This old and twisted thing,
arranged in awry futility
like most lives circumspectly:
 a pair of denims
washed in the Sun,
 a slow laburnum glowering.

face-ovals perfumed with
  the camphor of such departure.
 the hand waving the weight
  of the night's obsidian
    is the love i take in - dull or sharp -
  as it arrives, tired as a crankshaft
      or a waned piston

 this junked engine, wheeled off,
  looming a light-clenched house
 with its exhaust of excess. declension.
   rife as a numeral being. repetitive like the drivel of radio talk.  heavy like the sudden drop
     of Sunday on the plod of chapels,

  once more into this.

Thought first begins in
          mouth

                         Tzara

a Sun with a slow metabolism
       excreting    sterile   doves

            or    roses in machineries     of     crimson

I feel   the  same   inflammation

   when    thought   first starts    in the   mouth

   and ends    a derailed    train:      *******
      in   an    alley      of   locomotives

this    titular  token   of the   grave  sorrow of the World
      sinking   in   your   sleep   a  dagger

or          
               simply   a
promise

there are only 5 seats and on each end
are metal chapels. time slows down like a slug
climbing a vertical wall, or say, a drunken man
  making his way towards the oblique recess.

the ignominy of an exhausted carburetor
is the orchestra for the night.
lots of women go in and out, out and in,
  whichever is first, but the last is always
just as bland as any other truth:

we go, each foot splayed to cover measure,
  and in the flash of a scene, gone.

I watch their skirts make gossamer tune,
like some flotsam or a poised note being led
  straight to a trajectory disappearance:

the idea of the image is to glide
over them, over flesh,
over this fetal smoke that I will soon toss
  right into the womb of nothing

and fall flat as a key from a tone-deaf cathode,
a spanked melodrama of television with dull cursive,

        or as lithe as justly, the right camber of blues
             ripping straight through my day-old denims,

peering through the tease of a thigh’s penumbral shadow,
the sound of the world being dragged into double-doors

       echoing a metonymy: *silence the interlocutor, her mouth
                          full of birds. Dark birds.

I.* there is no thicker undergrowth than feeling. first to go is reason, everything
    else levitates into something graver than say, one foot deep  in the grave
     and the other somewhere off-tangent like an offbeat adagio zigzagging
      into slammed slalom.

II. the crush of oregano against mortar, and the clasping of a hand. carbon monoxide
      fades into air as youth takes on momentousness. take for instance this once soft
    hand like a breath of cotton in a precipitate noon: once whirling in claustrophobic
      space, this slight inch of feelingfulness is dazed into the span of *Maya windhovering
       somewhere unseen like paramours *******.

III. from the window you can feel the bluster of falsetto disintegrate at its slouched peak,
       and from where you hear it, a dance thwarts itself like a cigarette ember
       convulsing mid-air – that slow, repugnant twitch: that is you, when you first
        broke your silence in thick shrouds of disgust over strobe-lighted simian jaw.

IV. what else is there but to take this sour ocean in front of me and decode something
       the blue always means mellow but the froth of white something the tragic caprice
        of tropic: some nights, they remind me of bodies careening repeatedly; some days
                    they just are, like you, just are, like a riot and only sound, or sleep and only
          reticence, something short of wonder and terse with reply.

V. there is a cluster of harmonies flowering in my mind when the sensurround of din
        starts conflagrations in the ornate dark of ear. my limbs snake in the garden
        of plank, my shin bitten in sharp reiterations – my mind crossing the equinox
         looking for shade, or possible, a parasol underneath the crimson of rain.
           say this is the sky, this dense space when I motion both hands into a length
       not an inch could ever devour. suddenly a boy made out of a man, flustered
        in jangled arpeggios and unapologetic thought like a letter of debt opened,
         paying no heed the mind and only what the body dictates: a smash on the
    escritoire or vigorously scratching scalp, reopening scabs and watching
                old blood ooze dry like a lightweight webbed impression
  of       a    dreamy legato.

VI. the night deepens with the warmth of its black upholstery – we do not know
      when to stop and bid for home. last to go is will of force and first to arrive
     in the bleakness like a recalcitrant thought often straying outside with the
       strut of a yuppie, fervor of old haunt. i conjure an image over the cold chair,
    its steel framework thighs untouched, its four decrepit legs the foundation
       of something that refuses to admit its weakness. the very base of what would
   catch the anchorage of my gravity, the very heart of all, and the flattened back
      with a vandal that says “Soleil was here.” the liver shattering in the trance
                    of everything.

VII. night is stupor. i am the lilt of words from a rambunctious machine.         there seems to be an afterthought that separates
                       a concept of vastness and the tactility of narrow ether.
        a word is uttered in extremis - something heaven eschews
                with its bright, arrogant face.

The immediacy of the ambulance turned speech into stone,
  and the gyratory red and blue which is still unknown to me
  grips with bewilderment.

Passing your decrepit home in Santolan. The slovenly lawn
that welcomes an oncoming figure, sometimes I.

The love will stay there,
deep into its sepulcher – fingers of grass sprawl in arbitraries;
answers unknown to ourselves, questions leaving
themselves carefully placed in irrefragable order,

the brooding future that strides a fugitive,
straining our place – the warmth of its absence
oblivious to us like a pretend fireside casting shadows, aslant,
on any figure trivial to us.

we begin to shiver in the blue of night, darkening around us.
the moss-grown silence securing its station somewhere unseen,
but felt,

like this individual morning.

the car outside. you in your plain clothes;
I solemnize over this slow hill of flesh
when you lay down after the dredge.

it was your old automobile. somewhere in the
console, piping in the shell of night, your once
swift-footed self.

it was for Mico, you said.

this thing of time that was once early.
you in your white shirt with blotches of
yellow, like some aureole-bitten lip of bougainvillea.

some cold smitten flitter peering out
of the window of your gray head, your sage,
prattling about its conscious footing, this automobile.

