much that I rue this place,
you are this night’s bleak behemoth –
your full volume of absence
displaces the air.

where darkness asserts its terrors,
the heart knows no clearing;
stroke slow at first say, accuracy
  of all knives absorbed or when you
said remember, remember – supreme over
this tower of silence, like the last of your life
before you slid into easy sleep – drowning,

nothing can drown you, I say, this afternoon,
pulling at the sea, both of us, separate,
  your moving in all places,
as if pushing me further into the taciturn water.

my love, love of all loves, is the moon
   nobody knows. I’ve found her voice
the sweetest taste. In the stolen throbbing
room, I bask in her absence.

there is not much of me like you,
  or I, and in a glassed dream you flung
aside and strode in vestal swiftness.

I can no more taste your truth.
time tells your monsoon, and underneath
the steady weather, your light hands me,
   a bell – a bell I have no use for.

Moon missing now, in the depth of sleep’s
ravenings – a revelry was it, or a passing train?
gnawing sound at the very heart of nothing,
my love, love of all loves, is the moon
nobody knows, my tenderness of silence,
  and with stars eloquently leaving signatures,
the available anguish dropping all else
   in the knifed horizon.

hear    me now as i say
  pilgrimed is the image
  unloosen
   yourself   into the wind
  as i *****
      for some
  sense of
     placeness in this
 vaudeville

      no more are
 the birds that
     sing and way past us
 already seconds
     in waning
    is the same permeable blue
tracking    up
   our curved  spines
and when      weakened
    falling at
     last

as multiple
    cities do -
i see   a line
      for  a stream uncollected,
 as      rain
     over     genuflected
  hills      will.

you are in the middle of things,
insisting importance – you would feel
shivering in the distant blue
of another girdled spark and there,
in the not-so-distant sky,
I reach for damp perimeters

and have your face conclusive
with whiteness, sure of its glare,
  crossing the frangipani outside
  my home; silence leapt borders
and now an incident. uninterrupted.
resolute. absolved.

although so suddenly moving away
kiting around and perhaps death
will deal its part when love’s done
with its tedious labor – and it will all be

moments of bliss, two people renaming
necessary haunts, laughing
  in the dense air, keeping an ear for
the spring of yourself.

days when all you had to do was
arrange the furniture and watch the passing
of shadows in mellifluous slowness – ready to catch
you in heft of mesh.

nothing keeps her in place.
that is what you said. you said you were
always moving
from the north up to the south,
and at times the north of no south
that refuses to be held close into straight paths.

you gave it no unction – this abstraction.
christened with the water from
your measures, slipping out of grips,
from where you are and where I found you in,
retained in some sense of placeness,
almost cuts with the sharp dagger
of wind in mornings when you peer
into the putrid landscape of Manila asphyxiated
by the rise of smog.

her sorrows remain untouched and intact,
given urgency by the emptiness of her
hand. he had to be elsewhere and you
were in the midst of nowhere but the hollow
oblivion of your home, and I took it, I took it
and I fragmented it to gather from it,
a sacrament or say, the looming of dangers for
  mine to situate in defeat,
and I placed you somewhere like a new truth
that you’ve grown fond of,

like the only voice you hear in the night
is yours, and gathering that indistinct sound
from the stray of light was the
lover having left an impending need.
my father proposed to watch a film
with my mother and I see potential
in something that had gone away even before
  the empty din of the sea played its exhausted
machinery, telling me something known and familiar,
which I refuse to utter because it would double
its terror.

we ought to meet somewhere, you said,
a bridge, a tangent, a straight path
or a perilous curvature. you will never break
as the sparrows close in,
as the disparage quavers,
as an old man stops his engine somewhere
under a bridge beneath rondures.

we ought to meet somewhere,
you said. a word tamped into shape,
lugged into narratives,
so easy
breakable
and false.

1
Corrections. You drew a straight line and noticed its crooked part. Arrhythmia, was it? Or picket fences for us to blame? The seismic consequence of righting out wrongs. To even realize the thick light
      shining through like some stray decision.
                               The hot mint of touch carved out by concern, and to forbear a slight chance
            at miracles. We have no concept of heaven, this strange wall between us. When I look at you,
   I see myself at bay, multiplying weaved tears for scraps and metals. A mirror of the sea breaking
            amidst the sea. We have no sense of what is right – we only have sense of feeling.

We twirled between the sheets and broke the circles,
   the air in between collision produced silence. Gossamer. Clear. Sure and exact. Where are we headed?
                 We are crossing each other’s worlds with nothing but heavy bags of ourselves waiting
   in stations rid of the populace. Implication: this is the part where I fall asleep standing
          and you carefully traced your steps back to the source.

2

dark swerves to more darkness. Faults. There is a place for all aches a finger, or say a hand where I sense yours, should be. It is here, in this finite silence.
                         I notice peripheries to give them their apt intensities. Say, driving along the freeway,
   you in your night-old shirt, and it starts to rain. I will recognize everything, pile after pile, fade after fade, quick to match this disappearance is your head out in the window
                    celebrating the world and you tell yourself: I do not know, and I care not.
     And I begin to say it without saying it, and you ended it without ending it – this curious case of contention, part yours and lonely selves waxing in complete space
              to the edge of our seats, brought to the brink of all fear but you were braver and I am much
to myself, a trickle of rain descending from inflorescence of leaves.

