Help me shatter this day. Our bodies make
transitions unbearable. All of us here hiding secrets. By design,
we are silent. It takes me days to fully sing.
                 We think walls are our doing, bridges our undeniable shame.
  There are things following me: the bird soaring, another one flat on
   the roof, and the other atrill on umbilicus of powerlines.
  This day is composition – let this day atonal. From where I sit,
  daily pursuits key in difficulties – eyes closed deep but not aslumber,
  are purblind: gauge me in this order: feel the world scabrous like Braille. In a world of continuing
  breakage, what is there to hold together.
                If not, a debris pattern. A held rigor in suffering – there is that
  crisp, sweet taste in the air again like some air winding out of ***.
  Look at me through dappled windows as reflection of an oncoming storm.
    Help me splinter this day. Placate my tremor of, and fasten me dearly
set beyond the grooves of this day. I teach myself a coruscating example – to reach for
  and break. To stop you climbing, plodding your way to a conclusion,
   waylaid you in your place and summoned your fiddling of chance – the duration is
lined by obeisance towards an endorsed situation issued, not accrued.
                  We are somewhat conveying this burden to equal our weight. Must we
  be afloat, what hoists our rebellion? What must we be
       to endure,    to witness these wondrous beatings ballast our gravities,
          no warning of, and against reliance. Is our being here what we determine.

All bleached. Sweating a spindrift. Senses dumb like a blunt arrowhead.
It is time again when liquor cuts like paper. I have weak means,
weaker skin. Wanting to strip home of stucco. Fails to, is white like clinic.

My measures to fret an end: books unopened, left yellowed. Some old cigarettes
my mother keeps a keen eye on, does not hurl in the trash, permits me
accepted death, the body taking a toll in this house. An empty wine bottle
corked to contain the drone of this animal. Pills I do not understand, only
touch the symmetry like a wife. My own shattered histories throbbing,
operating in the hollow dome of this

   some words when fated, do not reach their fathers. I have
many sons by this. My laugh bends like metal. Celan bellows trust the tearstain.
Body curled to a note impinged by conductions of this electric music. Listening
to myself confess as walls watch my back.

There is no reason for the wind
to maneuver

propagate cold in this province.
sullen this progeny when they declared

it so. The hue of it stark, dispersed.
What the hands pass on

as something with limit,
an azimuth reached.

The found body in tow, what season
limits this chance? This serene boy

catching up with a sullen, walled-in image
handing over a bent shadow

to knife this life. This economy of utterance
for I have no duplicate of your town.

I wait for it to arrive in this segment,
when time becomes impossible

a task to endure. Falls away, never settles,
searching balance – grasping what you speak.

What of her, bags packed and then unpacked later on
when they denied you of entry. You did not make it past
the deadline, or before it was purely yourself necessary to
incidence. You intersect, moor yourself to the center
of transactions – the force and shape of it, your tired image
sauntering past weathered windows.  The sound of tickets
being torn caused you trembling – doors held for body,
    hinges a hand-signal, error communicating through neglect
you didn’t listen to him, because he did not tell you
of its necessity. You were a day late as many others are,

almost a bullet hitting,
a crash postponed,
death by biting the barrel.
      Two lovers hinting at each other through open windows,
  hands are doves waving, parting the evening, almost this
  paled technique of fate to put you in a place you do not want.

But what to realize after, when all of this is nothing but
a disorder. They cleared the throat and gave you something
to remember: denied. Loose without a threat, even.
   A sensitivity so endless felt through volumes of people
  walking past metal detectors with smiles plastered, framed,
  crawling deep inside the mouth of it. The idea of   towards

a destination that is now far within reach, beyond the order
of things. You are one brash mistake away from assault.
That promise of a waiting bed in another country. Let alone,
the taste of the land burning what leftover Sun there is in the mouth,
  made you lose sight of, and now it is raining all over the city
  without umbrellas.

Ad astra

1
From the city I know you were from,
building up the perimeter in summer – it was plenty searing.
Must when I found the town already, triggered and almost accomplished,
searchable signs for searching parties involved like grass on the lawn,
scraps on an empty lot – when in summer it got very hot
and your salt smelt of the sea crushed in between my territories, start the word.
Flesh deems it so in frame, walking with us this very evening crafted
   by a waking remoteness.

2
When it rains, build this city from here on – relieve it of its terrors.
The memory of an old cathedral being burned down to the last cross,
the volume of prayer genuflected within pews, or anything that was hieratic. Rain in the
afternoon was what your entire ocean meant to me, crossing its span of promise,
   sure of its weather. Rasp the skin tight like gears fine-tuned. Borrow its heat when
   it drizzles. Do you remember my face when you pass by familiar pavements, stalls,
   hospitals drenched in prognosis? The even flutter of a bird? What does this question seek
     but your truth – like an elastic map stretched to infinite directions.

3
Here is where you were named darling. Taut your name had it belonged to someone else.
Sharp were your features. Your definitions smooth. Your textures visible with difficulty.
                       When you wore denims rising from the cuff of your knees you showed
  me a blotch and other fraternizations. Moles as variables. Your body as graph. My senselessness,
     somewhat a trying delineation. Thousand fingers mesh altogether to formulate rescue,
   mind a garden of salvage enough for two. Or underneath the sphere of a body,
         neither rain nor sun could stop to flourish me completely. Yourself full of
  symmetries – the universe cut inside and out, trimmed to lasting – ubiquity, inhabiting the temporary.
         I transact with this darkness yourself containing light, like a window to your home
when you’ve moved on to a different continent, I myself staring right into as if the whole space,
    in search for a singular glint I could make up for a cluster
                            to make an elusive thing such as you walk backwards, from the entry, just before the guardhouse, to meet me.