are we but disputes and all that sense,
eluding us? somewhere in Malolos, the fatigued
machinery with its lilting rotor

modulates a once wild memory:
you, still in your white shirt. two bodies
drained of inertia – otherwise occupying song and silence,

our volition nothing but jarring (unmindful of its scathing dialect),
our terms to ourselves fabulated, the savannah drunk
in dappled light that evening – in front of the hospital,
mum as a nurse.

you pass on the keys to him,
learning new language. by the thousand strophes
of this lurching sea with its plodding delay,

your once bright bone, quickening in slow delight
now, as his face obscures yours with wonderment,
this evening – both of you in your denims,
   all three of us in a huddle stamped
  with heavy understanding.

the world around me, in the world of men
   studded to the hilt with green (scorches silence, the time-corroded
     hands that mean to caress) – it is because in birdflight and bird-knowledge
I am with them.

    their beaks excite, the flair in their physiognomy retain importance,
  it is    in   their   vague   meters,   the measure of    roads  remain
    undefined.   the world  around me,   in the world    of men
        flayed    to the    bone    with the   color     of     green
  (its   congenital     quiet,    its    growth   like  the   sea,   a mound  of
          island-woven  muses rising    like   caryatids )

   in    such   loftiness   I  can   endure
God’s    hand   through    the    rind   of   the limit   testing
    pain’s   territories   with    His   bare   word;

the   world around me,   in the midst of  all men,
    perished in  the   voyage  heeding   His   footfall  outside,
smiling tenderly     proved   through   incredulity,   His    masterfulness,
  and  I,    in the   world   of   men,   have ceased   with  birds.

Light unloosens itself. Space slackens.
A figure of a shadow I have conjured before
anonymous eyes. Lapping up the waiflike bleakness
of their elliptical faces.

                               I must teach the trees to let go
of autumn, and relegate spryness to the hearth
of cold without merit, this slow, claiming mutiny
with its face-oval peering through windows multiplying
lovelessly, a crunch of a leaf, suchlike, flourishing
in peerless company. Before me, the sound of footfall
preparing to make sense, a rotunda of bell – that movement
of somebody done for, so ****** the scald welt of ******,
the belch of the world like a pore clearing its squalor.
Or the toppled verdigris of gull.

    Autumn’s greater extension, the abeyance, smilingly
a facsimile of crowds – its roads adorned with laburnum
singeing through the morning’s cauldron, a waft of bald terrain
inflamed, drawing with absence
      a crippled drip of rain back into the world’s dim address.

We have now become this bleached wall exposed
to graffiti; you and I, lost in a vector dwindling somewhere
between flight and ground-woven footing.
Like only such delicate secret opens to tongued up
and thighed upon space – only nightscapes the air dares elope with,
but isn’t that what absence hands over, a roughed up winding
moonlight suspended in crunched ether, or something else
that bade sibilance of speech rammed in preterit?
A blossoming descends in Maytime, besmirched with dreams
collapsing on obelisks. The moment in which I thought you
to be devouring space, nurturing a whelm of heat squalled and
intent, fanning a spleen of intimation, riveting a conflagration.
Else it was before, sulking in the finagling quiet: truths hauled
out and carved to foists,
      much room it was to differ a voice and fragment message,
      staring at this world the first time and the last – all at once
      in that rampaging instance, the rest of the world pinned down
                                                        befo­re me.

There is an inch of sleight in this house – this cold chair,
a burst of cologne clogging a 20 minute stride. The stringent
air tonight blusters deeper than gashing sheens.

The little dryad of dew outside and the cadenza of frogs
after lambaste of rain. Whenever you sing, your voice
communes an immense pain, something unconscious of its
gravity, something that levitates back to momentary ululations

swelling in the grime of times and heady chances. A long stretch
of a day submerged in silence resembling a howl underwater.

There will be many sorrows and they will take form of doves,
assume the skin of the populace. They will come in a volume of
names pressing the linoleumed musk the way the body turns
maneuvering over the saltine, the mattress, juxtaposed to a lover,

a brusque aroma of coffee brushing away the calm demeanor
of the morning, dragging along the weight of its lassitude
towards the sprays of fern opening a dense ornate of forget,

you, in all places that pulse without recall – an obtuse
fish feeling its life in a surge of blue, overtime, finally knowing
    what it means *to sing and drone only words.

Is this emptiness
or cosmic space

a love for dark or consummate
absence?

You lay there
and I, here
in the same
tangential uniformity.

we are but together
splintered, then separate,
making no difference.

you, in your place
and I, in mine

like some unattended baggage
dragged mechanically
by a tireless conveyor,

a hound in pursuit
of its own tail in intense circles,

left to my own silence brought
to the brink of all the noise.

*

The morning with its peripatetic
crush of garlic and spry birds.

In an unassuming distance
strip to void, teased to rogue,
the light does not arrive with
its usual taciturn warmth;

your mother gives you a pear
to pare and ******,

my mother, the same in giving,
yet another thing worth grazing

say, the old skeleton of an empty
wine bottle,

a cold stride past womb-tender
bungalows and sleep-shaped mailboxes.
the feel of its bone , gutted out of flesh.

a compelling strike of silence
permeates more silence – like a prayer thumbed
down to its last throng.

there will be no dialogue.
this is the same quietude
in miles that assume our places.

maybe once you knew this domicile
like the curve of your bow-leg,
or the glint of your inner thigh.

the word “love” falls flat on the surface,
taking its station amongst the masses,
flying with the birds soon dead in their tracks.
the word “love” slits,
cuts open, unloosening a wound,

your mother in the kitchen paring
the flesh from the bone,

and you hear it,

as we look out of separate windows,
the hush churning sound,
spreading on all fours once in this room.

the morning lays out its hairbreadth
wire of memory

in some place unknown to us,
to size the measure our own,
still yet not ours, you in your home,

and I, somewhere outside the world
fathoming shadows their own things not ours.

Fallibly, this evening, the moon over movements
exposed to prying dimness.

Everything is resigned to silence. The balcony
peering through the vastness, the moon like a tonsure
of a septuagenarian paving a hole in the sky.

The Earth moves with feet: plantar, tiptoeing –
out of propulsion from underneath the ground,
turns to sway, a clenched league of roots

the dog outside fashioned to sleep, draped by
the curtains left to dry in the bleak behemoth.
a stone his own size, or the emptiness my own weight.