3

I am looking at the subtle insufficiency of maps, and the enigmas of things their own structures
     eluding touch. Somewhere along the way, we get lost
                    but you remember then, somewhere in the vast terrain,
     you remember where we set foot and marked it with some vague memory of origin,
               coming back to it still untarnished, knowing it was there all along,
and you took it in your hands and tore it apart – your face swollen with satisfaction, we
                     trouble ourselves in the dearth of feeling – what’s left is a naked word
        splintered in the pavement. You told me you will never come back to this
                                strange place.

4

a singular impedance of movement was all it took
       to romanticize what it meant like to be still as your brindled face this evening.
I always held you like a child would, a blanket in somnolence. Rays of sun searching
                 for mouths of flowers – heat becomes its negligible end: sweat pulses
   through open integuments drained of their poisons. The voice from the thickness
         of quiet translated: the moment suddenly hits its sojourn, and goes through
                   gradual dissipation.

   you have missed tonight’s highlight simply because
                  you were mum as a nurse in your camphor of white departure, and I cannot overlook
  how the stars begin to wrestle each other, telling an allegory of darkness and hearing a catastrophe
                begin its fusillade of entrances taking form in tomorrow’s tabloids
  you know not about.

         They say when you hold someone, you transmit something and might leave a thing
worthy of hypothesis. The sound was made clear and I did not flinch.
                            You were asleep the whole time.

Kalakip ka ng dagundong ng hangin ngayong tanghali:
    Bago ang lahat, kakapahin ko ang natitirang
    init sa upuan. Iyon ang aking galit. Inukit ng iyong bigat
ang paglubog ng buwan, dito sa aking gabi,
tumatambad sa silid na walang durungawan,
  isang batang namumugad,
gumagapang sa walang-malay na gulugod
  ng pagdaralita. Bulahaw ng radyo at ang binulatlat
  na pagkakataon – matapos ang lahat ng ito,

ang tulog ay may angkop na bigat,
panaginip ay kulata, dala ng hangin ang bukas
  na walang pagkakaiba: Dinaanan mo na rin ito

kahapon ng hindi man lamang dumungaw
para kumaway.

everyone else sleeps while this weather
takes a peculiar turn,

decides to chronicle with a mild kiss
of drizzle on the loam.

you did not know the name for
the mortal perfume of the Earth in the heat

of contrary figures but knew the nascent lunacy
of things and the dangers of their pursuit.

the gripping contravention holding things together,
a piece of the sun against the urban sky

and your apparition splayed as cold silhouette,
forced libation of Earth to soothe its machine,

sharp impressions accurate with details,
disseminate through the static conveyor of messages

the intact hieroglyph of your movement
in this odd weather.

all quiet this afternoon, the sky
pulses in its unprepossessing limit

surveyed the intersections with the wane
of tired eyes. in this side of town, yours

the gray-faced pavement, mine the stones left
unturned, pillaged by the children of suspicion,

thrown and must have hurt something,
a bird hurtling in its pace, or a mangled body of a cloud,

wingstalked, stifled to the brim of impinged labor,
  depth of sleep is measured by the weight of dream.

all quiet this afternoon, the naked body
of the sky is blue, spun around in penetrating tone.

quick is the flat motion of the quaintest of feet,
this afternoon in Poblacion, heavily veiled and demurred

the vertical climb of morning past the cranes, the monoliths
screaming broken litanies – strange skies are insipid now

thick with the froth and rekindled petrichor,
you told me you had a view of every inch of world

from the 31st floor and now I circled to cut corners
and fold my love for cold fronts, monsoons, storms.

you said, at the end of the rotunda,
there will be a shade for me to seek asylum in,
and it took me in without hesitation in that blank
moment left to my own device,
not my heart’s control but yours,
I drew a line for you to cross and pithered in excess.
     you have gone far enough,
    this March afternoon – you said,
   there is potential in this, smiling, you in your
  tattered jeans and timeworn Chuck Taylors

staring  indefinitely at fretful space,
in the falseness of things, you have gone somewhere,
  I in the shed, inched along where
  you stopped to dust your clothes.

kung ikaw lamang ay iba sa iyong
   sarili at hindi itong anino
na may hawak na balaraw,
  mala-dagitab ang bilis ng iyong pagkabig
sa akin,   sana’y naririto
  ka pa ngunit

ikaw   at    ako
ay hindi   ikaw   at  ako at tila
  ikaw   at ikaw  lamang
na sana’y dalawa; waring kumpisal
  sa harap ng salamin,
kung mayroon lamang kasiguraduhan
at walang bahid ng alinlangan at itim
na katahimikan,

puspos ka ng pagdaramot
kaya naman
sa init ng paglisan at sa pagiimbot
  ng distansya,
ako’y tupok
    na
   tupok

transcendent it was the first time
when it was of faint memory to touch

but voluminously told, exacting itself
like the pretense of the heaviest pages

the curve of your face the entry of light
through momentary indulgence

nerves their city buoys and the pedestrians
salt of skin in intense heat begging for details,

ways to sewerage of mind and previous blunders
and the purest landscapes of feeling,