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.

So much laughter perhaps in front
of the console

If when we hand over what was given,
we are inconsolable.

Assume this position when
reaction is demanded:

You could, a massive day.
You could, a spectral of night
daggering into the forthcoming of nakedness  that was your title,

enmeshed, and then in a moment’s brief charade,
        torn apart, contained within four bedposts and a notch
        for a shimmering body lined with a peregrine skin.

how much it cost you, putting a face in this profile
    losing the document from flinging in the last time over and over
  as if we do not die only making copies of it each day

a    page is  turned not over but crimson  with   blame,
forging a lie  about  every  gilded moment  as  if  touch could  end it so

                      this day collapsed into a breath’s span crossing rivers.

Exhaled when sexed up a hole in a thing
particular is this day surprisingly surpassing

without end, if when volatile
consider stasis; ripples initial a signature

on plainclothes this Sunday. Silenced
his fist over dinner, this raconteur of beginning

splits to an end tracing a line between
stiffened    voice prior to   mouthing it so:

we have nothing to do here but absence zeroed
in like a marksman. Rendered it full

to a trembling gait stooping over parallels,
put it inside a box and hem it into a trundling vessel

send it to the edge of sun gruff with fever
   your derelict day inside this news.

We fumbled within ourselves as how I came into myself purely coincidence
     a repetition of a fleeting truth, or an elusive thing in its flight,

   let music remain in echo
                                         let  real be a reprise of tenderness
    let this patent be owning up to, a conscious enterprise its own   frailty
           do so let this body
            sing:

I am cold-blooded, I am metal, I am completely aware of presence,
     this elliptical voice keeps hunting rendering it false, breakable – this machine

    taking place over  navigable portions   of  myself when I trickle  down,  awaiting
       a prophecy:   we   only have what is now,  aspiring  for  the possible
            a glimpse   of   a thing   hiding, approaching  an  anxious   story

taken  as  hand   me  this  structure,   haul my body  out of,   break into,
       end  it  beautifully.

The poem was something in me a land
   beginning its history and I dug.
        a wind carrying a dove, en route
     a reachable reality stretching, floating towards

        a  tree whose body is its own frightened muting,
   a shoreline lapped by repetitive waves
     that is the poem, trying to erase what has been
   long  engraved in the sand, sand in between its
  very small distance housing  the salt of this wound,
      an addressable stream -- a signature of the
   not-so-distant past, which aches I trust to live.

How i found you frozen in this city
but not desolate. You have everything
else tethered to a string -- pull, fathom, decree
    it yours. Say when to stop, but not falter.
Push yourself over the edge none to break
   the fall but you. When sensations reach
 for the viscera, choose not to break.
 Coagulate like shattered glass in the banquet,
 labor as it were forced by default. Resign
 under makeshift places we haven't slept yet. A couple

          of  accidents made of yourself, some familiar
 things brought over supper. Your father will smile
 at the completed sight of you. Your mother I saw
 picking fresh apples from the stand, your face
 this evening juxtaposed to the many lights of
 this city. Yourself would manifest a pavement,
        stretched like a corpse I sleep in the gutter.
From the city which I found you what else
      are we but to wane.
   We   curve    in   this   curve. Let me  finish
 bent   as  small as  a question  mark starting
 
   with   perhaps:  perhaps they meant it
       perhaps they  saw it  coming
   perhaps it   was  i not  you
            perhaps  it is  morning and  birds spry
    everywhere   speaking.  perhaps it was you outside the  rain   burning

                    ending, concatenative else it was
        merely I trying to explain   to  a  grievous fault.

there is a way to part from
                   what separates us | converse issued
  by this curious distance |  toying with the
           proposition at sundown |  where to go
    when  you are home |  look at me across
          the eye and  see  copies

              true  breaking  in mirrors between
    shards  graphed  and  measured   go
           through me  you say  where   are  we  now
     that  we  have  gone?

        i  am  all  your   textures   shuffled  by
        hand    all  your  susurrus  folded   slid
        underneath    my   tongue   --  messages
        through a fusuma of teeth  piercing  air:
        breath mine to your  own mine  still  past
       clouds   in   dizzy   formations   head   northwest
        where  you belong, i sleuth  but  not demand
        an  opposite  of   presence, much palaver
       when it is thrown out in the  open  bare as
        a  shaved  beast
 
       how  does  a memory   walk   in  stilts
              past  cities   dreaming  impish
        with   a    proposal

      let      us      flee --

1 Method:

Witness nothing but the body
    hurtling at best, if not dilapidated.

Cusped in space, never held.
Behead the music,

    if not the conductor.

It will happen when everything has
  expired in the threshing.

Wring me pure, make me delicate,
  chain me in the wrongness.

    Embody this figurine pierce it with stem
  break it gossamer as petals imperiled ad infinitum
       sleek as a metaphor rising from rinsed perfume.

2 Chance Operation:

  Say when she caresses / this mired  setting:
  it is   of  preparation.

  Seize this mean when preparatory.

 Turn you as inside-out cleared from veiling.
  In a vitrine you wish to be freed from,
  examined, never granted meaning;

  Mundane the discovery.
  A throb of fever gone from tepid bath
  walking into space, abled.        

  Acute blunder is study, wash me with theory.
  Sullen is the word for it, entitled to acute error.

  Say when    it  ceases,
   tranquilized. Never waking up, fastens to

3 Dreamwork:

  Always still is the heart.
  I envy the water midstream. Fingers partition
 
   when infiltration is sure of. A conscious removal
   merits the continual of lobotomies.

  Augur this dim presence, make it raw again
      infallibly, make it my body. Forge my skin out of
   and  listen to  it. Feel the drone   of  this machine

   making space less tolerable. This begins
      an end, but of what pursuit is this here

   always  a  vision Blinded  by   definition
         away    from   here?

