum of things that mean
everything, like how breathing
is default in trial, like how derby
is expendable in the flurry
of indefatigable trying,
like how i slowly,
naked and dripping,
kiss you through waters redundant
in its resounding call.

it is raining in my side of the
   earth
and where light slips away,
ensconcing with its lackadaisical imprint, is the morning: pinnacles and then topples
    into
acontinualeveningwherewordsrunandbreathscometoa      sudden
                  halt:

in the same intimation,
your lip's crepuscule
or your commune's crescent,
  in my side of the earth
    from yours, hurled out
the many sinuous fingers
   of water and the lamp's
  palpebral flutter.

it is like a juxtaposition to
idle trains of fading or
a transcendental manuscript.
death of a man foretold
in every syllable.
i could be gutted out of
and displaced into the dearth,
in doing the dailiness of this life.

in the eventide, when these
walls lurch in, sizing me down
in sleep's hyperbole - a mere chasm
or say, nothing but a gap in
continuity, there is something
that is within striking distance
when you first wrote:

"Truth naked as a shaved dog."

it is your mind's paradigm
that has passed a torch to light
my way through the labyrinth.
it is like your deaths take my deaths.
it is when you pursue the trellises
of all-telling lies that i take
to learning, the belligerence
of wars and the tearing of the heaven in midnight's augury.

it is like you are haplessly
trying to teach me something
without voice.
without life's syllabus.
the only common prognosis
is that i have a sediment of
your soul through litanies
and you do not know me nor
am i a captive in your peripheries.

the wind takes your words
with it -- limping like
wounded creatures or perturbed
unions of cicada, flying away
are also these words
searching for asylums.

we have fallen right
through the hurl
of this inner breaking.

    it is like we have collapsed
    into a twine of hands -
    spoken before the flowering
    of the twilight.
    we have awakened before
    the petalled corolla of the
    moon yields the peril of
    this void's statelessness.

in your eyes,
  so much in you is stellar.
  a florilegia of waxing images
   burning at the tip of this
    lunar flare, derailed from
   their orbits and left trundling
     in the vacuity.
in your eyes are the moon
   and the sun, the twist in
their shared iridescence,
   birthing out all your stars.

let us be contained
in our squared circles.

and join the many
forgotten things.

let us revel in the
flight of misfit dust
and partake in the soiree
of dancing alone.
let us only hear the words
that gnash through the teeth
of oblivion's gaping mouth
and like a hollow jar,
let us be only that - flowerless,
waterless, aware of space
and weary of forgotten capacities.
let us startle them
if they find us in unsettling sleep
and in their somnolence
we will saunter the avenues
of indecipherable finitude
  and not shrink
at its accompanying terror.

sleep
drops
on
your
body
gravitating
toward
the
embellishment
of
­dreams
and
then
running
off
into
a
reality
chiming
the
bone
to
ma­ke
sound
in
soundlessness
to
knit
the
walls
together
threadbare,
­loose
free
as
a
body
is
like
flotsam
sprinting
back
to
sea

the explanation of it
sinks deeper yet it is rare without
any manifestation.

it is difficult for me to
unlatch the locks
and throw away the keys
into an unknown abyss.

the hot star and
the apple of moon
now rise in the distance.
tonight, there will
be all that is troubled
and no solace could ever *****
us in its promise.

it is the ending of things
and right even before
its emergence, you can feel
it in the way things play
themselves out like a
premeditated plot or a fool's
unchanging ploy.

the wobbly table, stirring all
glass and fluids -
the soft rumble of the feral
over the rooftop -
the remaining enigma of an
unfinished epistle
teeming with infinities -
the door left ajar by
the tenor of wind -
a raked tumble of singed leaves;
the swarm of cocooned light
over the bland asphalt.

i have seen hands lose their
taut grip upon things they swore
with ease to never let go
as a dog is wan without its
asphyxiating leash,
as a bird is free without
the conundrum of metal,
as we are both
free
as though we do not know each other - fretting for answers raw without
questions, or scurrying through
the fixation of so many pleasures
just to diminish whatever it is
that remains insatiable, or holding back the flight of things
and consigning them to slow exeunt.