the underpasses of eyelids where glances hit
first, stalk swiftly – to wait underneath their

shade in the fleeting Maytime sun
coming back with renewed fervor, remembering

that from there, waiting in that margin,
there are things that may only strike a potential

but never learned, memorized, collapsed into
the absolute, and that lostness is imperative

to the finding –
the river of eyes where pilgrims are in transit,

well-constructed like the mausoleum that
keeps its secret of hills and cathedrals

kept unmarred in the silence of your refusal,
pulled out to be nailed taut into origin

the blankness of your face taken as mechanism
of marvel – to whoever god drew lines on your face

and to whoever foolish wanderer would dare traverse
your collapsible bridges, the sonorous depth

of your being when back against the dash
of beating back to senseless origins,

your name similar to the prepared countenance
of Manila, passers-by in awe of your slow Moon

unraveling behind curtains for showerheads,
humming behind, a conversant tune

where not one being ignored and it was true
to the form of first whispers

this whole new world mapped out
made naked to the twisted augur of shadow

reared by light through innocence,
a whole city I know but cannot touch.

In crepuscular tapestry
   telling of mauve night

and the dull color of
  stones intimate

with waves from an
open  sea of laughter

the sound of you
in the hollow of me

      keeping watch over hills,
my body hunting your blue echo.

Who are you this evening?

body    first   we took   on the    evening
   like   it    were   virgins     on   flay

we    owe everything   in  praise
   of    moonlight

saying    the   ****   of word
  meaning   it   full   in the   sudden heat
     of   ephemeral   light

once    and   always
  at    once    your   world     became
    a tiny    cage   for that   little hummingbird   heart

and you    wafting
   in    the   wind   like    a cloud
    of       farewell   from   the exhaust
of     transitions


redefining    you    with   intent   stare
     was     searching     for  myself
from    heavings    of      tired     fusuma;
          hefting    out   a    mound   of
equal   parts    divine    and
       sullied       undisguised
yet     only     silence   retained   its   poise
      of     mystery    nothing
I      could   understand

a    hand    in
     hand      is    nothing but  the   instant
merge    and   separation
    and  that    the coming
out     of     words,    a   tabulation
    of    abject    loves

simply    you,   a  splitting    image
     of   a thing   refusing
to   be held   with   one    hand
     on    my face   and   the
    other,     fluttering   away

from
there is nothing to fall against this evening.
the sound pace divides lavish moon
in half, and inside a glass,
in clenched circles.

what slipped away glazed
this fruit with old glint: patent of territorial
anguish.

speeding right on by this evening,
the lift of morning borrowed from sweat.
I am tugged at
by a moving thing

sundered there, seeing whose anonymous
  back sways with flaxen hair
laughing freely into the wind
   and gone with it

to
everything brought to the edge
I listen to metonymies:

want* for running into
fear for holding a hand, a part of something
   now in union

light for the clearing of the path
  cluttered by feelingfulness

and pry open their meanings,
back into the fitting measure of waiting
as the slab of Sun lies like a dozing beast
on the streets where we surface
like the sound of falling

feet strong despite changing winds
  when mantling the living rivers
  of gradually dissipating lives

running away
even when no one was looking
we are headed to where
   we found ourselves
occupying spaces.

plenitude steps taken in those
    DMs. my hands in the tense wind

are two hounds in a ***-lock.
somnambulate if you may, in the pretense of this
   grotesquerie. sing to me, you might, lax in tune
and foreboding by consent.

on the floor now, aslant, like two dogs
   waiting in servitude,
  the detritus of shedding – outside to no windows,
I perceive an elongated white of moon.

you must have hurt the world
with your darling feet.
carrying the night, deciphered from above,
whose distance is this that switches
to impact?

from the look of your face in the drone
   of sleep,
I doubt my presence

but when the radio of dream soon dies
and your breath ****** out of you
like a vacated city,

the undulant breath, a fair warning
and myself simply, an aftermath.

Why this house? This house that walks without frame? Only air strides
circumventing the dome. The permeable atmosphere
flows freely shaking water down my arms,
          pulp by pulp, fragment by fragment,
consolations for tippling music streaming in the ears.
Blowing arias – intone of regret, or the loss of beautiful things.
Preferring silence over sanguine narratives. How are we to assuage yearning?
   I heard someone say, “The ideal is unattainable.” – strange, holding
the small of one’s back and lament the narrow ends of the world.
   Strange the flight of birds, the hum of buses past Quezon City.
It would drone that you do not know her – and that she is never somebody
  else’s – that is dearth consoled. Your palm indents delineate not fate
but the steady distances of things close to contact, eluding tragedies.
                          Why this house, and why you?
I have no blueprint of your home. I know not what festoons the balustrades.
   Your rue for the absence of a balcony. A panel over earthenware I suppose,
or partitions to separate dreams from stilled things impaled to the wall.
   I presume there are photographs of you in every corner
to remind you   of your gathered storms.
                         I know not the smell of your home, but I have your
nameless fragrance on my shirt wedged, ambulating with me through the halls of
    where I chase moments like cirrus stirring in a somersault of summer.
  Make use of  bowls with
      evening water  and flush the specter down like how you would, cold water
into throat from a night of weeping. Somewhere there,
    the China will remind me of your elliptical face in
                the intensity of leaving. Your eyes
the windows for birds humming a music I do not hear.   I have been to too many neighborhoods,
I have seen unfinished structures foretold by obliged scaffolds holding together
                     a would-be home. Why this house? There are only shadows intimate on
the floor. The sudden burst of impossibilities watered down, attenuated by
            piercing glances through the thickest of nights black with remorse.
The palpable silence gyrates and the diameters of the world are too close
     to break in sidereal circles.
Why this house?   Because you are in it, and outside,
    through the thick quietude, underneath the paling moonlight,
                         you pretend you see nobody.