Precision is everything. Bodies will be accounted
  with accuracy, one by one, and then all. Buried
  in the  chaîne opératoire.   Aplomb simmering
  in the sinews, cold as metal. Daylight will collect
  all that is disposed. Twilight will erase the monuments as cathedrals gorged, fat with prayer
   but before this, what impetus?

 Shot from the in-between, hip and pelvis.
     Surpass something from the peripheral:
 There are fugitives   conquering   secret places.
     Behind tense trees is the sought-for  enemy.
  Blinding light as   shot from  a hollow chamber
    the size of a dilated pupil: in a flash, 
             paraffin smearing   the  languid   visage.
   Hold   your   breath   and do   no harm
    to statistics.
               Nothing is  sure in   the   blotched minute.
    Stepping    on    bones    like  twigs,  names
        identical,   faces   disguised by    elements:    fire         as   sweat  and   blood.
         Air  pernicious   as   unheard   call for  mercy.
     This is   water:   the  one   who has  crossed
         the  river, close to   touching  the hand
      of   god.   Earth    a   trembling    grave.

      Words   roam as  should there  be  always
  in a  body, a  dazed  ornate  for a tractable  beast.
     You are here    for  passing. Prayer  is  intolerable,
    mind  the  sound  later  in newsprint. We  are
       the  same  muck   plastered   to stucco. It  rained
    ballistic  somewhere  between    the   sure-footed
         paper and   the   drawn line:

     They word it here as aletheia.
      The victims still unidentified.

In between,
     nonplussed   punctuations. Home  will  be  empty,
        if  not    for   candles. Carry   this   diadem
    across and    place  it  over the  helm of this
       broken   skull. Save   later   the  days for
     remember:  let  elegies perform nomenclature.

     Counterargument   was   day  if blinded
         by   intrusion. It has  happened,
    indelible.   Marked  by coordinates,  likened
    to   where  body parts  must be.  Unchallenged
       to  dismiss  the  derelict:  never to   return to
    geography.

          Dust on the ground.
          Rusted this  morning:  a bond broken into,
         the alloy  of an unknown   body
        breathing in the austere air of who   defied
            the incidental.
        It  will
     never     wear  off.    There
         is     only     reminder.

Remember when we
cannot remember anymore,
the Sun shining through
windows sealed shut,
when we talk about it
we do not talk about it, we call
it with a different name: aberration.
I cannot remember you anymore
so small and languid in this
life. Everything pales in comparison --
offered by chance, filled with hesitancy
as if obligation, emptied by coming
into the fullness of it, saying it as a plump word
with the same accuracy of knives
tucked within the soft recess of the kitchen
counter that same day, you were different
as any other when we cycled through
Alexandrite Street, the world new again
like we were born in the similar moment
splintered by much less of a force waiting
outside the black gate of the home, and so
much more of a name slipping away
from the cliff of my chafed lip onto your
body's sustained pit, the drop barely an
indent, only as if of limited exertion but
possibly a weight for us to solder
through and through. I told you I could never
indulge into the fray and hold armaments
of it, but twice-told this battle I can
fit in: you, my accoutrement for war,
hallowed you are in excess of flow and march
through rain and light smiling through
opened windows with a blank circle of lightness
that is your face held close and memorized
before taking the commute home, force-equipped
with time's persistent pleading and our
untoward compliance like a reciprocal of stiffness:
you are the wall of your home and I,
a suspended pendulum with a dumb clockhand
     in a stalemate.

if yearns
  to be  kept as  is
  a thing holding   itself  together
  traversing a straight  line.

  pause as if insistence,
  breeds space, pretends   as  if one
  if not   halved,
  severed,

  stills itself  to  a  portrait
  facing  the   mouth
  of a  door   that shuts   itself
  to   the   future,

   reopened  like a  wound
   foretold,  dragging with  it
   the  lassitude  of a  detritus.

   memory
       has    a    force
    compel  me  to    compress
        my    voice   to    silence,
    memory of  a   face
    by   sundown,   the   moon   in   its
       throne   subdued,   kept   afloat   by   a net
    of      stars.

   memory      it    is
      a  force it  cannot   name,

   forcing   open    this    held    peace
      does   not know   how   to
   break
   
     a   fall
   but   only
      break.

worthy of impedance  over time.
cause of this   space is to
   deliver me sleep-shaped. exit lights harbor
   sounds of the coming into just when you are
   born and raised, held completely
         against light    favouring  the source.

undenied, the demand   of   this
     assemble.    in any given climate, moderate
       but will not touch ground.  frothing elsewhere
    true  life, once again this   machine: in between
  labor     and     rest  is   the impossible.  to reach
     for a certain ****** midair. height is  palpable
  and will   rinse   flesh anew, how  urgent
      before i decompose   into   blue shear
         in   sky   face to  face   with   the
   all-too-immediate    rasp    of   ground  pulling
      together,  cast into   the  unloved  water
         breaking    apart   like  mesh   unwanted.

he   is  over   space   and this   is
     to    measure   warmth,   when execution
  is    the     verge  of  undoing.  so  barely-living
    and   claiming  it   so,   the   cause  of this
      performance
           is    to  free    the body |  
    making  past the  divide, careless and  almost faced
      beyond   a forthcoming   of  rescue:
    have escaped, have gone   and   already here.

1

held  against   the mouth
  sentenced cleaved to silence, what is around me
 is all this is: wire. quartet of birds. aqueduct
 as arrest and close range tap of rain on face
 rippling in the eye foreclosed and reasoned is
 this image's return -- what is it like to live
 far away from home and not hear me say
 regret as study of attitude? News carried
 bombardment of inner cities. We were hesitant
 to leave place and borrowed skin instead,
    if not borrowed then grasped for, what is the answer? if coordinates lie, what are
                   we trying to discover.

