What space allows, presence threshes.
Devotions mean nothing but prattle of the neighbor.
We inveigle them to sleuth us, and now we have their
   word pressed against their neck, like a dagger.

In this weather, I have no excuse for blood.
If words were bodies, then colonies here quench before
vanishing in air, with an exasperated apparatus.

What light swallows, darkness heaves.
Devotion is the hearsay of intuit. Sensing out the farcical writ
as though embossed in flesh, here where lines split
across a sure-footed paper. The **** delimits
a famished movement. Nothing like this abstract,
if not collage.
     I know a hand’s intimate framework. Space knows not
a trifle, and presence quick with finitude.
   Here we expose margins and squint at presumed limits.
   In the deepest midnight before we sleep, we crumble at the
portent of the borrowed heat we are to suffer,

seeking underneath moderate climates, this home.
as in any other home, our feet dragged along corridors.
   wander-wearied, our place within ourselves
    we savor with denial.

A cresting wave then descends
and somewhere, distant bells toll.

It is the twilight of the palabra.
Soon word falls at last
when ripened.

Gild this image and come back
sullied. We have no use for memory.
Your presence less than total.

The mutiny of this calling is the
silent margin dividing the dark – how to awaken
the sleeping when dreams sit still as cold chair
punishes the floorboard?

This is how its ripeness was felt.
Surmounting what remains to be, a fixation
of a parched region. Grazed by the crosswinds
in front of the decrepit hut staring with some
kind of hunger for a visitor.

Failure masqueraded as conquest,
gravity of no gravity is but levitation – or the cost of
listening. No sound will be absolved.

In a short instance when to lean into everything,
the round vicinity of the ear and a plummet of hush
reaping underneath a swollen moon,

It was how it was felt, and began
a refusal worth mentioning. What’s seen by the eye
is nothing the hand cannot reach, say the horde of cirrus.
The intolerable sky tender with silence, afterwards we partake
    that one word still nameless.

Like the audible wane of a train
  outside the dank night,
  or the faces in each carriage
  blurred by the most drenching rain
 the next clear face in the dimming
  fluorescent spillage is the face
  of another. Much has been ruined now.
  What is difficult to understand in farewell?
   The stillness constitutes what I know,
   embellishing the vastness around me.
   Of which spaces here you used to occupy,
   all the others that you have left,
   leading to a possible finding, or an easy trace
   of arbitrary -- it is a blunder to seek terminal finish
   making you less than what was preserved,
   perhaps more than what meets my eye
   in sleep and waking. A dream of some sort.
   The voice breaking when heard, resonates
   with revisions of what transpired, as if to
   always flatten a truth -- some voices do this.

Unless you are here for a reason, your presence
  thrusting and thrusting, what for?
  This thing has no name it does not understand -
   its incompleteness, its sleuth for finality. Maybe
   when a hand is buried with a manifold of many
   others in the fall -- to initiate a conflagration
   is to remember it for the first time.
   All versions of the same absence. If you are here
   for no reason, then what for, what use does the
   body subscribe to?

  What about, say, the abundance of Balete had you
   consciously wearing your shirt inside out so as
   to feel placeness? What now that your hand
   fastens my entrails? There is no multiplying
    feeling into truth. We do not know that the Sun
    through the interstices of leaves is a small child,
    or a swift woman. No other answer but rue
    and rage, across our slanted shadows in the
     dank perimeter. Your eyes finagle to annotate
    the bow of my leg. Or the curvature of moon.
    Anything it has in their own, vicious sights
     grappling the flesh now inflamed; anything they
     will ravish completely and leave drained. A wrinkled body of a log, or a forgotten manuscript.

    These are all answers I have to invent. Intuitive,
    unwise, unsolicited. Somewhere, I had to point
     out the differentiating margin between
      speaking too much and conveying so little,
     and the finite amplitude of silence sensing out
     something in you, about you, and arriving here.
     Why are you here? What are you doing? What must I be when you are not?

he is inside out. no time to catch the thrill
   of a ripe morning
               knifes his way through a thick airport mass
   and captures jet-fuel perfume,
      collar squalid as brawling for yesterday,
      in front of the masses is waltz, music is    threadbare, as if left with no choice,
      extricating the sound and all that will remain
      is silence. no more will move the
           body of you, take this river.

  how do i name this assault?
       by remembering.
  how do i exact my revenge?
      by renaming your terror with something
      i have outgrown. say, a roach on the wall,
    or an intense wind turning trees shearing
       the lull.

  you should have disappeared yesterday,
   yet now back with forms these pleasures
    seize. if i were given a reason to abandon
           everything,
    there will be no assault. there will be no revenge.
        only a separate day celebrated by the vital pulse
    of a moist hour, this day, when everything
       should have fallen in place
         but refused to, rivals through settings,
     and slowly begins a rupture.
 
     you are this assault. sounds draw
     naked in the sequestered silence.
     a pigeon darts. the short bus whirs mechanical
      exhaust. hinges twinge like guillotine.
          it is time to go. it is Saturday.

To watch with intent but not desire, his life passed
     him on as he tries to explain which one he
     would take to the afterlife if there is such,
like a convergence at the tip of the horizon or a
     humid evening in Pasay as pyrotechnics scrape
     sky fashioned like acrobats. The breeze he needs
     no longer. And then begins to disquiet the quiet
    with the heavy burden of which he will then forget
    when he starts to move all of a sudden in space,
       capitulating afterlife again if there is such,

 and if everything takes a sojourn into the bleakness, must I remind you that you are all
     variations of the same absence. Remember when
you had your name carved on wood as attendance
    but not for long. You have escaped, locked in the
       arms of a life that you thought was yours but
     still isn't, leashed under the Sun. Bodies pulse
  then fluctuate but not a sign of life. Words function
     more in stillbirth. Never forget, as a dandelion
     hovers and puts a smile on your dreary face,

and a question in search for all available and naked
    answers. Principles undermine caprice. Do not
 adhere. Must I remind you that you are
       someone else apart from who you think you are.
  You have yourself straightened, tucked safely
       like intent, not desire in all its voluminous and
     vehement speeches annotating something unknown
           to the behest of ourselves. If I were a house,
  I am gratified by windows -- your mirage there
       transfixed in a secluded spot, looking out
   brimming with life as curtains oscillate as the
      Earth breathes with you. If I were a house,
   you would ransack everything with a sly mouth
        packed with powerful narrative. How you
   have done over, leaving everything undone,
        moved off-tangent, under impossibly gray skies,
    brindled in prayer. If I were a house,
    
       doors slammed, speculative fabrications sleep
  through evenings and mornings until no difference
   is met -- you meant a word as if it had a lock
       and the key, somewhere cold in the air of
             sleuthing pains making me so, less than
     this and more of a fractured house.