I once bore witness to no soggy corner, a seedy cinema, or a vile discotheque
  when out in the open, the somnolent air on face smashing the distance
  often times misappropriated as meaning, or desire – that we hold no choice
  to circumstance and acquiesce: I have become consequently obsequious
as in April’s proper warmth swallows the coldness of metal and mostly words;

it was when nights are spent without maps – roads and their meanings,
    separated by lines – washed with the squalid metropolitan living,
down from the urban thresh to the empyrean glower of a slow moon beginning
  to ignite in someone else’s but mine only and nobody else

aches and persistent meanings, a hand reopening
   a long-forgotten dusk –  painted anew with a chance never off-tangent
   but always at the cynosure of things

   this glass with rondure of your face, the valve of shower
   your hands or simply the droning sound of driving homeward
  
      that I cannot escape, a voice leaning in, saying something
    in the calm wind.

the heat of an approaching story
(they have their own way of trickling
  your hands are hourglasses on the wooden table,
  the sands of whose sea you have shattered immensely
  with a single stroke of    recklessness)

it will be punctuated by the silence taken to the limit
   of a moment’s finite order
  (I dip my hands into the palms of useless glance
    waving heavily against the concrete lip of this dark
   intervening, standing in between as fury on the other side
   of the city is taken to the streets – barricades and men
        bawl into the fullest weight of the world,
     you said you   see all of it.)

and  will reach the lilt of   embrace,
  in all forms plundered of sentiments,
  all of it taken into the  air where

  I    see the final bird of dawn, flying
   and I cannot.

blank spaces sharpen the same way a whetted blade would
   in a dull moment of assault;

the sky above me, I wished for, over in and caving for,
  a gun doing its own sinister deed

of shoving into the highlighted realm of some peace-distortion
  when it is done, I will hear laughter shearing

the wind with its beautiful imprint
  unless it was always darkness and just that – a place for passion

and so much of it in the middle of nothing, I cannot
  bid well into these frenzied moments of tense

stillness – when it is done
I will hear you laughing, screaming into the wind,

    a name,   *someone else’s

You’re well-received in the Sun, this extraordinary Wednesday with nothing
  to do but to look out the window in transit and feel the breeze
  when it happens, that it takes a sojourn also – imagine it into form of all things
  gone wrong when love took its place.
  a linkage of all misguided features and ghosts, some travesties along the way
but it is all good once you bet on horses in burning stables, each eventual fall
  of hand into another hand – you see his, and sense a potential glower into
  detail. The patter of rain when it falls hard, and taking into account bodies
   flaying in unrestricted pace, breaking – when the impossibility of an immovable object
   meets
                   an almost impenetrable force or reckoning and no distance or collision was met,
  only retch at the volatility of the variables we have no use for
     such as love.

we circumambulated the cathedral
  and whose face of gray for I to wear
  is insisting that I have been dead for
  a long time as obvious as a bell curve?
whose cross is this that I am carrying
  all across the firmament repeating
  in a yelp of command: salvation?
whose nails if not for knives
do I smother at dawn? stone’s hindsight
and a fool for the world deep in the night,
  beguiled – waters decide my home
is permeable. I must have drowned in sound
a dwarfed image when I shouted

your name in all of my silence.

there are many things trembling, disparate, conscious of their
     spaces. things appear colossal when near. rife as tongued word,
     an approximation – a misuse of time;

     dealing more for sight than feeling, things snap in a very short distance.
     fire burning glowers pale. lilt of a sentence in speech.

      a luminescence is nearness. its impact, relative – brands it a different
      form, recalls it, a clear warning as message.

      what is yearned for is distant. mostly what’s ignored is as obvious
      as want. you, both at the same time, undulating.

sa dagliang pangangalawang ng buto dala
ng bawat patak ng ulan.

ang pinapaling lakas ng hangin palihis
sa kurtina ng pag-iisa, itong kamay na palupot
ng pagkalugmok, hapung-hapo sa paghabol

sa pag-uumaga ng mga sandali.
napababalikwas sa tuwing banaag
   ang hinaharap.

hubad ang bughaw na katawan ng mundo
   ang kulay ng karagatan ay pula – dala ng silakbo
   ng damdamin;

magtatampisaw sa tubig
  hihiga at lulutang
      kasabay ng tagistis ng alaalang walang ibang hangad
                   kundi ang umusad.

marahil ay tulog ang diwa ng binigkas ang salitang
tiyak na ikahuhulog ng buwan mula sa mataas nitong upuan;

ang kamay ay entropiya – ang iyong mukha, ang aking daigdig.
lagablab ng mata, halaw sa init ng pagkakataon.