2

held  against  the  temple
   not a barrel of a gun, but similarly, a chamber if not
  a mouth breathing in sulfur. the day has spun
  out of, and in between clipped reminders of
    the calendar:
   today's broken notes on the tablatures are
 the daily. Do groceries. Pick the freshest fruit,
   take the sour out of the scale. Gut the fish
 and not word it so over the kitchen counter, I will
 watch behind a clutter of earthenware and furniture. Might topple the glass
     once and catch your attention. I do not deny your
  effect     on   my  soul.

3

  today's forecast of rain   is body staying in.
  the children are seized by terror as scattered displays    of  lightning   paint their faces
       petrified with a lack of hue -- listen to the
 intermittent, coarse static of the television
     when it happens, your face ripe for arrest.
  there   is   nothing to do in  a home
     holding  its  breath  when  you walk,
   do not   leave just yet. the water   is  rising.
      it tells   you   to   stay  in. triple your  presence
  across the  dining,  rain as if out of the  shower
      barely  drying   yourself,   leave  water
    i will    not   drink,  only    test  swimmingly 
      a  dream  out   of   sleep and   so real
       a   twitch of  fish    out   of   ocean.

4

  outside  you are  no longer  than  the   transit
  of   birds   seeking   canopies. Wind   disrupts
  the steady  arm  of   cables. Slosh of water
     from an   oncoming  vehicle  as if  beside  the
   sea crashing into   me   are   waves,

   What need   is   there  when  your   mouth houses
      water, your   *******, warmth?  Contrast as
   habit   of  alternatives. In verbatim, this is how it
    sounded from you, "We  are   very   young.
          Remember me   this   way."

  Now i  wish  voices   could  be bodies. The next irreconcilable   face   as    hearth.
              Fingers   as   assuage,   distance  as  dearth,
      grasp   if  not  borrow,  translatable  to
   signal,  my  body   heeding,   fraught by taciturnity through the   caught  wind
      through the  furniture, once your   body being   groped for like any
     other   sundrenched day.

Proof of the past:
    In November, you were born. Nothing here but stark cold,
   until your warmth. Your presence extolled.
        The mirrors remember your vestige. This is the silence
       that extracts itself then exacts itself in this frame. Sometimes letters

accumulate but remain unfinished. In November, it is all clear.
     I have no use for sordid entrails.

      It is the stone’s duty to be evidence
of situation. Its flight, the sum of all its lost parts,
    say when you speculate over the escritoire over an unfinished meal,

burn altogether and turn to scrap everything even the soft presses on the creaking
  metal of the chair where we almost made love but didn’t because it is a surprise
   that in rawness we are ripe more than ever, making our

     life total, if not equal to an immense fault. You are sometimes

the cold metal chair I conjure.   Sometimes just bleakness.   This uniformity

    seeks riddance.

   Proof of the past as surety to claim:
       In November, this year, they have changed the roads. Detours constructed
to arrive at a certain destination. Faces blur past the old university.
Trees    are  effigies.      Leaves wriggle like   the  curtains of  room  201,  2nd floor,

      I do not know what specimen I have in my hands. Bare in lack of worship.
  Grandeur      is  here
         when   seasons   are predictable.    This is the home and that is where you are that translates
      it     so. A wanted want – a dispossession.

Proof of the future:
                        You know nothing about this place.

A   twist on  the ****  may
   bring about   another  bout    of   setting this   into
the  brightest  contest:

in  the  middle   of  so  many  arrivals
    become   departure
   even   when   coming   into.

Fold   this   abandon   into   prayer
    and  slide it  underneath
  a pillow – your pillow, a  dagger
    to    wage   fray.

lean  toward   the  absence  like  a lover,
  dream   befallen   like  an  unwanted  visitor.
devise  a  plan  as  if  nothing  was here   at play.
   there is  nothing   here  but the

tentativeness    of   space – it may or   may not  happen,
   what  of   it, as if  it is  possible,

our   bravest   reach   to  things   we  recall
  is  our   conscious   error,   pity  our  duty
  if   not   our   image   cast   mirror to  broken   mirror
    shared   is the   damage   blown   by  wind

shorn   out   of   an eyelid’s  flutter,   weaving,
     turned  to    writhe   in   this    mortal   bed

this    day    will     evolve    tomorrow
  and    we   can   say   amid   transition

we     are   coming   to   be,   and   being   as we  have   went
  how,  in   this     frail   wonder

are   we   but    unsure.

words   what   more  than  silence,    criminal
    shaded    meanings   plump like   the  mien  of   a night-strewn    beast.

words   what    more   than   sounding for   it
  the   night   hemming   into,   less  than   a fugitive   by definition

   words   do   I   deny   the   static  of   soul    when   quiet then
          places      the    cholera   in    our  abdomens ?

to   say   when   the   nature  of   the tangent   is   a   voyage
     of   the   story   you’re  telling,    masked   behind  a non-sequitur


  that     does   not   intersect   elsewhere   issued   by
     a   lack.     where    else   are   we   only   slightly   connected

                       when    we    move     to   break   a   point,   or  to   distract

a   face     once   again   foreign, your   name   emerging   as   whimper.
       coming    out   denied.

   words   what   more   than    revenge,    your   sound   less   than an alternative
            bandwidth    confusing      its     meaning

coming     out    undisguised.

Tangential   is  this  dispersal
  of  things.

Greased   like    chain
slipping  from   the   curve
of  the neck

it   is
mundane   that hands
  have no   sense   of control
and  abandon
  is kin

as in  a   home
  furniture is   desolation
made absolute   by
  a   visitation.

better   it  is to
know   the finest   day
  is  only  death  in the  afternoon
like   piecemeal metamorphosis.