Nothing like this assault.

In here you were gradually
introduced. The keen sense
for identity realized,

the distance that was a sullen
word for madness, a tender
perimeter established.

The calm wind as not-so-distant.
You in your plain clothes this afternoon,
lost in a commute of phases.

This weather schemes to be
your leitmotif.  This is of no
identical ownership but breakage.

In here you were met with constant
delimitation, yet always you are
as you always were, perhaps,

quite unsure of the next face
dislimned past the delicatessen.
The barkeep yesterday wiped the glass

clean as I watched from the edge
of poor furnitures. You, sudden,

of no warning, no clear word
for objects, has objections for marvels
made clear still opaque in the eye of you.

That when you were brought
into the world, I had you coming as
soft blow in the wilderness

hardly tractable, all by yourself
as I witnessed everything, past dead
underfoot, being all necessary

to yourself,  as you always were
in various settings and adjustments.
You were sure of the unsure and I

am in the middle of things
feeling the winding of it all, the breaking,
and the passing.

Nothing like this assault.

i pass on a story to empty barstools and
     cathedrals -- that i will remain as
      inconsolably so

  and ask, shall I be free so as to
      suffer myself?

 admitting i am shaped according
     to your demands,

    where, first there is you and the last
 always the prime of days;

where mapping out or telling a thread
   is inclination to never mind

our place. the need to bury you
   in my own Earth, willing to make you

meet a darkness which you once
   were as if to swallow the entire verity

of common peril. this perish, this drown
    first before displacement, to conceive

the evening within stories you have
    created beginning with a sharp departure

making your silence and abandon final,
   myself less than total.

that when i look at you, i want to burst
    into meaning like stone being taught

to speak, as much like your study as comparatively
    a bluer dawn rising from your feet

you passed me on as someone else, a makeshift freedom underneath an impalpable source,

that i am sick in your densest volumes
    when you speak, all the more when you dont

realize that I am trying to gravitate you
  into something, say to allow me into remembrance

and you, an insistence to function in void.
    that whilst you remember, you forget

   that in the tense moments I am trying to unlearn
you, as if there was only I,

    the city we were both in underneath a senseless moon, and whatever it was that i saw in you

 in such an imperfect night -- taking all your debris,
     the body of all this sliding into reticence

  as detritus, the unflinching weight of yourself
     as time stumbles to shuffle absence.

 strange now as the morning peers through
   the wide aperture, there is only I,

  faced with rivers as transit; when there was once
I moored in place and you have learned

       how to walk, and further away.

Bare-breasted this afternoon facing the Sun
   northward

   there could be more places for heat like this in homes
so shattered, their faces of malaise – a hundred days of gambol
     boys in their sanguine shirts; the myth of sun
                     is truth of soul, or moon

            clear vantage of something – neighbors leaving
radios wheezing in tetchy static,
  dogs panting in dry ***, lawn the verdigris,
                   the marauder in the market, all moving towards

even sounds shorn out of the daily are pure:
           the prattling neighbor again back in the foyer,
  the revolution of an old van and the dismay
                                   of a septuagenarian, the harangue
  of a mother, or somewhere, the marching of
                 soldiers shot dead – sun’s always painting pristine
  the milieu, so we can see now past the papers,
       the truthfulness of atrocities;

there came by you,
        in your full brightness, blotches of sun – untouched
by the heat, you’re passing and passing – in transit, nothing is snatched
    as the neighbors beat through.

From the dream you
were |  emerging from  the
    natal hearth |
you go, shedding from the sound

Change the currents |
   their immediate implications |
surreal to touch, a smile stilled lucid as the eye

Sees more than air the nasal
grass | trying to
           speak to  trees |
connecting inner consolation

   Of both waking up |
to a dream so realized, and |
   sleep’s confabulations no less

Than joy | wordless|
  beside every
                      widowed morning.

timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.

digress from this river that flows into a straight line. the following here
   will be that there is another body waiting at the brink of
      another figure lacking in speech: brook as excursion.

this plaintive leitmotif this afternoon. everything smells
        of old furniture. something this is trying
to preserve wrung out of suspicion, shorn out of air
        and unrest. when I begin saying it, and when I become
what I want to become, I will fold you in a manner

of houses. tell me of the footfall before I plunge.
   outside my home you will be waiting

for a question because you liked the idea that
       askance is the heart of all assertions.
and I will slowly begin to realize that imagination
   as machine, has not failed me.

when moved by the sight of you,
   gradually dissipate.

when halted by the inching step of
   your basis,
take a moment as evidence

and use as ground for furtive contest.

when there is evitable cipher of silence,
     I will phrase gestures into something like a metaphor
would induce

    when there is meaning, there is the moving away
and coming unabashed, pendulum your way into two walls
   as weathered as this house. Your face, a thousand adorations.
                  your heart a truism in the heat
   of naivety in place of a wild embrace.
              your hands this evening, tremulous, nervously seeking
to be one with my measurement: this thing that has nothing to do with me,
      except we have such fondness over allowing sorry states.
that we have use for what we have no use for. This thing,
   a fragment so foreign to me,
                            like hearing my name disintegrate, as if a thing
     of obsolescence, as everything is.

Shadow as proof of memory: the indistinct light spilling on the tablework together with smears of water. The smell of hair on his skin now is engraved as lesson. At the tip of her tongue is strange wonder. Said this inner life when it starts to crumble, you are witnessed in the soar. Bedraggled through the ***** of the street, a hand, or a vestige.

Her bony prominences of hand kneaded to retain as memory – to be swallowed by the full procession after; stroke as compromise: as if mapping all out. This is not how it should happen. It would happen when a safe distance is maintained by two bodies: the other sleuthing, the other moving in finite directions. An end will be revelry.

– took whatever it was that cannot be contained by the body. Remember first when you took the dive
     into the water, as if never to return again, together with silent fish and errant current.
                                Underneath the blue, light still casts shadow in interstices. Conveying weight
     in water – your mouth as conduit, my body as land for the till and clearing. Or my longing. Or a soon to be discovered ambiguity. Skimming through your moving imperatives, telling me you cannot
               commit to quantum movements. That in that event, the world will throw you
syncopated images, that it will give rise to your hiding altitude and lob you to vertigo.