the world underneath
the thatched bowl
of night
is waiting for
vernal beginnings.
sleep is
transit.
dream is the
locomotive.
the wind blows through the window
with a sequence of perceived ends.
my only moon reels through
  everything's impending newness,
  trailing a far-flung equinox.
clock's fulcrum turns a page
  and the now dislimned words tumble, scouring to be seen but
   denied of emphasis.

if only we could singlehandedly
blow each of the candles on the
night's banquet, we wouldn't be this restless in waiting.

Dear You ---

you and i -- and only two,
under the lightsome dome
and spurious light.

let us write
and laugh. let us not be hasty
with our speech.
we have immense responsibilities.
let us, wield the words
as though maiming beasts
in their predatory sleuths,
let us make them our own
and let them go
in paper white with pains,
awash in the delusion
that only our sweetness
could give us freedom.

you and i.
let us watch the rotund of
our words and their silent billows.
let them start the bells
in our lonesome cathedrals.
let us be unsafe in the dangers
of our boldness. in simpler connotation, naked - not in skin,
not without drapery,
only in straightforwardness
that they will all, who read us,
be brave enough to laugh too,
and start with their own words,
the impossible.

it is like you have
existed before i,
and in the darkness,
your lightness beckons.

it is like
your bright body has
mapped the secret roads
to unearth my bones
and scale them
to love's density.

it is like
the wind under every flight,
girdled to the height
of laughter lifting in moonlight,
never falls
never shatters.

it is like you have drawn
a line between
body and soul and every night,
when all lights have swayed
to their prisons,
you cross the border
where we both meet,
body
soul

in the
equinox.

the moon follows
with its silver hook

a fish in the water
swimming through
the debris --

when i am in the avenue,
  it sleuths in similar pace,
its nearing blear
   in my window.
its distance
   in the thoroughfare.
  it shines its
  white face, presses its
  luminescent hands
   the size of two worlds against
   a jungle of fraternized lamps
   stealing all light
   creating the dark's progeny:
      a shadow enters frame.

only the mellow moon
knows the loneliness of
my melody.
the wound of my tempo.
and sometimes it sings to me
through the embellished amaranth
of starless sky: its dull crescent,
dips its voice into my being
   creating ripples.

and through all worlds witnessing
  its tight clutch in the distance,
  choking all that is lost and
  sends it back to its
  origin, is i and the moon.
  our secret entreaty in all
  the windows of the world,
  gazing at each other,
  romancing pains.

| masalub-on |

to bellow
is far better fate
    than silence.

what the world never hears
will be forever buried.
the muteness encompassing
all our states has its way
of burying things and emblazon
them with nothing but monuments.

nobody hears a creature
  when it is wounded
  in the dark bramble.

nobody sees the crossing
  of birds at dawn,
  and if you do,
  you'll never know the
  memory of their flight.

nobody knows the existence
  of rust in the gears of
  a train slumbering somewhere
  in Buendia. the resilience
  of its song, the allegory
  of immutable abeyance.

all matter consigned to odes.
punctuated by time's manuscript,
and all derivatives of sadness
   mean only this:
      
        it is time to go.

it is all too sudden
without preparation

when i start to write.
say for example,

the night waxes
superior over everything.

verdigris walls emerge
vandalized by breakable light
and the sounds ever so small
in the hollow belly of
this evening --

like a flowerless jar
and i am to put in it,
words the structure
of roses.

something
like
this.

i am vis-a-vis
with the wuthering truth:
perhaps,
why
we are flourishing,
we are colossal
in our
dream
is because
our realities are
small
and that our frailties roar,
bludgeoning us to our
minuteness.
it is our fate:
in the dungeons of sleep we
burgeon!
    -- as though we do not wish
   to wake up to what bitterness
     rises with us in waking.