Here are misspent days under hermetic space.
I am a child left to my own salt. I lift sleep’s lids
and what dreams diminish in realness is nothing but a tide
that clings more to brine than my hands – leading me back to
where I have found myself verily this evening,

the old Moon repeating itself, unfinished still.

I take it that a spray of Sun occults your face,
like watching in a squalid cinema, something a slapstick would
conjure a stylistically dumb image, or the prattle of
bunkum hubbub drowning loudspeakers in plazas.
You know there is a part of you that goes missing
  every time you hear me pass carefully under the care
  of toppled light, and there is a part of me that engages
the dark in this straining mutiny. This is such a troubled time
on the hardline; a martinet on the other cheapened end
of a totaled horizon hollering at gentrified space, eyes sternly
fixed on the mattress, conspicuous in urbane manner, something
shadows bade with hands, lifts up all the ragamuffin days:
   to capture you in such moment, such oneness, of no complication,
like a clean Yamazaki on the house, or a metropolitan district
   augured with rubicund crisscrosses, streets sidereal in measures,
an aggressive ******* at the end of the curb, the spanked curve
   of the mordant asphalt, and the rise of body heat from yesterday’s swelter;
  something only I could have thought of in white thighs of little ladies
    and peering birds for collarbones: look at this, maddened, retaining
    nothing but age.

In here everything attempts
to be infinite – that when utterances
free themselves from mouth’s dungeon

it may all be but locutionary.
This is your leitmotif. To have your darkness
breed flaxen hair,

and in a split-second your eyes in their
deep epistaxis of blackness
follow me with the drone of such machine.

This unmethodical severance; something
drastic by necessity, but does not strike
with the same accuracy of necessary haunts.

Back when I was young, I had no picture
of ravens. You, screaming all across the yard
of your rawness, fracturing the morning.

The trees with their shadows strode
in stilts – the span of such winged vestige,
I thought, on the sterile concrete

was the virginal image of ravens.
Even the rain is able in that awning fount.
The sound of tranquil is the water pipe left pouring,

draining itself of its entirety. Fire hydrants
inflamed, grow jealous of such catharsis.
The bus, running over a pile of garbage, is never off-tangent.

I do not know if you have still the memory
of this place – if you look back too near, wide-eyed,
and surgery-precise, or if you are to trail back too far,

the settings will only pulse with a life you used to know,
and adjustments we are not inured to: if you are to take
this dream of fish out of sleep’s water, it will fade into a cathode.

It had in its forgetfulness, something still the moon is a raven
in a knell of silence. If you are to come back here, everyone
is stranger than they were when you left,

and that what used to pass on as answers are now
mauled into fustian of enigmas. The din of such
demeanor, electric and tense – so swell you can feel it close in

like some pain masquerading itself into
a close encounter with the sheen of pristine moment;
but pain is in media res and to look at you merely, a disappearance

      or a terminal finish .

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.

I do not know what it feels like to live in someone else’s dream.
Outside the house, the moon, like a mistress, slits its throat
and bleeds white. The nature of all things around me has its way
of heaving out the wrongness, as if a drunkard staggering for words,
floundering in a curt reply after being asked where’s the nearest station
towards nowhere. I remember in 4th grade, they asked me what I
wanted to do with my life. All I ever wanted was the same clichéd response,
without knowing the appropriate punishment the desire coming with it.
I am not culpable. I wanted to be a bird stirring in a plainsong: free.
Whatever that meant. In a room where cross-sections of you tender me
margins I cannot cross. When I was young, whenever my mother would
leave me for the marketplace, she told me to always lock the doors
and never let anybody inside. The sound of the gears resembled your hand
in mine when we held hands, securing each finger into place the way
the night tucked us to sleep. It is still something the unforgettable, with
its feigned urgency, its ersatz summer days indoors spent on nothing but
gibberish and luxuriously lounging at nothing, looking at blank spaces
as though they were naked women the first time and the last. In a place like
this that selfishly spires with thoughtless hum, it’s conversations with the smallest
details that cover such distance, revealing weight I cannot solder.
Freedom to me is as bizarre as any other feeling that pushes one person
over to the next one. I have its wobbling sense scattered all around like a crushed
scent of bougainvillea. What we have to give in exchange for it, and what we
are to acquire after trying to weave out denotations that would make us swill
over like muck over the city that we selfishly breathe in, and our almost
ridiculous misunderstanding of the word riddled with unsparing details.
  I had myself mull over it, passing your decrepit house. Freedom,
the wind, or a bird, or anything unloosened like a waning volume from a stereo,
a readying tip of fire awakened ready to catch the corners of your fingers,
a basket of fruits in the morning from a remote bazaar, the peeled off and pared skin
  of an orange, some November night that burnt auburn, anything that may take place
     anytime in our hands – something that does not break in it, but holds still, waiting
to take place, forming names, sliding away from fingers. Freedom, to have a shadow
engraved on an architrave and a cornice, and to have your name in my heart
  like a frieze ornamenting some entablature, or that long dream of striding past
the Metropolitan, knowing how erroneous it was to feel so immense at that cosmic moment
of sizable smallness: the perpetual dialogue between a host and a barfly,
  mellifluously woven striking in sense, a farce raiding meaning all afternoon, like the close
eye of the Sun inspecting furniture, or your nosy neighbor taking time to stop watering the
  plants and watch you dance from your window, to a music that he has no knowledge of,
               but I do. I do. If it wasn’t plainsong, then I was wrong, writhing and alive
still, leaning in the air of a dream – free, wandering,
                      *wind,   passing of figures, clenched fingers, nothing.