Detachment as question. They must run. They must remain fugitives – to be unseen by the rest, and only themselves know their seams, symmetries, contours even in absences. Even the sky now is engorged with cirrus. Soon, like half-truth, or wildfire brash against green, the pallor will deface the atmosphere and give it unction of rain. Must they be reminded that they should run.
                               But you are in a city, and it is impossible to not be thrown out of line by another     figure. Names will be given. Directories will be solicited. Voice necessary to halve
                    this blatant quiet. And then to remind you of your sudden place, they will build a map
or a bridge with their arms outstretched into the sky, looking at you with life brimming through
      their eyes – the smoke of your departure once again curling in its fetal nature
       against their brows. Everything you do and undo is a forecast of some liminal finality,
  as if all of this is birthed by the same oblivion – and that all forgetfulness feels that same in different
          cities that may or may not know your name. And that in changing season, there will
always be
        a hand that will be held even in its tiniest detail – all of the shadows once
                      cast by your small body drunk in its proud altitude – we both
know   whose hand I am    thinking of

stretching to length of gallows
under faint light of moon.
the dead buries the living.

a thing is not a thing in itself
as it denotes nothing.
like a peripatetic iamb inscribed

persisting in drivel. flowers her face
this evening. pillars her arms,
  i do not have a wife.

i do not have a love undressed
as i examine a pool of shadow
in the plenary recess of silence.

the dead buries the living
within the blue-headed noon;
fascist birds bellow over haciendas,

tuba from the dustwell, from the orchard
decorated with blood. it rings for me
a guttural voice: hustling down

the avenue of the dead. better the alternative,
the guillotine, the small beginning of rage
through the thickness of air.

a marauder sleuths as the living keep
on keeping on, as the dead resign
 a hindrance under dissonant skies.

she is not with me as all the others are.
they have passed on expired limitations;
a flash of lighting at the back

of startled hills. rivers shake cool waters
 down my sleeve and i sleep -- soon fields
will be nasal with dew and the children

will have their place in heaven. the damp
landscape will adhere to stucco, fashioned
to cerements on corpses reeking, rising

to altitudes where some birds
in spring soar, left thriving in smog
as i bid you good night, farewell.

Are names telling of something?
When you were young, you were taught to name shapes,
    count figures with your tiny, slender fingers,
      read text like creed, memorize facts like incantations
so that when it is time that you are already raw
     and machinated into the fullness of your body,

you are ready. Ready like the gull darting
            into the deep blue to filch the marine.
  Ready like artillery to fray.
                       Ready like genuflected children
    in contrition – left the peccadillo aloft, canopied
         by a thumbed down word of prayer;

Are names telling of something?
       What do they delineate? A sense of ownership?
A demystification? What machine does
               it pledge allegiance to? Sage of old?
   A frantic fretting of sensibilities? Erudition, or at the very least, obscurantism?

If we leave a thing without a name, what will
     that thing be?

It cannot be held – to what extent?
It cannot be owned – for what reason?
It cannot be classified – for what? to saturate it with comprehension
      to ensure a fate underneath a conceptualized bent
               of attestation and abomination?

         If I left you without a name and only held you in my hands like
  a thing waiting to be used, to be fondled,

            what will you make out of it? Will you darkle and then dissipate
in the thinnest air? Or will you remain? Are names exacted so that

                  when a thing leaves the body, when an abstraction leaves a moment,
there is a device we can use to drone it into coming back? So that we know
                 that in addressing it, there is a sure claim that it will move back
      and retrace tractable errors? So that in the aftermath,

                                we are certain of the weight it casts upon our sorry and aching
  bodies that refuse to make love? So that there will be words to be written
                   and voices to be launched in form of song

                 with identities assured to match the thirst?

      Why does this deserve a name? Why are these hands undeserving
                   of territories? Why is there dissent when there is desire?

   The answer lies in the silence of every passing day famished by
        evidence: this thing that has no name will remain

                  as punishment for being – so that when it is time to
    prosecute, there will be no
                                        firm basis for eulogies.

We have this peculiar practice, both of us. We partake in the delight of nothing.
We are two walls being vandalized. And then we are the same walls being photographed
by onlookers. And we become the complicated eye of the strangers. We become the beauty
they try to subscribe to in strange calligraphies, bent caricatures, and flagrant peripatetics.
  We have the most outlandish of penchants, especially when nothing happens while
            everything happens. Forget the sidereal zeroes of this equation. We are one
  unanswerable phenomenon tractioned by a willing cohesion. Put into mouth what fingers
    cannot do. The one in pursuit is divided by blame and the other a fugitive.
              Mind takes space when absence does its duty. There is ease in accepting
  that a body impaled in a moment may bear no gravity.
                                                                             We have disparaging repetitions.
   We invest in invented lives. We know not much from here but we know
                      the end it tries to exact in itself. The silence teems in that probability:
   all static, intrinsic, and jarring. We both know a fine day when it happens.
                         Lurking sounds of hermetic space brought to life by informed choices.
                Clinking of bottles and the silver of fish on the platter. A book stolen
from a place where everything is organized – strangely enough, the disarray people
          are capable of with their hands is not preempted
                        by a custodian. We have godless moments. Say for example, this body
   houses a river and on its flaxen waters we have already let go of everything.
                 Soft waters gnaw flesh and shadow off immediate impulses.
                                 We have bizarre practices, both of us, separate.
      Desire is dispersal. Weathering the diaspora is grace.
              We both are gilded by attendance, and in rooms fat with people we are
                                marauders of space together with them – our lives so unobstructed,
            free, and proliferating. Why can’t we house ourselves? Why can’t we cling
                 like ivy to walls of stone, melancholy to walls of blood?
                                          We have this peculiar practice, both of us. Separate. No warnings,
   no conveyed messages, no alarms. To be unmoved in moving, to be moving
                           in stasis.

Dramaturgy

1

I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.

It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.

2

Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.

3

Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.

4

Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.

5

He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.

6

They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake.  A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.