Nothing  like
this     oblivious  day.

It is     dawn again in the periphery.
   Slowly beings a rehearsal.

A furious want only brought
the tint of the sky down to its last trinket.
Glides over air – resigns under dissonant skies.
First angle: tiptoe. I admire your machines.
   Second: a song for no one to hear but your presence
          my adulation sings with.
   You are a farewell for no one.

The cotillion undone under pirouette of Suns.
Music still for the mouth to bloom,
awakened at the edge of the world
that tastes nothing like metal.

Housed in reliquary assumed by the hands,
   committed to duty:
  contain the coryphée – body revolving, breath held to count,
  how many days expire to bring

back    the  black of   night.

Death among other deaths as the hour becomes moist
   by the rage of oncoming minutes. The scent of rain lingering
   everywhere – here from the end of the most sullen sight
   flaying the document.

This among the cheapest of things – to find the beauty
   gone in all things. I am reduced to turning moments
to body parts – people to signals, currents, beacons;

        you   are  the  arms  pressed   within   monuments.
eyes   crushed   in  glare   this very catatonic     second
      in   flash   gone,  whoever    lies   in  the  parking lot   with me
         the feet   that have gone     missing.

    name-recall passes as clearing. Close protocols
     to   guard a well-oiled machine
         beheading the avenue.    This anomaly

   is the common thing within stains   trading
         cleanliness among     fabrics we  are cut  from   the
      same      origin: now    let    rain.

Pale, divine light clothing
a hundred people laying like carcass –

a thick fist of people
   punching into the system of failure,

unrelieved, dismayed. Faced with
  downfall, tracing point A to B without

any other in tow but luggage,
  they annulled the flight so we pull

an escape when it rained – it taught us
where to hide, where to run,
what to do when we are soaked in sound
of rain pummeling the rooftop,
what warmth to share

on a bed meant for two with
  only one     dent.

I.

I trace you against
the skull
with the old photograph of

age 8 and 7

aloft and angling down some stage, or performance

in
this perforated dome I call home

trace you against
the map impaled to the wall
and locate you amongst the
geographies and heed
its brash distance

shake out its potency
like how my grandfather murders
the brief matchlight

I trace the trajectory
will not pivot to return
or scope rescue

none like this force,
the insufficiency of maps,
the harsh terror of adoration when
like a fruit ripened

will fall to the hand waiting
underneath

II.

    Propel me to where it counts

into the masses transit-worn,

shorn out of the flyblown-dry in amazement
or immense performance of breaking

outside the window
when it rains forever

to Icarus in his blunder,

from the dilated pupil of my father while
   watching television

from point-break of time
  and sense when nothing made one kind word
as salvation

out of the tangle of clouds,
    the skytilt angle where heaven might topple
at one point to scatter my reckoning of a god

from your place of interval

III.

space – where you will it,
when the night shining in,

          far are the noctilucent skies
  place me in the soft ease of beds when
   burial is ideal

make me ****** than light at first glance
    or water upon initial drop

and then in space, where you will it,
    promise-tender, drunk in shy altitudes,

this most biddable machine will spread to make way
    for weight giving in

to assume so small a drop of the pin in the ocean
   or to cannonball – fitting  chamber of a gun,
  
swimming in a mess of no restrictions,
  prepared, contained to carve deep

in the night writhing in with him
  with no need of hands to break point.

At noontime, it is severed,
just like in any other time. The walls no longer flounder but
                        crucify the ground or vice versa. Sunlight floods
   bodies of rocks. At the height of illumination, there is no process
   adequate to describe. The bramble of illusions swerves to allure.
   Drunk in the surprise of the founding: the rusting roof from the nearby
   school still there. Solid as entity, fluid as trance. Deep with the phantom
   pain of it, I feel its drone marauding with even-inflicted sharpness of memory.

This is how far you’ve already gone, towards the invisible charm of falling apart.
   There is an opening that is left behind. I found it here,
   in the chasms suspended in an open field drawn together
   in the alternative. This is all that you’ve ever lost.
  Reclamation is a sure defeat. Retreat, you said but didn’t.
   Straining towards this ruined object.

    This will not wait you out. It casts its weight over my hands
   struggling to take picture of, imperiled as if these unsolicited quakes contain
        the image within a broken frame. Strife deep within a sense of responsibility
  is to show you what was left – everything but wasted origin, demeaned by
                             the disintegration of, to suffer the penalty of decision.

To face the wall than each other, revealed in some place known.
                                      All the junk of this requiem reused as deficiency.
   Elsewhere it could be another thing, but to me nothing but a net
   to falling, limbless creature, or a basin to the water of surrender.
  It aspires to be something, to be another story of, to be a room of disappearance
    is what it is to me – across the kitchen sink mapped out near the cupboard,
     or the tiny, mincing steps to your room, the posters scattered everywhere like
   avatars. The partitions still exist dividing real from illusory, far from near,
     a luminescence or opacity – still dragging along the detritus, strophe by strophe,
                     rearing the intensity of artifacts but none found.

How does this breathe with no life? How do these ghosts ambulate
      in the bare and naked space when horrors wish to be unseen? How this wishes to be
  unperturbed in media res, and how it dissolves to be now, infinite, is substantial
                to tragedy. To be consoled by nothing but the pure sight of a once dwelling.

Hang a picture of you in the wall. The wall the bears no foundation. This recall.

I.

Time elapses, clock’s dumb head says it all.
                   Not you. To lose sight of. X is where you stood,
           and this is where you will begin without my grace.