Revel in space, yet not darkled, still
the **** and span of things that breeds
airlessness; The trees are evenly cut,
and their overgrowth seems like a forethought.
Where I am from, we eat fish with
our bare hands and our furniture, from bodies
of sandalwood, crushed with the scent of
peregrines. The morning makes you conscious
of space, and altogether the height of trees
syncopates to a nauseating stillness. In the awning
hours, leaves punctuate the ground – the cicada
with its machinistic song prowls, spills like
water from a broken vase toppled by me
years younger, raw, agile, deftly windless,
  wounded in love, lovingly wounded,
perhaps if there is a word for it, then let me
have my way, easily fraught with its meaning:
   a casualty. Sometimes the timeworn folks
would light cigarettes underneath the canopy
of a mango tree to banish ants and send them back
  to their queens – roosters in their wrinkled stations
croon in stasis, a song for the somnolent. I become
what the seasons evict. Constancy. Rearing weight
and gravity from nocturne. Tears are communal.
They make us aware of the weight of the Earth.
Somewhere, a funebre stilts through the silence,
and the jangle of little pieces spells out fortuity,
men in huddles mending pain by the sleight of hand,
a toss of a card, spinning in its imaginary axis: fate,
   feigned and fine-tuned to belief that it is controllable,
a variable, or a tabulation marred by frailty. From where
I am from, people stride through the streets naked,
soldering baskets filled with fruits gossamer from the
harvest, children suckling their mothers, the music of sweeping
metastasizes throughout the afternoon, and the same clouds
contort themselves to afford wry proposition: it is a day tender
with wonder, its allure overwrought, its sheen unremarkable.
  The funebre leaves with a necessary abundance of absence.
All the leaves depart from their mothering boughs,
  collapsing on the dreary back of the loam like penitence.
Like how once when you were young, you tinkered with
the fresh scab of your wound and felt the pain confine
  itself there, a part of you, that has now healed, but is still
      available for the world to break once again.

the line between dreams
  and wakefulness is          thin,

in Ghanam North.
before me, the landscape rogue without
heat lays naked, ash-lorn-true all around;

cold pure, and air distilled
night keen with its eyes strobe around
  revealing drowned pine.

the wall between the living
   and the dead is              frail.

the diaspora trace through names
  what is retained: vestigial, frightful;
   a stone’s throw at the nearby mosque
  crying in prayer, bellowing through the ashen
     quadrangle, a dazed interlocutor.

moving past things unmoving.
the astragalus feels the slow tumult,
   silence as remnant, trilling,
                                     free, carrying a message,
         *Ta’ala.

It seemed so much as no new and uncommon thing
   that what passes on as only a disappearance,
   is but a temporary postponement of something
   long withheld in feelingfulness, in treason of one’s
  desire or simply, a hand which is there, or kept in a pocket
   scouring for loose change, a hand which, somewhere,
    is known in accurate proprioception: refusing to be held;

  I swim against the current not
     for the water behind your river
     that dreams of fish

   I wake not underneath the bowl
      of moon slated by sensorial howl,
     whose wounds are white like
      a face once held in between palms

  and sleep almost endlessly, together
    with everything that twitches, slewing
  to avoid collision, alliterates to blur meaning,
     sways fervently to addle meeting

until we let loose a sigh, and unfasten ourselves,
   dropping pace and both our eyes meet.

In some odd, conjured up way, I might say under
a lethargic light of a dream, as if a housing roof-beam,
that underneath it (mine, of course, the dream), you are
a carefully placed furniture and around you, children scram
for joviality, passing and crossing the shadows that blot
on the floor, where most of your stagnant life, you have breathed
under me, in the same net of which nothing is cosmically related
in some way or metamorphosis, under me or you so quite new
possibly, consciously aware of each other’s settings and adjustments.

Amorphous, dove-form, on rink;
I was once as free as the wind,

and I consider the day’s unremitting reminder:
bent light – falling flat on my dull skin.

Wryly enough, the mornings are pried open,
remorselessly, like a note discovered obsolete in secret

gaps: why would such unopened unraveling
be secret? A persistent memory?

I gaze by the barricade, children fluttering
almost in flight at the city center’s space,

possibly conjuring themselves up as birds
or words freed – such scene requires several audiences,

whereas adjacently crooked, I stare inanimately,
which requires no spectator, possibly dreaming

a shadow, an old man wiping his reading glass clean,
or the squalor of the heart decanted in the heat of transitories;

acute on the night-watch, I will rejoin them
like old haunts finding new-fangled skin to scar.

you cannot escape poetry.

there’s poetry in the uneven streets of *Salcedo.
just to exhibit, ogle at the preen park
  and watch the ravenous trees write in a treatise:
    only shadows are engraved. gravity, their paperweight.
there’s poetry on the oncoming figure,
  a woman in a pencil skirt, disfiguring herself
to pick up her wallet – she wrote herself in cursive,
    cruising in front of the aperture, a form of C in crescendo,
then jackknifes back to slender posture reaching for the sky,
    arms to sides like armaments poised to strike.
making itself known through whimsical imperatives,
   the wind that bludgeons the trees, and smites the poles:
      written in hieroglyphic – the fall of leaves and the felled
  ash of morning, deepening in its station.
you cannot escape poetry
    whereas, I start remembering you without consolation.
  the sudden onset of your memory thrusts through
       the escarpment following a steep descent towards
           my body, a figurine, without water.
you will die here. and from what has been retained,
      will arrive the inescapable.

Heed tetchy static, roving around McArthur.
I can feel the steady impulse breed flaxen flumine.
   Songs tumble notes as ladies sing blunt-mouthed tune.
You croon with them, mindless of the force that tries
  to break free past the console. Your voice is analogous
     to reticence. I hear nothing, feel everything underneath the lazy glow
of the sign that says Yield plastered to a decrepit signage past the
        posh city buoys of Jupiter. Everything comes to a halt
in the remote red light district. Somewhere behind those thick walls
   that enshroud the fumes of tantric body heat, I can feel the ground
    stop in that disconsolate delineation: morose and encumbered,
    outnumbered by the cognoscenti that filled the streets unwilling
  to give us directions to whereabouts we rarely have knowledge of.
   cigarettes rammed deep within their mouths, masticating the cloud
     of nicotine as though it were tender meat, I hear the radio go
      ballistic past the sign now that reads Exit.