7

Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for

describe this moment by not only using one
   word – one word used is often times crippling, scarring at that,
when all else revels in the multiplicity; even one strange moment
can be duplicated. the allure different, but still enthralling.
  except you are, when one word was hurled. I have all of this
in varying amplitudes. you will take them all like a gaping hole
   in the mouth of the darkest night and overdose in light, you slung
at such reachable height yet gloating in air like you are your own travesty
       deciphered. face as taunt. hands as feat. limbs
their steady bridges.    the guise of your face, a counterbalance. supple voice,
a trembling scenario of infinitude. i hear this is a way to
       avoid hysteria, to identify

all things as nameless, shapeless if possible. only viciously imagined
    form, contoured into the vacancy denied. this is a way to mitigate
                        demands. to keep a thing from identifying itself
so when  it   comes that   these things start unmooring themselves,
                    they will not administer their potencies. so that when they come back,
  you will keep mum like white of camphor, or the black of a hilt,
        the blue of the sky – something that cannot be perforated.
    so that when they come back, the return will never carry
            their attars, that pivotal minute will never fluctuate into an hour
     of  density, so that their namelessness
                         will be easily dismissed as the expected howl of a dog
   in the middle of the already fractured night, or a cat’s enigmatic drone
                       in its concentration. So that this thing

will remain  to have no name and that when
                        it encounters itself in the presence of itself,
     the absence will be clear and the finding,
                                  a release.

one idle hand slides through the balustrade
in a hurry

my life quickening
shattering beneath the earthen ground of

this tower in this stucco-perfect day
in this wondrous moon suffused

by my dissent. it is all anticipation
and warning, all suspicion, this one

that has no name. say when space happens
a body in a body ****** in the aqueous hand,
and dreams of fish,

say this space once marred now
occupied by us, or you, say you are not to be
mistaken for my being and simply
for absence to happen

you must sway, dartle into this thick
array of contests and then

in a sharp stab of air, bleeding,
quicker than the drying of streets in April,
space will happen.

is this vacated cocoon
 a concatenation of a gradual
    obsolescence of a distinct
      machinery

    when it lulls me to sleep
 so obscured

   grip like vise, then lift as if
 passing a levitation
 
            submerges something
  in the throat
       rammed like inward canopy
   of hand, links like leaves and leaves like
       leaves still.

   paying hindrance to stasis
convolutes a mirror to steel and mangles
       the bile

    not minding me when i fall
asleep to its last, faint recall.

para sa Kidapawan*

Diktador ang makinarya.
Maringal ang langit. Walang ulan para
sa pasasalamat. Ang ating tanging pagkakakilanlan
ay pumapaimbulog sa bawat sugat na nagsara.
Muli nila itong bubulatlatin.
Hindi paham ang gatilyo.

Mabilis na matutuyo ang pangako
kung pawawalan ito sa katanghaliang tapat.
Tanaw ng nakabiting ulo ng araw
ang lahat ng nangamatay. Kasabay ng hangin
ang pagpapaluka. Hudyat ng ulan galing
sa ibaba – gigibain ang makapal na barikada
  ng katawan atsaka muling uuwi sa asawa’t anak
na may bahid ng pula ang kamay. Dulo ng kuko’y
kapiraso ng mundo. Itim. Hugis buwan. Ang pagputok
    ay isang rekoridang laging gumagapang patungo sa tugatog
     ng isang alala.

Dadalhin nila sa bingit ng pagpaparam
ang babasaging boses – ang mga bubog ay
isasaboy na lamang sa lansangan.
Lumalaon ay dumidiin ang bulahaw. Inutil
lamang ang pagtatalik ng kamay at bakal.
   Umusal na lamang ng dasal sa likod
ng kakahuyan at baka dinggin ng bathala
ang panayam. Walang iisang dilang tumatabas
  sa dahas.

kung saan sisimulang hanapin
ng mga mata ang isang lugar kung saan ang lahat
ay iwinawasto ng nakaraan ay lingid
lamang sa kaalaman.

bago mangapal ang dilim ay nilusong ng mga kalalakihan
ang nalalapit na katedral. Naghahabol ang papauwing liwanag
na masaksihan ang kabalintunaan.

wala silang nakita,
katawan lamang sa lansangan,
tinutubos ng kasaysayan.

this deep devotion in abstract tends to break loose
  reclining in air.
it may be even that the face is water
  and the eyes, basins. should the heart endure dank
seasons, there will be new skin thereafter.
the favorable light sways outside the house,
  stilled settings of rife adjustments, the objects are in
study: the fluent is stone. the trees automaton.
     demand for sought after thrills, the plenary hall
of moon. wider than any light, drunkenly, frothing by
  the gutter of this body.

sometimes when solemnity incises
   there is image of death in mirrors. yours is diffident
surrender over the haze of hastily contending moments
  and such truth is that the escape is yearned for
by a body – stiffening to become so rigorously false.

listening to the infinitesimal sound of body
   take this music to the trees, their lignified arms akimbo
yellowing, grandiloquent from the seizure of old fevers,

    the maddened, thorough tune mistakes your
    anatomy as cartography. if your deepening, secret parts
   are known, we will assume all conditions
and give variables for metaphors.    Sometimes escape is coveted
by    the   body, its indistinct signs neglected as beacons,
   there are   other  things happening, say, a hand meeting a face,
or the feet converging in trembling altitudes. A limit is set here.

“Today, we make a man out of you.”

  Was what I may have heard in the pitch dark, blindfolded, hearing a mechanical arm swing and in full force, smash my hamstring. I was made that day. And for that, I thank them not. I celebrate myself this way, in the full-turn of a dream.

   Was what I may have felt somewhere in Bocaue when Sonny brought me to a ******* in the middle of the night. They wore the same, seductive dresses in the crimson night. They had their flamboyant maquillages. Bodies like curved spoons. Heads billowing and airless, their hairs frozen, held intact on the skull. Their skin smelt of berries. Sonny took two and I took one for myself. How am I made that night? Never touched, never held. Fair enough, I disappointed her. Her name in the Filipino language is asusena. A man’s a man when you cannot fool him into the trickery of a device that does not appeal to him.

  Was what I told my nephew while whetting a switchblade. The grating sound made sweet music to his ears. He was intent and keen at observation. He just got circumcised because the much older, paunchier kids made fun of his boyhood. You are the wind, Calvin. He smiled as I maneuvered into the blank, corpulent space and swung around, pretending to stab someone in clear air. He lauded me and believed that I was a master at that – which he may not have seen, a master at pretending.