   Imagination as toll, if a thing hurtling is to punch into
        the wall defending you, what sound will startle? Imagine marionettes
           moving to no strings. A god sitting on top of our heads, like a pin
       to commence a fractal of dance. If this dance is memory, we know its accuracy.
      But what is its color? I tremble at the thought of your feet
                         setting in pale soil. I may have answered.

II.

   It joys me to be wrong, when the gorgeous agony of pain
            is what binds us together. Each to each, the real time not any longer
         hers, but mine of only difficult pattern. Let me revel in this heroism.

III.

   Things continue to move as I do not. Starting at the center, sure to break
     hem. I ran out of words to name this. Not elegiac. Perennial but short.
              In all extensions, elastic like water. Hairbreadth as in none other but plunge,
             drowned in a marvelous catch. In my hand, a piece of the moon
   twitches, drifting as a signal of life, in a certain mode
                               of hearsay: in the night she thinks of  you.

IV.

   I grant light to things but they cannot see its father. This room is anxious of
its vicious clutter. I must move out, beginning with old paint, crumpled papers,
   dust on the ground, shyness of the sheet’s accent erasing its folds from last night.
   Only the kind order is to do and undo.         Time continues from this intermission.
   I write only to regret. I have so much to say
   to you, but never to one another.

V.

           I broke the news without delicadeza. This is resounding of traction. This has us
           naked, crawling towards a predicate. A fine practice of
     moving towards a parallel edge,
     facing different directions when done.
      I broke the news: *I broke. You amalgamate. Time stops. You must continue on.

Hands       places I haven’t known
   in her room taking-light all I have known

groping for some place I haven’t known
     from her   belly once with the life I have    known

of   value, I cross an   ocean I have not known
  to know  my girth   within  her rondure eye   I have known

to live   with   is   a cross I carry to a  hill I  haven’t  known
     seeking    correspondence   from   rocks that I have   known

to be   much  wiser,    in account of what  I have not known
    yet to   be wholly   complete as in ready  for fragmenting   I have known

as   means    to    live   in  summaries I have not known
   to    be  a tracer   of evidence, as if a  search    party    I   have   known

to    be   your  hands  in  all the   places in my  body I have not known
  to    be   sequestered by   the face you   carry all these years that   I   have   known.

For a moment, I doubt your possibility. Like clues to a riddle
    filling its minor gaps. And then, from a seen distance,
    you sidle as if to arrive so sudden, yet slow with great impedance,
    an absence I am familiar of. Next to the sound of the not-so-distant
  I am deaf, wearing the same heavy mask of silence. In sequence,
  when we talk, I am pale wall, I am crumpled flower, I am riddance.
I am the many versions of bad dreams
  rolled in one, deep slumber. Easy it was the first time, when it was said
with precision, the things we were before, set loose in the air. Hard it was
now like a trick I have to unlearn forever. Alighting love a blind journey,
second sight as if responsibility. I watch myself wear out by much dailiness.

For a lifetime, I may, will it short so long then when I must
care less, the freedom, keep your face as instilment, memory, recall. You are
introduced without light; all the more I love the sight, so dark the enigma, gets
lost because distance always is telling of a long path – imprecise the steps, surety
   when feet fall, breaking the bones like twigs. I did not mean to disrupt
     your harmony – that is why dance is always a lack of another,
                             *“Catch the music, love, I must drop movement
   and seek your return.”

Pardon me while I remember.

  when   sight scathes, used upon,
  this glass shatters I love the sight of you.
  in days the Sun trembles
   through a fist of streaming light.
  I can only think of objects the size
    of my clenched hand

  a pear, an empty basin, a flower deep crimson
   between fingers wanting to break
       stem twice-told pains the sound  of it,
   a flat black disk on the turntable bellowing
       sounds of the bones we made in love.

we are mirror
      facing mirror -- our distinct quiet held us
          shattered,

  standing apart, I running towards, and you, from,
     feeling the wind glaze the wounds retold.

/  rivers pulse this house as if activity, predictable.
  leave this body       just like that.
  and heave the emptiness from the thrum
  of the streets         just like that
            the stars delineate an axis tilted by my means
  to live under frail coruscations.
           take this house, take the rivers
           with you, all the more my body
           anything other than my blunder.
   take even, these tiny and immediate currents
   as i hear this is how it is to be delivered from
   grace and expanse.
             you are what this truancy is trying to undo
   as you were by mine before -- this is how
   it feels to be moved and sidled again and again
                     this river that you carry me across and left with details none can supply. there
            is resolve in this, even when I am taken aback,

which certain things are left crossed and wronged,
   and how you keep the place guarded, possessed
        by light -- how it wholly hurts, this invented
       life all mine /

1
What is to break if not another word for
       impossibility, or another phrase as palliative
    for suffering each other

2
What is so sure of it to arrive
     in the densest minute, say when if already
out of sight, I implore you to
     unlearn my body

3
This and the deep and hollow end of it.
      Visage voyeurs as if the past is just next door
      sleeping with my woman, laughs and then cuts
      open to free itself from a slammed door
      and mosey on.

4
As statement to refute my coming into,
   I am already accomplished. Turn this day opaque.
   Lens to the world my found
                    imperative of what was given, a knife
    to stalk a heart so difficult as if known to me
          as a path home, or unearthed bus tickets
    from Longos to Tabang. Say when it rains,
        forgive me. I remember still.

5
To believe in touch and its memory is
    obligation. The way I see this, a palimpsest.
  I attempt to discover something, witnessing myself
  pass mirrors, body found as if rivers do drift
      me to the brink of a high noon wishing
  to swing downstream the words I have
       no use for, if not documents of haloed hours.

6
I passed by your house.
Silence annuls azure skies.
Balustrades gone. They took everything down
    evenly to the last inch of paint,
balmy this oblivion only for me, catatonic is this
      peace as my hands lift a piece of the soul
   to shred. The day burns like a forest in my hand.