For instance, recall daisies,
or if you have not seen one, so much the better.
Paint me a crass picture and sleep
on the shallow crevasse. Stilt through
the orchard and search there: nothing still.
Even the nothingness is form-fitting, and thus,
your vestigial image of daisies. Mold something
out of the vacuity, and there a retrograde sculpture
will wind back to clay. Cornerstones have your name,
and your name even so, has taciturnly placed stones.

Stones. These tiny bodies that lay, undemanding,
scourged by the rapid passage of a carriage.
I wait there, with them, still thinking of daisies.
I know of a child, cylindrically obtuse, in front of the mirror.
Have you seen yourself in the hazy windows
of the Metro? What do you see? I still see daisies.
Or people with heads of daisies. But remember your
forethought of daisies? They are nothing. I am a beheaded daisy
in the lackadaisical wind of Summer. There is nothing to gain
here but the sadness of cold passing. And the child that I am speaking
of, his name, Magno. Sturdy like the rucksack he’s carrying,
lovelessly trundling altogether with the pipes and the
handrails, almost signaling the alarm without warning.

This uncared-for sultry evening decides to splinter
itself against the masses. Again, the daisies appear to me,
this time, in heady form rogue with peripatetic fragrance.
Magno used to unearth daisies and give them to her
mother when he was stiflingly young – he hustled through
the carefully placed furniture. Whatever happened to him,
I know not. And just like the daisies we have come to know now,
trains that do not belong to anyone, and the daisies too, that go
unheard of and unknown to the behest of the city,
have gone into the subtle beginning of everything
that once started in itself, the form of splendor. Nothing.

I can only summon feelingfulness like the passing of a dove,
postponing its arrival mid-air, somewhere along the tucked
bramble across Poblacion, starting with metaphorical sensibility
or an insensibly bland space to procure wanted meaning.
Girls prefer roses and their bright foreheads diademed with more
flowers, and boys, their chiaroscuro or lack of a color thereof, seems
to be fitting in this maladroit contrast, and so I begin, as always,
with your very vague and caged memory. Your face, the whiteness
of snowcapped alps. Your strut, my slalom in a treacherous course
of words reduced to whisperings, to flutings. Your voice, though nuanced,
flitters with an overtone of arrogance: if sound was clothed, yours would
be flamboyant ermine. And the line in front of you before I, my arbitrary turn,
assimilates into a picturesque form of waiting somewhere in Cubao.
I wanted to smash myself with train-speed towards the metallic turnstile,
which, would then famish me even so, just as much as I wish to be a car crash
somewhere within the outskirts of your town, heavily vandalized by the swill
of squalor hefting itself like the rest of the world conscious of its viscera.
  This is how I start you – like waiting for the sun to emerge by Borobudur,
or the clandestine *** of mildew and grass, a hundredfold of images appear
before me and I cannot choose upon my whims and caprices. Are you a dove?
A spear of Sun? A thunderous crackle of an impending rain? A harlequin?
A moseying cirrus? Or just another by-stander in the crowds where I ultimately
seek your being?
      This answerlessness measures my knowledge of star, and my breath snuffed
out of me while I sigh from exhausted penchants, outweigh dissimilarities and symmetries.
A progeny from all superseding conundrums arises: are you a retrogression of a wave
back to its saltine wound, flailing in brine? Or are you just the vast sea and nothing else
on a fine and lucid day where children skip stones and chant name-callings?
                   I sense the peril in this undertaking, and much to my chagrin, I still
   do not know how to end you.

to hold a photograph in my hand
  and believe what is presented,
  take is at it already is – why not?

if I close my mind’s shuttering eye,
will you be as candid as before?
unrestricted, unsorted from the hullaballoo,

you, freer than what is imagined, closing
in like a bullet from yesterday shot out
of the sky’s contrived clearing –

to hold a photograph in my hand
and tug closer by the mouth of the fringe
as if to pour water on a broken glass,

slithering now, a shadow of moon
at the very dull end of my cup;
you are closer than any rehearsed moment

ready to catch the inner canthus of the eye:
this relentless picture-passing, tense and
fervent, avid like bankiva to air,

water to chrysanthemum: behind thick shrub
of crepuscular, an arboreal locomotion
shatters loose, your frantic figure.

to hold a photograph in my hand
and size it down to the dimensions
of this home – there is potential in this

comparison: flaring out like smoke from
where it infinitely burns, I seek an ache
and hence place a finger to shush,

to hold this photograph in my hand
and confabulate a soft blow to the gut
and feel it realer than any dagger or berretta

held at one’s life-edge: this delusory intimation,
a slipshod work of feeling. to feel it rejoin
me somewhere I ought to be back again.

Like a pack of dogs lounging
  in minutes, minutes, minutes, eyeing an endless treacle.
it’s worth the shot.
     what is?

I heard he went into a crash,
    and that Rey went into the deep blue dreaming of
    fins and fish – that *******. Brenn was up in the hills.
it’s a wonderful day to fill this space with the electric frill
               of laughter. Open that Emperador held loose in that
   cheap, slender bottle. That’s worth the stipend, in exchange for
    light – clarity, be it crass, and unsoundly. These ungodly hours
    will form a God, trying to go home, slurring, shaking in his gait,
      hailing a trisikad or a tricycle back to Philomena’s arms.
  it was a magnificent day – you know it is. The squalid canals
     are filled with the ******* under the care of a tyrant.
        Jon looks like he’s cut up for matrimony. We jeer and give out
  no jell so as to ridicule him into chaining himself to a passing.
       Empyrean is the mood now: all primed for the blackened chapel’s chase
  down the pews towards recognizing the smallest children inside ourselves.
     This moment is far from over. Like a skipping Betamax. A gramophone
        clamped in the kinked note lost somewhere in the sound byte,
  try this matrix for the forgotten. Tomorrow we will curse ourselves
      for the proud challenge, rivaling ourselves in the process.

    Like dogs in heat. Like dogs aching to ****. Like dogs
      garroted by the selfish hands of the neighbor. Like old bones
                 sleeping in troves we have forgotten.