   Was what I may have noticed when you and I were in a cheap room staring at the white ceiling talking about cheap lifestyle. The nomad scent of your hair wafted, almost trying to describe the difference between inhale and exhale. To inhale was to take you in, and to exhale was what you do best. The word “****” lingered by the cold metal of the doorknob and the hinges seem to collapse in their trade of swivel. You were taken into the thrill of the void and I was caving in at the edge of my world. I wanted to kiss your beautiful face
                   but a man knows a device he cannot control.

           and  so
I     heard
      myself
sing      into   the wilding   air,
                        let     myself
                         diminish –

darkness excites. caliginous walls
    flounder. deepening are the blue grievances.

i should have killed you
  in the stale air of nothing; when it was said
that it takes less courage to love.

a hoarse cry in the obstinate woodland
  insolvent, pressed against the foot of hills.

the quietus in spite of artillery
over and over the deep, droning sound of it.

tirelessly the flowerheads swing forth
newfangled skin and engravings of pious woodwork

tremble in the maladroit wind. the indefatigable purple
   of the very twilight – its slow onset, flays from the air

once it gets into the vertical; I will not speak
  in front of mirrors and curse the fragrance
of camphor and its foretold departure –

everything that is not much of its communion
   living at the small altitude of my feet;

blood rises clean, emerging
  from the earthen womb as I am not hers yet,

I should have assaulted you as a marauder
   arrives in the deep, blackening night

                        of total surrender.

o, good lord of the streets
where a phantasmagoric sensurround

banishes the scream of youth –

a carburetor snarl taken
   as unction of name. was it

your name that you whispered to my ear,
   him dearth in the quietus.

first to go is grace,
  what soon follows is bravery. a makeshift moon
of course, hanging by the earlobe of

her; I’ve been wanting to bite to break skin
   her truly frightened symmetry
of a  storm which is an  onus of  pain -

o, good lord
     help me weave way later
     when I’m down on my contrabass.
Scout Albano tonight’s a dark
   expanse of    regret

resonating a deep and hollow throb.
    women on flay, cigars in mouths chucked
like busy streets on a noontime sun, the soot clambers
   the billboards and their frozen, extant smiles

      wring out the poison and drain:
    we have no imposed god, an announcement to ear
  shot into the flay of the bone that persistently
      aches - like some unreal drumming of squalors.
            
         we are ruined with echoes of many names that haunt us
  with their gaping mouths
              in   frightful  angles,    but

when we’re drunk, Marc,
   this will all be over.

The peril of this thing is to imagine you in the
     word marvel.

Anything that must point towards the Sun
     must be tender with meanings

in the dinnerless evening
of the leaden chapel of silence there is always
a fury in its own movement say,

a touch of a hand on my svelte upholstery,
machination of an enigmatic discourse towards

fluidity of bedazzlement simply by saying
   you want to go out in the center of which
   pulses with a different life but with the same name,

or to briefly wonder
   if the word marvel is its own fault and
accurately measured in longitudinal  fashion,

so innocent on the passenger seat now groping for
some warmth from the black subcompact with metronomic sounds,

the mechanical work of this droning disfigurement
   is that even in wings

you    are relentlessly     going   and going
   crossing points   and delineating   crosswalks

with more   x-ed  angels  lamenting their   able wingspan.

Unable to give birth to new conflagration – grace of prayers is nothing but
   sadness stilled in sandalwood and simply this poem,
a letter of intent to crush your face and fracture your bones the same
     way you do with mine, in every evening where

the final squall of the throbbing moon is a realization of the answer:
I am the one who wants to drown you in total darkness,
    and my final word wanting to scar.

snaking through a modal-jazz fine-tuned evening
      this soft huddle of sweat and tender bodies
     it was purely girls strobed, fired upon by the oncoming *****

of a maddened hand;

     slowly becoming inured to this droning of the blameful balm
of evening, always when    ennui   starts
    to   wane I will     start    the   car
and take myself to the   edge of   everything

and all the  suddenness becomes    inept
  and I myself

a   shot   in the  total  dark
making    it   final

            somewhere in Quezon City
given a   levitation and    you
  
      are     somewhat veined to my wall of disgust
the same as
     finding    an   old,   forgotten   thing
you
     have no    use    for.

pointing easterly,
azure skies of course
   this afternoon.
washlines drenched in
  high-sun,
precise contraptions
    deter spread of
anomalies seen daily.

  you tell me
hare's the fool
  you had once in your
 fledgling hands and died.
hare's foot
   is luck more than
imaginary.
  when no one is looking but
always i, keening in the total
    image -- it cannot
be you, impossible
   under ineffable skies
and twilight-erased  mud;

moments are   disavowal.
   you    like   the sound
so withdrawn   from  contestation,
  so easily your accurate self
liking   the   captured  dissonance.

you know   a fine day when
   it happens,
slow ****** of the vertical,
   highest  time to quit, bid for
a sequestered   place   free
      and absolute in variables: x is the lie.
all the intimate
    dark   you   pulse  with   the life
of   beautiful  horses

          gaining lightsome distance,
an approbative signal of technicolor
    painting   your   face  with   all
       things basking.
                     truant.

it is much like rain this hot evening,
          prompt in arrival to assuage default
                  settings

   like most days when in the intimate dark
          which love I clutch and whose
              hands i ****** shatter before me

    between the moment just arriving
        and the press of disappearance

     this body that dartles onto the leadened
          cathedral of  your heart, the jaundice
     of your repeated self accumulates

           to harangue this true evening yellow
    starting a burlesque of moon, flushed

         in the punctuation of mildew. grass
   its fragrance the first time and the last,
         translated - a revision of wind's gesticulstions. else it was strangely always
      pure dusk, wide-eyed, awake in futurity

    dare the hands clench and the feet
       mingle with swift pace much like
    rain    this   evening      forgetting
      a jammed, rusted   parasol
  
          your first time underneath the world,
       Summer ending in a blink of an eye,
          a stab of bated breath.

done over this afternoon I only have one image
and about you were many other surly things

all wrapped in the sudden heat of happening
through the clear eye of a diaphanous world.