I.

On the surface easily gliding,
  are my hands. I keep on the table
  an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
  becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
  a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
  ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
   whose face I can almost touch.
  When let go of closure, air thins and I move
  secretly with fluency. This is how objects
  escape my grip.

II.

  In front of the eatery, a transit.
  I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
  a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
  The face next to me, disquieting the music
   of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
   like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
   another throng of absence. As a substitute
   for beings shackled to duty,
   the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
   borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
   the wind through opened windows.

III.

    Define space as a venue for collision.
    Say when a red-haired woman straddling
    a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
    She ascribes her presence to my footing
    and from where she left off, I take form
    of her expired movement.
                     Found strangeness is that space
    is what happens when remembered. But hold no
    bearing and rear contrivance,
     trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
     the in-betweenness and then transmutes
     an occurence,
             say the volatile shape of a hand when
    clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
    feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
    reticence of a troubling question.

IV.

            A man carries a take away and is now
     amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
     housing a familiar language. Home.
    
      But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
    trying to transact a being angled towards home.
    They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches  the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
             Air once stale, is now succulent with the
      resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
      and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
      home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
         of times the vehicle trundles within
     the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
        with rest. He is home,
     unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
          freed from a vitrine.

next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
     a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
     her body not even the slightest resistance.
  
after bathing when feet barely dried
      leaves pools, like an admission of something.

i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
     unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
     by the neighboor as you confessed one
     April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
         now aged, wind reentering a distance
     like i imagine your hand in my denim.
     spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.

  carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
      wasting its voice to no audience,
  when we crawled from one room to another
       leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
    and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
      across a tablature is music of creaking wood
      and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
     on the bedpost softly sings

              a punishment: now an urge to go back
     yet not knowing which door to enter,
           every surrounding object as witness,
      memorized a minute's completion,
  refusing to map out which way to go.

This old dog out of dogdom,
   in all of bones scattered elsewhere remaining
   to be unseen, hidden in old glory and flushed lives

In all their shapes and sizes they have
   their bow-legs and their collarbones dangerously
   recoiling in and out as if to ****** fully bare
   for me to see -- invisible hands for invisible reapings they go ******* clad else there was wind
    in all rooms winnowing to make good use of
    my time and unhinge the doors to toss them out
    of their senses and into mine
    letting them wear me thin like paint to turpentine,
    in this house that refuses to let go
    of fragrances underneath this cold rondure

I have forgotten how it was to love
    and clad myself fat with flattened foolishness
     not having loved enough to remember their
      weights crushing my bones so dearly feigned
      my eyes and skins love-crumbled and
      positioned to surpass their flow amidst breaths
      held like ******* or my collected body going
      into another's and completely vanishing
      in a thick scent of fluids so virulent and mundane,
       putting a smile on my face and an anchor
      to my wrongness as if to drag along ineluctable
      and loveless down the stream of many names
       i will confess to my first-born son

   so we can fill parks and stare at them once more,
     laughing at how they have broken us.

and so the continually pained
  redressed, sawn-off are fingers

  to halt the clutch of things
  not ours -- pure in the hour of

  restlessness, all oblivious/
  and no such mechanism as dream when

  our tides harbor at shore,
  paled and on bent knees wryly

  seeking plenitude hours compressed
  in uncollected days, in here was uttered

  its rapture of light displaying its luminosity
  of absence, this is what they said it would

  be but did not come to be, seen only
  at a distance coming to intimate terms with

  pilgrims of shadowed cities bearing no
  names. our nakedness to its promise

  do so sing, nothing else but move to
  its beat, alive are we but not too long,

  this interlocutor, for now
  we dig our hands in mud and face the sun.

1

   flumine stretches to the small of her back
as the    clock  slowly    runs off from
         twilight    to   midnight

     perfect time   for    assault   but  undeclared

say   when   tugging of   hair  to expose
     the jugular --  that is   where you plunge
           the  message

          when  biting   the   lip   becomes
        predatory,  when sweat    is   the telling
           trace  putting  the  clandestine, ******

        or  easily   when   hold   becomes   grip
     else it was just   estrangement    face to face
           in the   dark,  cannot  remember   features
              only   textures --  walled up message tongued    in   all   fours as if  a crucifix or idle
           penitence

2

        whoever  was   steering   was   just
    teaching  how    to   hate,   treats as   open and
        easy target,   mapping  out   what   to sequester
           and   authoring   silence    as    acquiescence.

     first trust  is   given  and   is thrusting deeper
   in   hollow   grievance. we have   no   use  for  it
        and so    we    take   it as   the first  step
            out   of   the door  keeping  love unharmed
     only  to be   taken   in  unmindful of   its implosion.

3

       we  then  have   damage   portrayals  as   if
   we   have   a   long divide,  or  a grueling  history,
       hit from our   blinded  sides.  

     a  man   from  another  country   could have  taken    you   from   this  juncture,
        but  he    is   somewhere lugging objects
 he   has   no use   for in   a haul  that was meant to
             drift  him away   from  sheer possibility

   and so   we   remain   here, a promise that things  will  start to exact  relevance, until  then
          we    remain, waiting for    our   smoke to
  dissipate when the last   fizz   of   fire   is sounded.

4

    you   do   to   me   what   i do   to   you
        as  if  polarities   are  clear   reversals
   and   then   back  again   with hope

       so i  drink   from   your   mouth   what i have
given   as   your   body   depletes,   your   fingers
      crenelate as   you     rebuild   your   stronghold,

          my   emptiness a  catchbasin  of  all the
   rain   growing   inside  you,  your  body  swollen,
       ready to burst  and   after   that
           perhaps,      forgive.