Staccato-***. Can you feel the damnation in the
    trickling water of minutes?  This fragment considers
   revising but in the next act, I will turn you into a miracle:
        a cloud of a sigh into rarefied air, and that is all.
   The ******* of women hang in trees. Consider this statement
     a ruthless compunction. Flesh in the market, I haggle prices
         with the butcher. I’ll take one in exchange for a love
   christened with portent, I gave it no unction – fresh as a fruit’s glaze
      in spring, or the crunch of dew somewhere along Baguio in the morning,
            intestinal roads frothing with excess of fog. Consider trees
   in akimbo past your sweltering window – the panes in feverish heat,
        what are you to do but splash water? Bathe. *****. Sully.
            We have no inertia in this feetless adagio. Wind is sandpaper.
  Pain is tactile. I am a ******, paving the way, crucified on no longitude-latitude.

Spritzed me with rain, this morning.
   Rooftops unravel inner coating like old scabs
   to wounds. Quiescent mercy of the Sun
   bleared behind curtains of cumulus. There is a far
   more in-depth correlation between an insurmountable
  ex-facto and the fruition of affront:
           something a sutured lip unwraps, a sotto voce.

                                                          ­    Murmuring murmurings,
       tousled the leaves to a zither like salad on a depthless bowl:
    a coarse susurrus unattainable through lip-reading: tongue’s the
   scythe and the message that rummages athwart, something
                                 that rushes in the blood, a scrape on the sinew
                 as I coil in pain like a thing in womb revealing its fetal nature.
                              something that speaks for another one – ventriloquism
                       in its keenest sense,        speak for me, you, both of us lost
                                in frenzied translation.

Thorns. It was all thorns, this thing of a hand, making its way,
swirling across the small of my back. We are here again. In this
working of the way, trying to make some sense out of our
elicited absurdity; Names. We are both made of them.
Some take a toll in our bodies and mostly turn themselves,
a parting wave, or a hinge that does not work – closes all stalls,
the thumping on the walls, and then some indifferent silence
penetrates the two of us: aberration. We are here again, trapped
inside this console. Our tabulated quotients do not rear the best
of our equations. Now there is distance in such short space that could
hold no less than a matchflame, or a little hummingbird, prying open,
the leaf that turns with us in the ground. The rapture of freedom
does not enclose me. Like a shuddering blade of grass bowing down
to the perpetrating rain, I am within arm’s reach with the stones that
refuse to give out answers. We have burned the bramble. Our buds,
of no use. The wind blows, and that is it. No solace. Taking time
to sojourn deep into something we both know as a standstill,
a petrified tree at the bend of the road, or this  undeniable thing
                  that asks for a different name: love,      something torn.

falling into subterranean sleep, I notice such blackness
   bypasses a pinprick of light; dreams are avenues
   to enigmas presenting themselves as someone forgotten.
sleep laves labyrinths with incandescent sequins.
    everybody is strange here, interlocutor commune,
still yet nothing I can understand – better be braille, or
    contrapuntal dance, but still you uttered nothing;
your locutionary silence seeks no contentment.

                                           i have never heard such riot
of laughter toss me out of sleep. perhaps it was our undoing,
   our deepest, secretive entrails unloosen us in such fashion
   worth depicting as obscenely courageous, the width
of arm-span the size of outstretched islands, and stepping into
   that particular wideness, are my small feet traipsing
   swiftly throbbing in the heat of choosing:
to go      or     to stay – cyclic spectacle that eschews
            dailiness that I know I may have forgotten you in faces
of lampposts, the pared skin of onion, the gleaming washlines,
     the white feral on the rooftops, a blank piece of paper,
            a munificent Bulacan sky, or any sky at that since
they are all bleached and they arrive not with wind but
    with lashes: the color of white that flagellates, that blinds,
        that oscillates in space which is then reduced to the
     back of my hand: I know this. I know all of this.

                                                we were not naked, yet something
         buried in the skin reveals itself disarmed, mumbling
             an earnest palaver of questions I have no answers for.
                     what happened? where are we? should we just – die?
                                   an echoing reverb, or simply a song – a metronomic
          carousal of swan-song I have heard before persists
                            and maybe all this time,
                                                       we have been awake, in separate cities.

this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
    light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
    sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
    i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to                            

                                 ­                        vertigo.
                                           in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
         long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
    120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
  form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,

                                          are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
    and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
      of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
     to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
     after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
               that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.

in the lighter steps of yesteryears come the name of which
I cannot remember insofar as I am awash with the delusion
of what a poem, or what to make out of a poem, or what use
is there, to heave out poems – I was then raw, supple if you
may allow, like dew on blade of grass, face front
   against the blithesome matutinal, heart somewhere displaced,
beginning to look for something the inward expects,
  as though things happen for the first time again,
  with wisdom of what to look for – resigned, young,
      inconsistent with the word, fetal in my hands: pen and paper.
a well-guarded secret
   swaying in tune, curtailed by some sort of split-second inhibition,
    trying to save face and give this blandness a whole new meaning
and arrive at two intersecting points where the lost self will be
     redeemed in finding – monologue of sorts, dark it was,
  dampened by such bleakness, this leitmotif;
     all around me purged of sound, strip to rogue without
       senses, suddenness at the tip of my body, lunging at any
feat of light that succeeds to champion this behemoth of blackness,
    to complete this impedance, a singular impetus to fruition ekphrasis,
yet not quite, deep in the study again, as though
     yesteryears are all but the days starting to disintegrate
  into tiny segments to wreak something devastatingly vague, as in,
   a language curled in the tongue, relentlessly flexed against the wall
     of me, losing yet no little piece.

morose thing now,
this thing under umbrage
  of a maddened machine;
who is reluctant to give way,
an ecliptic passing of
an even madder woman.
this thing now,
under the pretense of shadow,
this form,
falling out, whiplashed, broken,
whose name of music is soliloquy,
this amorphous figure
   that gives so much    cadence
  to    things
     that    hold onto   long and monotonous
    enunciations like a bad hangover from
       a slackened night’s slug.