inmost spring of an unreachable bud,
a raw material for hurt kept in the after-hour

of a dwindled morning charged to dark
moving with precise instep

rummaging for completion
underneath an untamed sky

left for claim but not entirely as to be free,
no remnant of the hour’s expensive thrill

where I do not find you in me,
as I am still down on your able ghost

pinning it down to where it will never
meet its breakable place:

a wondrous dawn, or the fever of Maytime afternoon,
  in your most excellent clothes

or else it was simply desire

scent of the newly-bathed
hot off the ironing board clothes, pulse of radio

  your smooth, round
  perfume   wafts

into my  distant home,
  making your absence

total    
                         keening
  through   the   anger   of   the feeble wall
  in front of   me

your    smell
   I     love, my love when it is time
I will    be   less than
    soul  when it   meets   body’s  persistent
     pleadings,      

lay  down    eloquently   bold
          for   mine   to    stray   thinking,
    here     engraved   to  bone
like   pompous   woodwork

again    and    again
   your   scent
making

your
   absence
total.

moseying on to senseless expulsions
the width of the hot, throbbing room

pulls away and cannot parry
   thrusts

breath stabs double angst
shuddering to speak only hands know
language, scent evicts
all names

goes   to   a   deathly  departure
  through sad, flittering windows

forgets    who   he   is

We rarely go drunk, or perhaps that is I, when I told Marc that all people are nearly up on exits
   and barely exists now is feeling – he started swinging a running joke between the two of us

facing the planetesimal – lights their strobes of secret I am on my 7th beer and still nothing
    when being listened to by frantic fret of fear because indulgence is key to demise

when it is said to pull apart but didn’t, I halved the 7th beer and felt my gut cloy itself with
  the muck of fat from pork rind and stale chicken

I deem myself incompetent in the slug, gild of attendance: freckled wall with dotted red,
    linoleum plastered, defaced somewhat, Marc moves to Hannah and I further

the dark with my groping hands – I do not smoke inside my car.
         Ortigas is unusually dull, minutes trickle slow like *** or un-***,

whichever it may, I quickly said as I stole the mic from his hand the words I imagine
    to become filled with the purpose of frayed upon exactitudes.

He always brings his knife with him and I always ask him even if I knew
  that it’s somewhere in his acid-washed jeans – I have always been fascinated

by the lives made better or worse by knives. I remember Gabriel and I talking
   about Holden Caufield when all we ever wanted was to fall

immensely in love with girls we  chase around   in sophomore year, Gabriel
I do not know where you are and listening to Radiohead now reminds me of

something   strange   with   unwilling potential; perennial silence permeates
        Ortigas and somewhere a couple is hot and *******

whereas I, asleep on my 9th beer, probably my last,
         willing to give   up  for  a   laugh or   some     sense  of place

  while I hear them all
    laughing   in front of my parked   car,  poking fun   at   something

I   can   barely identify.

Take salt for sea. And blue for feeling.
Litmus blue, say it will, squalid yellow
are the dead and the living continue on,
  swept onward.

Take air for flight and space for descent.
  When you are held, raised into this,
you will fall at last – take a sudden slither
   of skin as farewell, catacombing mist
  as    salutation but

   you      go    ineffably

whenever, well-paced,
     well-oiled,

you will continue on
  despite
     final   exhaustions.

Here is where the oncoming figure knows you.
   We have no realization of time. Of how long
   it will take for us to both decompose. This is
   already a peccadillo. Mirrors brand conclusions.
   The body lets go of its weight like anchorage.
   How I measure warmth is a device that does not
   concern you. Light inches and asks me how soon.
   Already a blunder, an inner life revealed –

Between this carefully studied distance where sometimes
   lines are crossed, a remorse is hoarded, exclusive
   enigmas of hope. Contort this body if you will.
   Between the barely-living and the already gone
   is where I windhover. Sealed shut in hermetic space.
   My desperation becomes a syntax of waiting

and there will be all beautiful horses, and faces in transit
   everytime you pass is an announcement to where
  I cast myself into a miscalculated sonority,
  hauled out of, loosely identified.

1
Fails to realize the momentousness of the ordeal. Syntax means nothing. Delineations weak. It is all obsolescence, this one. This thing that has no name. This agreed-upon assault of objects. Its loose fizz into the air. Buildings without balconies, or balconies without height – a plunge will mean that there is only little ache left to wring out of some futurity. Arrange the furniture, you said. Take pictures of the sullen victory right after. There is no place in there but only spacious silence. Like meat before it goes into the melting ***. Like light before it reaches its tippling point. Hence, let us both agree to this once again. An end. A limit has been reached. In most days you say nothing. I wait – concealed, overwrought with time’s unloosenings. I do no waiting at all. I do wait at all – this made moment is your new retreat.

2
This is an old woe with a new name. I ask you things, you answer me endless. Endless as in quiet is infinite. There are so many places in this world fat with stillness. Feelings flatten and fall at last, here, its exoskeleton. Keep it in your drawer with your DMs. To make a metaphor out of you means I acknowledge your disappearance. To keep mum about it means I take it inside me, deeper and deeper. Do you dream of fish now? Or waves? Or the undertow you take with you, dragged in miles of feet through dunes of sand? I ask you again, and you show no signs of being uninhabited. Although there is sometimes the warmth of pressing sheens, you take them as the passing of buses – you emphasize the waning. Although this has been written, there isn’t so much writing done here. If I could be abject like say, a washrag in your home, there would be little difference made.

3
To keep myself intent is declaration. To quote otherwise the world that you breathe in, simply suppression. It is much imaginable that way, much more attainable, resolute and quick with sense. A new kind of wailing. What I want, I destroy by earnest regard. There is a paradoxical way to cultivate this thing: and it is to leave it there, thriving in a space meant to contain it, alone. Nothing will be retained – it will always be one, and never two. You believed me. I asked you again. Your answer compressed everything to shadow.

Kamay

Heto, kung mararapatin lamang.
Ipagkakatiwala ang sandali
tungo sa laman ng salita.
Heto, kung ipagdaramot lamang,
at ipagsasawalang bahala ang dambana
ng iyong katawan.

2. Kurba

Kung abot-kamay lamang din naman
ang buwan ay ipagdaramot na lamang
ang natitirang liwanag.
Sa palad ko nakahimlay
ang talim ng iyong buto.
Hindi na mangingiming pang ibalik pa
sa tahimik na daluyong ng oras
ang mga kamay na ito na walang pagpapatawad.