may taglay na lamig ang hangin, lumalatay sa balat,
at sa nagbabalat-kayong anino sa bakanteng silid.

ang mga umaandap na ilaw – ang tahimik na ugong ng iyong pag-hinga

sa aking tabi, ng aking bigkasin
ang hindi kayang wakasan ng katahimikan lamang.

mata ang may bitbit ng
dagitab ng bawat sandali

at waring mga kamay na aba,
ang karagatan na may kalong na katahimikan;
sinusuri ng ilaw ang lahat,
mga palad na nagdadaop.
ang halakhak sa sukal ng gabi.
ang batong binabalinguyngoy sa lalim
ng bawat pag-tingin

itong mga kamay
tanaw ng mata


ang alaala

the droning image before me,
a wetted silhouette hushed in loincloth.

all are tiny currents with their immediacy;
confound careless grace for warmbound sweat
of the swollen world in the heat of an uncollected moment.

dartle I may in delight of frenzy, cold air nibbling
at my feet. river runs pale in the narrow grey-faced street.
knee-deep into the water of no rain, simply a dream

of wide hours. mind you in the **** of minutes
and fine-tune this machine infected with body english;
basking in the flood of midnight – this swirling fish

in the permeable navy: a nautical breath tender in its rasp;
a trifle on the things and their undulations. remember you
in that stolen night, face to face with walls their blackened meanings

faces pining away in transit – if the plenitude of voices
in the station would merge and form a whole new world,
are we to drown in the sound and emerge mute with wonder?

I squint at the city across the balustrade, its sibilant air
of disgust – I recognize mooned tapestries and see myself
as one of the lights, the appropriate tension of hands that

have    their own silences held to themselves
like how I ***** you in light.

I take this benign hour, simply disappearance,
before you – you have allowed entry uncompromising
as rain would, a cold envelope, or the waft of foliage

the impenetrable silence persisting within stones unturned
and trees impaled to the Earth like fate would decree
a sudden glint of circumstance.

the throbbing room of grace that folds a hundred measures
realizing it was easier to say nothing

and witness the rest of you flicker.

the rest of the lights before you
slid into erasures. we have become
everything the city is in its precocity;

from the wind that gallops, the dog
howling into a crossfade, even underneath
the already dead lampposts that give

in to the velocity of such departure,
a divisible line. a border I cannot cross.
I dip my body into the thick dark

and become bendable light through
the crevice of doors. the gnawing silence,
your leitmotif. something the wind is still

all beautiful things passing and I become
nothing more but a dank memory in the muck
of forgetting – whatever it was, that I conversed with,

stars their dereliction, all across the flagrant void,
I am beating with more life than ever,
dancing around your leftover moon.

affixed there, its insignia of silence,
   the river-memory of bleak stone
   in waters raging

all at the vandal of the afternoon.
  running dog's the swelter, a salvage
   of iron in heat. the revolution's an image
  of the child in all of dogdom

when anger breaks loose a fettered dove
   here, or the crisp agony of bannerets
   shoving a name worthy of forget:
   bawling enigma from here to there

all the tension of wires, umbrella-heads
   are people, drowned in lambanog.
 our mirage drunk somewhere in intestinal
   roads flushed with the swill of bile --
 moon's the face of ******, stars
    their ****** patrons. squall of wind's
  the pernicious call of morning starting
   washlines, groping dry,

   an unpossessing pale ******. somewhere
 in Quiapo, someone's a Jesus-monger, ****
         of the Magdalena, or
    an inverted crucifix treading its way
   past hills without geometric memory.

  mine's the next station, yours too,
  thumbed by a tired machine: this etcetera
      of coffins squinting at their faces.

he wipes his glass clean
she wipes his glass clean
his  glass   hers
  to see    in
       the fold of   her   being
she   sees   to it  all clearing;

  and things to fulmination
committing a steady ******   into
   the   silence, this   afternoon

I think to   myself

   wardrobes  tossed
hers,      somewhere there,   in oblivion
    temporary,   absolute,
  zeroed in, sexed up against   walled-up contention

  our  legs  a tribe
of   hounds,   our   fingers
     feathering  light    through   his   glass
  she    wiped   clean
     with       her      emissions
                           eyes    wide   as morning

somewhere by a mountainside,    horses
   ride   into    the Sun
and he   thinks    of  
      repetitive  lapping    of   floundered  waves
to    bite shore
   and she   thinks   herself

           a    verse     punctuated
open    still
           to  
                        revisions

is it too much of an onomatopoeic dissonance that this is synonymous to
   regret dubbed as slouched nirvana. Across the bonfire, there’s volition
   as glare, light as judgment. Why they call her
Luningning, I know not.
      Take excess for jaunts and flesh, and pay no heed to illusions. The mirage
  on the wall is but fire-dance on the bitten lip of true company.
                    heady static pierces pinecone. Soon the moon will sink like **** to ****. Or felled star as tripled glaze of salted lip. Or the ****** of the butterfly.
     Are we here to metamorphose these tiny susurrations into a commune?
                     Dank and stale as ****-laced pavement, the whole world now
    spires in uneven strobes. The last song on the karaoke as memory. The knead
      of temperamental air on the scalp. Take pork rind for bread, intemperance
    as tribute. The night dons its silken robe and shows her pair: two moony eyes
               piercing the noise.