like the S on swooned
   or still the S on the double-grinned,
    parasol-intoned, punch-to-the-gut spoon;

or S in  seldom
     saved,   structured such  selfishness
saluting   sordid stories   soldering
       smashmouth  Suns   surrendering
   smoothly-sailing    stars,   supposing defeats
     similar to   sanguinaries such sweetness
         sings   surreptitiously.

someplace called  space,  in the sunken word of healing,
   like woodwork inched, thumbed down to the last utterance
    of prayer – someplace called      space,  a hermetic enclosure of sometimes
     words    of   fancy like,    sometimes love, most of  the time   hate,
   convoluted   as amaranth.   in  someplace  called   space  there are a number
   of  things  worth mentioning in enigmatic form.   sometimes   no words
      threaten nuances, and   sometimes  (it does)  silence  (a)  bounteous
        dullness   of (what I perceive to  be  a fabulation of  the word)  sense.

love shakes loose, light;  which twirls  in a cornerless  square often
     dreaming sidereal circle, which rotunds sidewind to such darkness that laps
up    this  sequence:   as  sea takes to  shore,    as   people who move (restlessly,
      tirelessly, senselessly)  through    space.

i can hear a fraternization
  of doors that loutishly slam repeatedly:
just another instance leaping out of reason
   and lunging in on impulse;
wrapped in the heat of leaving, all your words
     scatter on the floor like white, mangled asphodels.

one hairbreadth heave and a cutting glance
  at space and it seemed to have bled carnations
  pried open, dissected, obscured, mutilated by birds.
bags drop like H-bomb. displaced equanimity somewhere
   between blame    and        accurate   silence:
in an instant   i believed   that   I am that sudden   word
       of  reprisal.

    there’s no   getting   even,   still   halves are separately
       wholes   to   themselves,   intact,   further apart,
         breathing and gashing    the   air.

i  arrogantly   imagine
  rain (splayed on the pavement) as something
  too short to ****** with, in plea, so as to say that
genuflecting on a field of budding roses suddenly
blooms wide-eyed skies so brazenly, an aperture that
winks not abruptly to shed tear.

somewhere along the lambaste,
humidity takes form of a nauseating swathe
of demise and immediately, in transit, comes back,
  a cold, haranguing wind – something borrowed,
something ephemeral, something that causes trouble
to the frail gestures of a rose, or a child in consummate siesta,
or simply the sudden intone of a band bursting midway
  through the sullen thoroughfare –
  
    colors seem to intensify, the world inflamed like
a contusion, the wind like a gaff maneuvering the
trees, and I, lost in somnolence, can only remember so much
of the afternoons lost wandering about nothing
when rain has happened and nothing existed before me
   but the braille of seasons and the obsequious  shadow
     swayed by nothing but light’s silent radio; much like heaven
and I, here on Earth,
                          looking out   in     the    rain;

because our dreams of leaf-canopies and lignin
arrive at a certain variety of green, we will zither
anew with song

here in Bulacan; all the leaves are capsized
brandishing inflorescences as naked as
  the scent of petrichor girdled
on the cobblestones: they are forsaken not by
trees but by seasons only, a twofold deliberation
of caprice: there is only two of what is spoken.
   such is the warmth and coldness,
missing their obvious targets, hesitant and abstruse,
  scattered and at long last, never collected

deftly camouflaged in the familiar drapery,
“Tantusan mo!” as they cry for marks to remember,
we touch the cicatrix to measure with our jagged hands
how much we have forgotten.

what we cease to remember descends deep, as wash-hand basins
concur such depth,
into the well of ourselves, later to discover such
perilous foundling in the squall of either morning or evening,
   still devoid of sense: still arguing whether there is much
to reconcile with what has been found and what has been pictured
   now, altered by such loss: this is danger, and so is nothing,

swollen and tender, the waters of the estero reek of such
remembering – we cannot ignore its perfume, oddly taking the shape
of the next dagger slowly making its way towards the back
of the skull to pare with river-run precision, what we all
try to hold back inside; so as if to say,
             “Tantusan mo!” to remember
where     we last    took  off,  like a heron,
   or a  bird, wary of distances.

our most frail signals surrender us to movement:
eyes and their gesticulations carry us through foresight and after-sight,
   sometimes the latter, which takes on space yet not so much space,
     and the previously bestowed upon unction that supersedes
       reckless meanings.

    syntactical is the source of rivers,
   concatenation is the body of mountains:

      clocks mean nothing to predate and antedate – now is the time for
            such realizations.

  I do not know what is it with the trees that moves me
  to bend, and I do not know what is it with heads of flowers
   that makes me fall in love repeatedly as if to make no sound as a thief
   is entering the premises, or an unsuspecting cat dropping
    just beside the all-titanium bicycle: desolate, on all-fours, no metamorphosis
   happening, just flagrantly stagnant in form.

I peer out in mornings in search for a curve of a face,
  or a flutter of an eyelid, all but marvelous insofar as they all remind
you of a picture painted somewhere beyond the mausoleum ******* clad
    with pressing scenes but away and moving, always on alteration,
permitting to speak clearly something so breakable and false: a day’s turning into night
                         sheds its skin and now without gleam nor white even, a child smiles
     at me without      teeth.

it was raining that morning – so much the effloresce of colors
making their way back into the sky; there were the strangest forms of
clouds, their bodies assuming shapes and geometries, obscured angles
like that of two coiled lovers on a bed, whose bones ache the septuagenarian
but still at ease when it comes to building fire; no birds were out that day
and the busy binatog vendor blared into the streets like an unwanted nuisance,
it was already afternoon when you had your eyes wake up to mine,
your simian jaw curved to a hook of the C in crescendo, your voice the twilight
and the familiar passing of birds, the gush of blood inside of you;
there are such speeds that ultimate a crash, or a fragment – the semantics
of motion do not appeal to both of us, but we ceaselessly exist in those
moments when all of your movements summon, say, the sea, but that is a metaphor
used overtime, overwrought and taken out of its blue – say, your grandfather’s pendulum
watch impaled to the wall on a heady standstill, face to face with a linoleumed wall
that shouted its age – its superficial maquillage falling out of its slenderness
fashioned to secretive ******: something both you and I know, something that does not
come well with age, something that only some shadows choose to eschew in light.
  in a faraway place, there might be parakeets but this time, underneath the cusped sky
and the parasol that was drenched by drizzle that we let dry by the doorstep,
there is something about the gnash of rusting metal-work that tells me time has its own
way of claiming things, renaming them, and bringing them back in awry stances nestled
in tight, wrestling nooks of space, dark and dust on ground – keeping us leaping in place,
    swift with dreams of wings and aviaries, be it elocutionary with farce
or just keeping it real by the unreal of our imaginations – like birds swell in the sheen
  of the sky’s flayed bone, sliding in and out of the fringes of the aureole until such gardens
  are flustered with monochrome: this perfect dagguerotype of day.