3. Mata*

May tupok na anghel na bagong hirang
sa loob ng malaking puwang.
Walang paglalagyan ng ligalig,
marahang pagiingat lamang,
kung tatanaw sa kabilang kuwarto ng halinghingan
na para bang nagtatalik ang nais
sa hindi maangkin

nangungusap nang walang karampatang pagmamalabis.

in   my   side
   of  the Earth
I    was   not   tilted,
   realized      and    emptied
my   eyes    are   spigots
   my mother    left   open  to thaw
the glaciers   of
        supper

   zenith   visits   the   Summer
most   often   than  the
  wind blowing    through   the
curtain     of    my    eyes
   where   I   always   see   the dead
smidgen    flowers   all   over
   the    ricefields

             this   measure   of
tomorrow –    to  have been incarcerated
   in   the   past that   bears
no     arms    to
       this   very   Saturday    afternoon
fish   breathe  now
  in    enigmatic    means
    pulses    of   rivers
tangle     joys    with
    naked    boys   of   brindled   youth


    see   once   they   jackknife
into   a   memorized    depth
            pellucid  like   my   memory
of
      uncollected      afternoons

Insouciance     first   fall
   we    took    the   night      half-illuminated
   dreamy     stereo     sketchy   static
   through     ear’s  round   bell

smile  we    owe   it  
      slanted,     bendable   light  moon
  becomes    another    genre

   to    listen     lilt
  even     before     methods   of   lip
   procure     shaded    meaning   cohered
  on     a    closed    door –  opened
finding    a    semblance    of Sun
     there,     veiling
a     traffic   of     cirrus
    in     the       elongated    road
   of          blue     skies

it    was    time
   to     point-source   a   home
taller    than    grass    in  Summer
     pinpointing   scenes    to     exact
a    long   divide    and    make    it
     by      punishing    it    post-peak,
let    it       drift    with    unrelenting
     quickness
       past     mouthed    rivers     and   from
the       lessening   fog
           of       the     same     morning
i
     will     puncture
it   true,      eyes     set   forth
    into     your   absence

*you’ll
bloom
you’ll
bloom.

in some paradoxes, space happens when two people
               are close but not close enough.

after hours of demand, the presence occurs in many ways.
ubiquitous objects rend the veil of vicariousness.
             there will be a repetition of days in here,
an assertive swing of dialogues to make ends appear as though
    real and accurate.

in a brief candleflame of silence on a Vietnamese restaurant’s rooftop,
    there will be noxious space conscious of: we are waning.
the way words leap from fences of teeth and venetian hairs.
        air becomes a fat mound of fools in arcades and then in an instant,
  it feels as if there is no more space left to move in, so they wear
     each other’s skin and shed right after the ballast’s fall.

   when done explaining a dream, sleep goes to belabor a bell.
soundless beside them, stiff as a body dreaming for itself.
   in some paradoxes, what is imagined is most real.
  there is suspicion that this lacks sentimentality. it is as carnal
and as commonplace as a hint of touch from a closed-in expanse.

  that time at the market when you had your hands fretting
for shapes of perfect fruits, taking them in your careful hands
wary enough to not beat them senselessly to the pulp of their
   glazed figures – the prices start to inflate and you wonder why
  people still remained when at the first sign of difficulty
       you   start   your   furlough.

     and also sauntering with maimed pace, that of autumn’s slow
reprieve, making your way past decrepit buildings,
   you stop to take sunsets not because they’re marvelous,
   but because you easily forget – and accept that there are
   also    things  wet under   the rain  and not with tears.

when in another paradox, things point to their source
when doused with oblivion – starting to breathe on its own,
occupying space
          leafing through days when   something instantly said
    rushes back   searching   for   its  holder,
              to  be   given,   stolen,   or say,
                                     left   to  die   on its   own –

Flower – crouched, crowned in its color tender, entombed, sees the moon.
     she has ten thousand things in her mind but only one heart
     for the life of her. She looks away from light
     through her spectacles yet only has her eyes on one figure, alone.
     somewhere in the mountain, drunk with the clash of land.
     she has her quicksilver of mind. Intoxicates when willed, talks,
    expires heaven a manifold. Supernal silence when nothing
    excites – she has mouths for kissing a hundred things but only
     the kink of fire for one. A wrestled shadow taking form of
     towers bigger than cities. She has two feet for the world, yet only
    one destination – to herself, and herself alone.
    She is much of herself the rest of the world shorn out of wide-eyed
    ruin – say, small bird, wishing her luck through wet leaves
    shake cataclysms down our sleeves – she does not know how to swim,
    yet has the blue of sea; anchored in the weight of unborn laments.
   No more moves the sight of her, but herself in the mirror.
    Stripped of sense and naked in a fine-tuned near-death thrill
    of hunkered ravening, we are left to our own devices, mapping out
    labyrinths. She has heard so many farewells, shook her not,
                steered her clear into the immensity of a wider room,
     her hands steely, pried open and precisely the span of bent tapestry,
                 alive in the receiving dark now, she has her eyes the size
      of Moons, shining on one alone, that is not I – furtively the distance
    calms and there is truth rising from the depths of deceit.
             The palpable freedom makes the Earth wider and she has only
    the world in her hands, trying senselessly not to shatter it.

beneath   her   feet
   her   most  daring
   feet
   that  traversed
   the murky waters
   of    dawn, past  mountainsides
  of  prayers,   stallions  the blackest mare
   love combined,  daresay   silence   annuls
   the    noise   of heart   and the  shadow
   casts its  darkest immaterial   stone

beneath    her   feet
    her  most  daring
    feet
    the    dead    continue
 ­   to   bury the   living
   and the    living    excites
    the    demanded hue   of another   blue
     to hold close   into the   sky
     whose    also    darling   feet   dangle
     much    like     water’s    fervent  collapse
    mantling   the   rivers,    miles you have
   walked   without     images    of I

beneath her    feet
   her most   beautiful    feet
    we   go   wind  by   wind in   excess
    of    days
    in   the night’s   blackest   dress    soiled
  by     light    is inmost    dance   instep,
     curated   from   machineries
   beneath her feet
    your     feet    I    adore
  which   bony prominences    hurdle
   me     weak,    ruined,
where    I    lay  
is   always  the   cradle    of   Earth
   your    feet and   I beneath
  them,   emerging   from   the  possible   life
    of    leaves   in   birdflight,

beneath    your    feet
    your     cold    feet,   unrelenting
on    the    unkind    tomb   of   my body
      your   swift   drop    of    feet,  their
superfluous   coming-and-going
   love    landing    on my  body – trampled,   weighed down
  beneath   your    feet,
    your    most darling    feet.

these dank stares throttle
         clutch my seeing night, the ***** color of the mirage
  outside
                            stills     her   face  calm   like the weather
    of trees,   unsaying      quietness   erupting
         in a groping    yellow     yawn   of
                         splendid     sun

the   sharpness   of   this   incident
    she is    tired      of   all   and of   me,
              stretches her    bones   crackle,     snap
    out     of    ponderous    limit
       staggered      by    the   unsuspecting    blow

rising      from   a tense   moment  and  ending
        suddenly, with   an  obsolete  stare.