1

I  love     the    love    that   loves   to
     insult     the    love   -- so   abject,   giving
berth    to   himself,

  once   i gave    you   modest   figurines
      of    angels    but what    use   are angels
   when wings    are   clipped,  prayers are hindsight
 dashed     with     words     inflamed

    and    once     this   i thought   when drowned
         dies   at    last    but    makes   it as  fish-dream
  sees    the   punctured blue   as the moon  is
      discombobulated    in    the   water  which reminds


        me   of   a  room  so  small, your    face   virginal,
    one   with   white  curtains    flapping   endlessly

2

My      recent    memory    of    drowning:

    A   man    desolate
            trying    some   cockeyed  miracle
  on     beer,  using    a   variety    of    silence
     as    the   world like   a flat   black   disc
           continues   to   show   a  collection
      of      failures

3

  I   am   worried  I might   forget   your  face
  the   next   morning    but   there    is something
      to keep    the    light     from   passing
           beyond   and   not   through but still is
     evident     of   a  day   leaping   off    memory.

4

    My    faintest    memory     of
           drowning:

a     woman     glinting
       under    quotidian     Sun

            quickly      fades,     departs
   from    imagining    this:

      You   know    it    is    bound    to   happen
   and    both    of    you   are     now     drunk
         and   her    face     now    is   the    cold
     brink       of    all   places    so   placeless in   recall


                          and then the world all over, blue,
          deepening, rearing  multitude    currents.

Where else to begin

but from a repetitive scene where
light smothering the fractured windshield
is the face of a mother

and the brute agony
of a totalled vehicle, the countenance
of a father?

But which ruin takes its station
amongst all moveless damages?
What narrative to assuage than appall
    which has not been drawn before,
 say a line to daze the day into genre?

In transit we have no words for it,
  nearly giving meaning to a god and
  fray itself drunk with a lesson.
What space here remains vacant and is
  an invitation to a marred face,
 pressing against the upholstery but makes
 final its formlessness?

 What space is here that sits
     with in an acoustic? This silence again and again,
  a sign of a spectral dawn again and
      again released from what they spit at me

   those who are but vigils in pried open yesterdays
         decomposing from where I lay with them.

"In a room where the truth naked, shining"

                                The body wishing to break
   but cannot    still in fragile pace
            stringing  defeat   so sure in the air

     and rising from salvaged metal
   compressing everything to scrap;

         Every single one mum as water in basin --

   I am    akin  to  all  their   silences.
         What language could run its smoothness
     if not the same voice relishing in the beginning,
        drawing this reticence much more immense,
    commensurate if not death in the afternoon?

           From this room there is the disquiet
    taking form, the symmetry of a knife,
           crushed deep within my plight
            of wanton need. The night's meaning reduced
   to a stockpile of laundry soiled from yesterday's
           scuffle, the same metronomic sound of
  
       the world dropping from a high place,
   my hands dreading the catch from the fall.

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

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

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

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

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

  seeking rest in the next embrace
    awaiting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

preserving the imprint including you.

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

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

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

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

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

now, i imagine the horizon as a point

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

what this line tries to prove is that

an enjambment is a mimesis.

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

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

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

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

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

that aspires to be a poem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that quiet coheres to its inclination to consummation,

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

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

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

this body of work as absence
  and its completeness, volition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

demystification of its transition.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                       starting     measures  everywhere  we   left and   returned –

1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.

2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?

3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.

4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.

5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
   Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.

6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
    And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.

7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.

8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.

9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.

10  Disappearance.

I. You wrote no manuscripts but somehow, whenever I move to inch myself over the sofa, I can feel your soft blow indent me over the edge of this quiet. The quiet disquiets the quiet – is something you would have said over *******, over lamenting the death of a lamppost outside, over wanting to be stranded underneath the awning of a dilapidated canopy of trees outside. Over the slowdance and the turntable, over Belle and Sebastian.

II. I left the faucet running just in case you were to be awakened by a myoclonic ****. It helps to hear the sound of water gushing as it protrudes calmness. I would have intruded you, but your absence first lifted into the vacuity of rooms unspoken of. I inspected the impressions left on the bed and left the tousled sheets as they were. Questions discerned. Answers disarmed. Somewhere between inquiry and certainty, there is a body hauled right out of the alarming bedazzlement. We were both gutting each other as the light from the television spilled right onto our naked bodies, stuck in a fucklock. And then I got up to the slain body of the morning.

III. I muse you over Wittgenstein – separated by a makeshift bookshelf. I felt a revulsion for slender straps for watches. The face you wore that day was white. Now you’re as pale as a July tapestry.

IV. I bought new venetian blinds today.

V. Somewhere along the steep ***** I heard the machination of an arrival. The dogs were randy outside. It must be you, approaching. I fingered the slats to reveal a little source of Sun. It was the daily paper. I have forgotten all arrivals are the same.

VI. If I were to blueprint this house with my sentiments – we would be sleeping apart. Your bed, of cold metal. Mine, of sandalwood. Erasures last longer than revisions. I know your presence as the familiar clangor of the same instruments you use for preparations are the same ones fondled. Right after the investigation, your immaculate neglect transfers itself into a sly translation of perfume from a day’s work, winnowing my faculties.

VII. I made a blueprint of this house with my sentiments – you somewhere in the outskirts of town, I deep within the suburban. I have a question for balconies I do not want to answer. At what height should be a balcony situated? What if the scrumptious fall is but elevation?  Will the intensity of the Sun pulverize the very fixated shadow on the corner of my parched shoulder? If not, should I take the balcony down?

I wanted to revise the blueprint, but no. Erasures last longer than revision – I dream of cities expunged
when the day ends.