with what you had in your hands was simply

an ellipsis to emptiness. Hands can only carry
                very little weight.

and to have been caught in a virulent string
   of your Decembering noontime air – was it,

just birds spry and singing or was it
a wreathe of girls surrounding the *****

back to how it was to create light out
   of primitive engines?

once it capitalizes, we are caught in this
small circle. often retained, the detritus of

such duel: once ripples are May and
  initialed the reprise of springtime,

yet here we are only tropics, and cancer,
   and the heat is too much as to bear

charge, your tired, sleuthing dog Django.
   rasp for the lift, was it before the collapse

when both a yawn and a dance trembled
into   /stillness/

ano pa nga ba ang tangan     ng haraya
kundi ang langitngit ng katahimikan,

na sa isang sulok lamang ay mahahawakan hindi
ang puso: sa isang iglap, pagsasatubig.

puspos ng liwanag ang lupa. Muling pagtatangkilik
sa sukal ng dilim.

hindi alam ng hangin ang pangako ng paghilom.
hindi banaag ng kahapon ang bukas.
pipikit na lamang ba’t walang pagtangis,

na sa dulo man ay marapatin, kung tayo’y papel,
     ay mapupunit na lamang
ba sa mga kuko ng marupok na sandali?

that moves from its mooring: it was from interstice
          to intersection somewhere in Poblacion.
          I was once there, looking for loose change beside
          the market. Quickly I began as though an impression
          was made past the kiosks dense with the matrimony
          of the tabloids and print: its dearth on the streets
          of Plaridel. Mud caked at the grey backs of gutters,
          a spectacle
                                              of leaves on the ground like deft
          hands place them there for empires.

         the first that I touched: wind,
         last: your face, wind was it only that you and I were
                          never off-tangent, always, minus the blindfold,
             seeking endlessly as though things refuse to be found,
              pulsing in the heat of hiding grace.

      
          and goes back to its source: something too splayed for science,
          only too easy with a child’s fancy – chauffeurs playing checkers,
          crossing each other out within conjunctions – much you or I,
          our weights syndetic and our weightlessness, imagined – as if phrasings
          loose like waters from the spigot left open: mother arrives, haranguing.
                       like how it was simple for the wind to remind us fit to this
                 meet constantly receiving your incidence, and my place stilled
                to familiar topographies.

          a window is left open, with its hands in the terminal of silence
                holding light like obdurate stone; the surrender registers
                with grievous art, you curved like a bent question mark,
           or a swollen oblation borrowing its sheen from the ****
                    of bobbing beacons – the candid Manilascape you kept on
                           fevering for              like an open sentence

               only to find its birth.

this tired militia of existence.
the burlesque jeepney stallions
   its metal anatomy. its belch-***,
its slur of alloy clanging like hundreds
  of men for tacks buried deep
    by a cornucopia of strikes –

thus is the heart, a boy in his seventh year
  dragging along a kite;
the soul is a bus ticket torn by the conductor,
  thrown away into Novaliches.

to wish it true, its gliding silk
  of air – it was only beginning

when people meant we are finished,
  we were only just starting

tonight as the night wills it, a boy

   fishes for brine in the shallows of dream
padding the small of his back
with a hunt of green: his equal self.

   the day, loose in the wind, perfect as perfect
   can be,
   yet still not quite, like when mother said
   the light dies, its low wattage in the hour,
   the prize of the candid moment: dimmed. darkled.

my derelict third year in the drone:
a way to assuage what it feels to

function. to breathe mechanical air.
the rambunctious scent of morning appears

ill, confabulated, lysergic at most.
ladies in lithe dresses pose for pressing scenes.

taken photographs held up in loose light.
pelvises unloosening, ****** on the thoroughfares

fishing for trout as men, men as flowers,
lackadaisical graffiti dropping like simian jaw

upon visions of thigh. everything signatures a suture
so precise like a repair of the lip,

or the rapture of birds in impossibly blue skies.
news was that a fortune was coming in,

and I slept within the masses; dreams deliberately
vandalized and fragged.

they said it would be
marvelous. they said it would not ****.

i see a woman
in her 20s. falling subtly, a gingham dress

sexed if not pullulated by flower-heads,
she said it would be darling

my third year in the machine.

still as cold chair,
the sound and the unsound.
the clearing
wanes.

i think of nameless streets
and pry their memories.
when a steady hand reaches
for air, it is an effort to rename things
  their shabby selves. their yearnings
  crumble underneath awnings of a new,
  wounded moon.

   the   light   through
the    room, and the   shadows it pours.
  its working, a quiet punctuation
in  mere sentences   our own  silence,
  shattering at flight's first   thought.
 gravitations   may   be  heavy.
the   height   verily   not   its measure.


transitions   piled  like  old records;
  trailing the monsoon on  our backs,
 the persistence of daylight  and   coffee,
    plodding  in  heat, its vertical crawl -
   this metastatic fall.

i dream of old structures. dreaming
is the product of stasis. a consequence
of movement.

    dreams can only be too real. there is word
 that it thrives where it is assailed.
     an act of the body, conversing the limit.