Nandito na ako sa labas, sa ilalim ng payapang ilaw mula
          sa poste kasabay ng pamamayagpag ng mainit
          na hangin ngayong Marso.

   Nag-hihintay sa kasunod na pigura na lalabas mula
          sa masikip na daluyan ng tao – ikaw o ang konsepto

ng    ikaw   na    ‘di   dapat,  maselan
   kagaya ng pagnanais,

       pagkakataong mas sinungaling pa sa
pamahiin – mayroong napupukaw
    ngunit   hindi kalian man mabibihag.

From my slice of ample darkness and space,
     I look at you from all the stirrings of things,
  dancing though you cannot dance,
  leaving planetesimals all over the terrain.

I can sense out a locutionary from the heated body
beside me. Surliness so sure of its dagger in hiding,
slowly creeping up like cocoon of morning.

That was you in your off-shoulders.
Collarbones, caryatids, tilted atmosphere
summered, simmered into the air
  until it died in a hollow jar.

And from your foreground, rusting is the wind
  and it falls down on the lawn, like garlands
  spread all Autumn by a sprightly, darling child
  in a lithesome gingham dress.

My hands, past vertical, destroying limits,
   feeling the weight of mercurial form begin
  shifting into a disturbance in lotus stature,

  fraying out of phase in limited access,
this height where springs of undecipherable fogs
   lift the face of clocks, unwatched,
whose departure is this but only distance knows?

let me fruition this now
with emphasis. There will be noise
disavowed, and only the full metal of silence
would indict the plenary moon.

       whatever you say, it shall will
itself to the ground, obvious of its
decay long overdue. This time, precision
of aches outrace light – only this night,
and in some other nights when there is
only the blue glare of your face in the
nauseating vertigo of words intimated.

     now, in the barenaked room,
everything will enter as if the first time,
the last ones too – all at once so suddenly short
and handsome with abeyance.

   you were out into the world and I won’t
flinch nor blame. Soon when capable,
all of this will whittle into one fine laughter
pivotal towards the wary sides of mercy.

soon nothing, as changes
were inimical, silence will champion our
places, remembering you in the unclothed
sunlight of the South when we faced North,
watching boats wade in speeds of your freedom,
   in the boulevard where at one point in time,
     I have left you spaces to occupy,
   only mine errors found.

Always when moments slip into
   silence, I dream only truly of your easy
   language with urgent intimations.

I have always listened to the deep
drone of the animal struggling to be
freed inside of you – housing a pain it
does not fully understand, welcoming strange
darkness encircling us like fugitives.

you remind me of my voice so small,
so fragile, so mute in the mutiny of your song,
  keen with listening as in ear to the fullness of the world,
  a form of trying analysis

when it was only yourself spoken with recall
of days when you were young, ablaze, engraved into the wind,
myself looking back, still finally seeing you

  in the continual of running, singing songs,
  trembling in the wake of the blue hour.

what would take you away from place – a slipshod
   route of caprice, or was it, this silence in front
   of a pool, ripple after ripple, still the silence
   I have learned to love?

to have faced north and swallowed the Sun
  meant the desire for it.

spanning the freefall from a tall drop,
threadbare net of hands ready for the catch – unlearning
    whom to fall on, what else is there to be part of but lacking?

between now, this oceanic expanse, is a need
  for letting loose, a part of once only and never whole,
  unlearning what must not be held now, your eyes they

do not see, but entirely space  to clear everything
  and put my heart in.

Now it all comes back:

in pursuit of you from the basis of this armistice, when in the swelter of this afternoon
I wish you realer than anything imagined,
                 in confidence   that I may   arrive at a   hunted  answer.

But the question, when hurled, broke into the wet back of mound’s infinite silence,
   like a dog with its paw leaving dog-signatures on the bedspread,

at twilight, flowers shift from grace to melancholy, rail of stars in sight now,

I amongst the darkness, waiting – wishing you again underneath the dome
   of this immense night,

prying amongst stones their language of truthfulness: Have I not loved enough?

You feel stories are always unsolicited. You do not want them.
You want to feel the agony of the moment – all the more the electricity of it. A moment mottled by
rain this ordinary Thursday afternoon, or the dust eloping in the wind as we drove past 50 in the middle
of the night, you telling me I do not clean my car thoroughly, like that of a lady’s. You feel stories pose
no importance. Say, at the edge of our seats or at the jagged lip of a cliff – you would dare say jump,
alone, unwound, unfettered, resolute, obvious and available in truancy, out of incalculable fear of
existing – you took the plunge and claimed it’s all the same. Apertures frantic with dazed visions of
fondness. Vertical leap, cutting through the vague sky. Keeping some sense of freedom, yet we are not
as free as we think. You do not want a story. You do not buy its thrills. You chortle at the idea of lasting things because they have hands that are clenched and frenzied. They brand. They are territorial. You are no territory. You are an island, adrift somewhere, breathing on its own in between penumbras of want
and coasts of dread.  You feel characters do not change scripts. They change how you say things. Say, when he told you were needed, and I told you that you insist your forceful importance – you felt the need
to dab into the air and spire through the thickness of the dark, flamboyant with the color of freedom, you said, pale as a dove, I am free. Finally, the man might have left somewhere without you knowing it, and just as you are unclenching your wings, you project your pace into the sky like an unseen margin in the invisibility of all invisibilities – it is impossible to look away. You felt stories are not needed. You wanted experience. The end of a dull knife, the sound of a .45 shot into the sky as the police circle the filthy streets of Quezon City. You in your Chuck Taylors, running, looking for some tough nook to hide in – omen of another rain in sight. You remembered when you first bathed in rain and laughed a laugh so impossible with high notes and shrills – you laughed away like you were not coming back, because there is no need for a story. Now left to wondering in the vastness of the room before me, was it something
to be believed? A broken orchestra enters with its surrendering music and everything is ended. I fell asleep, still dreaming of running away.