there is principle, there is mad luck on the streets
 but then again, i have neither one.
i assume the idleness of poles underneath the roof of a cafe in Poblacion
   and wonder where all my poems go,
 the value they impose -- only there's implosion   and not   so much sense
    so i go out to seek tenderly in the night,
 a cheap moon trapped underneath the bottle   of a pilsner
   as i hear one  of   the patrons call out
  my solitude like a ******* on all fours;

one afternoon pursues a following.
  i have wasted my time writing and stopping
 to   watch   stray hounds   pant   and
     ****    on the hot asphalt of Plaridel.
the   papers   retch  at tyrannies.
    hands   for  mechanisms  configured to
  a heady bias of  probabilities.
 the   house   next  to me is  being
     overhauled   and i  imagine  the incredulity
of   things  not their own  meanings.

  a pair of old Chuck Taylors on the bedspread,  a decrepit  bed for making love
    or passing time or  wasting the night away.
somewhere, someone  is  reading my  poems  and  weeping at the  cadence.
   most do not notice -- it was the caprice of things   not mine to  commandeer.
   the sound  of  stone masons hammering
boulders double the  melancholia.
   the deliberate sieving of  sand and  stone
      felt like   sandpaper air.
 the matutinal  sky split into dire condition
    much like  mine: becoming   and unbecoming.

all the   ******* are out in the streets
with ladies wuthering in high strides.
all the priests are in their rendezvous,
killing buddha heads.
the police have silenced the sirens
and behind pairs of old navy blue slacks
   and mobiles covered with dust,
the  captives scream mercy.
all the ATMs drone the pither of metal mouths.
a widow in Bocaue holding a picture
  of the departed.

i look up and see my face in the sky:
  if only i could **** the man and be the man,
fill his shoes with flesh, his movements my emulation, his enigmas my clarity, his day old denims my best dress.


more than beer and cigarettes have done me in and more to myself much no less
   than a cat hit by a speeding bicycle
  somewhere in Padre Faura.

madness hurries like a lover and hands me
   a picture of the moon.

i've got something and that's good enough
  as the police leave the grime of times
   and evict drunks off the streets of Malolos,
  as the priests step into the showers, naked
  and bloodied just like the ordinary man,
  as the cat that was hit
      by   a bicycle
   goes   back   to   the dark
  licking   the   salt  off the wound,
    bone fractured,    still alive on the  hot roof.

Manila    is  fray

Tough enough to die,
    Brave enough to see ****** against
        the billboards

   ***** on the marketplace
   ***** men haggling for prices
   the corners are squalid -- rats with ambitions   of men take  their places    in
    the esteros

   a car-horn blares, wanes old moon music.
      I sing songs of malversation. Trains all graffiti.

     My heart like a jailbird freed somewhere
         in the big sur; love assuages nothing,
    comes with a cheap price
          a freak December night in Roxas blvd.
     i sit on marble benches and dream
        of artilleries, garlands on *****-nosed
            barrels, nuns   grieving  dust
     in    the ground.    communal bathrooms
         drunk in foolish caricatures,
   the tabloids     displaying  flowerheads --
        the democracy in the streets a ****
    for      kings,  no    love to   lull
        me    to infantile    sleep

         tortured are   the   bulls 
   matadors    hiding  behind    faces red   like
       faces    of    statesmen   flushed with
          the   spirit   of   bourbon
   whereas we are    here   river-facing
       northern tip of its  undying source
  like    wives    on  balustrades   waiting
      to catch   the fragrance   of   inamoratas,
   light  reenters
          interstice   of   chary webs of  dull heads   hemmed in like   canopies   in the throat      of     overthrown ponds,   scraps
     of metal    sold    for a  night's  worth
        of    gin   and   Sinatra,

  Deep within   the   grave, the dead   laughing
       at the dead living. Atop   waters,
   yachts peering   into   drowning  fish,
       in   the middle, a   jam   of buses
         belching    lassitudes that    strangle
    the console,    the man    in all  of us
       the same,   cursing behind   the wheel
   and everybody    else    different
              dancing    at   the   top   of our   heads.

in  the   sovereign  of your  sleep,
   you ****. tousle. scream out of bed
   flailing.

         like   fish
  out     of    water,
       the   current of    immediacy.

     i will     write you
a boy    in     his
        fetal     nature:

    bright-*****,   holding  a   crimson  balloon
       in his   small  hand (a  reminder   of
       levitations)
    teeth white    as endless   snow
         the flat-footed lotus
   wading     in
         the     waters      of   senescence

    you will    take    it
   as a holster      cradles      gunmetal
       as      parking lots    fill
       parks    with  senile    men
    waving canes   into    the Sun
        yellow-teeth    and   brittle-*****
  
        you      will    wake
    and       smile   your way   half-painted,
      half-illuminated   like   a dagguerreotype
         in my    mind's   chamber
       your   half-nose,   *******,
           you snoring   beast   in   the jungle
     of   my frailty

         i too falling in sleep
     the red   balloon    let go
           into    the   cirrus.

the horse rummages on the track
and the victory is owned by the ****.
soon sleep will engulf my body
like the oblivious quietude of Aokigahara-jukai.
things and their semblance of utmost care.
light begins to burst
and there is little left to see,
wide-eyed, crunched by the efficacy of aches.
taking all to the very heart of hurt
as gamblers wager,
and coming back with the sound of completeness:
a man is a man in his chronology of defeat -
left torn by madness,
a cornered beast pressed against the woods.

the moon plays its lyre, white-washed,
sound wading in the very source of quiet,
hauled out of the Sun, its mother.
this hound stalks the world
with woebegone legs, a reflection of the entire world fractured
by a singular shot at the end.
i hear the guttural snarl of engine
unwavering in its limitations. say, at first light, all exists to paint darkness quicker
than any obfuscated conclusion -- hiding in
itself, its mood for squalors.
the mud dug deep for bones
pared from the slaughter of midnight,
hiding them to mask my defeat:
everything around me sparkles with
the vigor of frailty, all the same.

the nights are too long, scarce as froth
from an opened mouth left flat,
a dry gin bottle.
i imagine sad armies dissolving in pale moonlight, and crosses thumbed down to the snaking hiss of its nondescript prayer.
gears gnash like teeth in anger
of you in your young clothes, the pace of cars
hurrying back to homes.
i remember the splintered wood burning
the last in the round kiln of the Red Lion.
the upholstery of night is the twilight's
catharsis. the coast of dread widens like
the vernal metamorphosis of a young ******* in Gibraltar,
come in, come in with undecided ******.
you can hear the fall coalesce with the levitation of ember, landing like feet blunt
on the asphalt beside desolate bicycles
    in seedy parks.

the surreal tabulation of analogue repetitions:
death's myriad, in all corners screaming
the countenance rebel, against the floored masses.

times like this, the plenary moon
  tonight wearing many faces,

the white-washed truant at bay
    white-hulled still, the brim of the sky
to a full, on such a bright night leaving a trace
   of say, prongs of fire on the kiln

the skin the soft breeze molests with a chill
flung from pinecone – the blackened spires of the
very heart of flame and the mullioned wood that understands
  what the heat of placeness mints underneath
  our skin – what silence remains a translation when the smoldering
  remains are bitten repeatedly, aureoled in the moment of vital meaning.

we hear its threat, retained in clock-whirs
like a primordial word or the fluting of  light’s bendable
   rondure harnessing a truth we let in.

I fail behind the walled-up lip of laughter
because the weight of passing
is heavy on my back – like a bough dragged
  by rainwater, or sound elected to drown:
the smell of poinsettia assaults,
lifting its slaughter against Kiltepan and Ambuklao,
  past mountains lulled to sleep: the moon sleuthing
  like a well-oiled machine.  what do you hear?

  we are aware of its full absence,
like that of our undulation after a fall,
  or the wild sibilance of breath trying  to  utter something,
  going back home with a song in between teeth,
    without words.

toppling the gait
  of trees in the bluster.

we do not like it when it rains.

under the melee, kamagong lay
idly with the gravity of fruit ripened.
  at long last, touching ground.

in this knell

i regard you as plaything
take drippy measures and harness
  cues for thrusts.

the span of the shadow plastered
to the wall means   the silence is as deep
   as the rain outside,

all up from the unfurling corner
  of walled up tango-stride, ripping apart
the    linoleum with   dance.

  i may become a daub of perfume

   and you, maybe a smile on my face
   passing as it rained.

wind goes ballistic.
the farther the birds are to complete
    this absence, the better

quicker exchange of easy avatars
   in Magsaysay, where no strobe
  roams and only alternations of taxi
      zigzag in stolen hours.

remember you pale,
   forget you raw with blood.
 eyes see all what silence divests.

in some dark place, we must
  all have many cicatrices. blue is the hand
whirling outside, serious with its narratives
    and tenuous notes.

lightening up
the fleeting truth of togetherness,
its ample weight something virtuous
    in perceived realness is

that      all guesses wan and wild
     exhilarating the    words we   utter
  riding along the strange   Sun,   our
  headlong  chronology of    rue.

Someone will cross, kiss as if it
   were rain and tough stone as if
  it were love,

and all futures stir, taking prescience
     away making all wounds dumb
   in foretelling, time taken like an orphaned
 child from abandon

the frivol of rescue is the promise
     of its danger

making nights stranger than they were the
   first time, room made bare and wider again
with its shy deceit of furtive silence

  you, conversing in that moment of sleep's ravenings

the terror of its lightness: the frothing sea reaching for salt, circling the toe for words
   left in tongue's misery, clasped and irretrievable like the vanity of naked principle
    rushing like tides in between
   bone-spaces;

I'll peer through the flaxen strand
   of night

with your color that excites,

and think myself the blue pither of fire
  or a flummoxed stone left unturned.

it's not the rapture of a knowledgeable
   beast or the common grip
   of the eye's gift for unsparing detail.

it's the way the queen moves to all
    corners unclenching a fold of sidereal,

and then like a child with almond eyes
  spruced up, spritzed this morning's
  incandescent dye,

the lapping of strange tides revealing
    fish with dreams of brine

or that one moment when you had
   at first light, the hot flush of coming
      into, recognizing insatiable appetite,

  whistling its overdue intent and the detritus
        we try to hide when we had that virginal moment of    once and  never looking back
      at mirrors.