exhaust of night's guttural snarl
  sleep, with its fixated eyes
  break the silence's dagguerotype.

edges of the moon fringe
  until its fingers sort out

      plenitudes of configuration:
  ignition upon contact,
      consummation upon acquiescence,
 pilgrimages within unmoving juxtapositions;
    suspended on intimation,
  void's hands swirl in depth
        lithe like a leaf, falling intimately on
    the ground:   my body's collapse
       to surrendering machination.
   it begins swollen to the full
         and ends, aching,
  yet unfazed by the untenable quicksilver
      of mind's pompous meander to a field
 where it so subtly blows,
              the wind in all spaces.

i   am   going
into    the    limp    dark
   where   silence   recites
a brief  candleflame
  
    it is   as if  these cavernous   impulses
rush   back    like  children
     whose  heads   are diadems
and   you,   their   mother   of   spring’s   masterful
    hands    neither  went
      nor      came

to   a   dream
    of
        roses  which
trudging    kisses   smite  the loam,
    giving  them   reckless meanings
yet    all    the   same

   in    death
and   in    beginning,  in  these large minutes
your   eyes  contain
such    light   which   all  things  darkled
    are    born anew
with   timid  
       names

think  I  shall  be springtime; such   clumsy
scent  of  the world   collapsing  not  with  nets
but   hands  not upon  trellis  but    bodies –
    sleep    shall   carry   us  to  inches
of  terrible  speech    such somnolent world senses
    quietness   in  the  rivers   of   our blood;
how  murmurously  veritable    moment
     leaps   forth  ripe  in the   air   of such  splendidness
when  it   was not   mountains
    but    your   *******   deep within   the    Earth of  me
and I  rain    cleaving  the   scent   of   the world
    into   two   separateness   until   the
enormously     ****   moon   plunges    within;
   I    shall   be   a   tree
and you, a rose    or   springtide, or   everything
   that
            blooms,    withers,
dances – new  beginnings;

i went with you towards the waning of the old moon,
enclosed in a season, stricken with half-glow, i went with
you to a blue enclosure, whose hands cannot bridle you,
as they, hunters all, would a thing that refuses to be held.
you happen everywhere as though secrets alighting pursed lips
and fragment breathing, springing in with the indelible hue
of autumn, yellowing all around me, where I join you, someday,
where trees bend slowly towards a reason, careening and pulling
back days  that closed our eyes and carved in with sleep,
like a prescient dream where all but motioning parts of you
     join from all separateness as though
                                             you were still here and never departed.

paint me this picture, sonorous color
clutching the quiet ****

             pressed against cloying scenes,
        a loose hand bannering a bayonet.

rivet me waters, and much of the Earth
tightly groping inlands,

                thatched in the branch nowhere alone,
                is the song of God lullabying cities.

again the whole sky with its keen eyes
manifests a gleam worth knowing a cherub,

                 and sooner than it is later, when the seasons
    postpone their flamboyances, chiaroscuros of smoke,
   deceit, uncared for and unheard shrieks bounce off careless corners
    and the song of God is but static with little wings clipped
    and tossed into vicissitude:

song   or    no   song
bearing a fruition of attrition:

                    resounding far-away:  a comatose  of cars,
             a scuffle of powerlines, a melee of battlement and tranquil

continually     fluster the  child
   in  metronomic dance.

such    darkness   is another  fleeting  thing
    and so   is   the   bird  of  your
                        arrival, mine    windows   receiving   bird-song,
  elegiac – pining  against   perennial  trees,
     sounds     of   well-put     strikes    bringing   back
       to   a  time   not    mine but   hastily  endure,

    and    light  is  but  another  figure   posing   for   itself,
       a  backlash  of  photographs  again   not
  mine      but      this   time    masterfully   endure
     all  that   is    mine,    being
       still    and   keeping     what
the  silence  holds   with   its    tumultuous   hands,
     a    song   once   my    roof-beams   heard   but
refused     to   declare: a   fugitive   frisked  out of
  the   nooks    of   depthless  sleep   is    I,   inspected
by   the   wide-eyed   gazebo     of     morning,   and    a    specter
    whose   name    I   cannot   recall,  completing   this  brokenness.
I am    neither      poet
     nor    bard,      stripped  of   words
and   I,    past everything  else that  makes   sweet  music,
   possess    no     mandolin.

our words outlast the weight of ourselves,
  to breast the wave and still themselves there,
even the Spring with its careful hands
   dole out lobotomies in cherry trees; their fall
  is not our fault, the behest of their nature.

this is the way the light sees itself disparaged,
  from which darkness still seethes and grows
  there is nothing we ought to do but look up
as unsuspecting as the world in the rain
tricked by the passing of words not our own
  but someone else’s translation – we cannot be helped.

we shall pare the flesh from the bone
we shall strip the fruit of its fresh glaze
we shall gaze upon a tulip and behead its fragrance
we shall raise our clenched hands and eat beasts
with our bare hands,

        and as an unquiet stone turns in its station,
pours out of its mouth, a tilted shadow,
we stride past worlds, our mouths tender with words
as though we have not yet feasted our fill.

she goes             freeing herself
and stops            to break her fall
suddenly            to gather herself

and begin again    with such brazenness
was it        the moon
and not     the far-flung bird of song?
was it        the brigade of shadows
and not     the heady kisses of night?

     she keels over like a vast wave
stretching    her   arms   into   the sky
once   again,  permitting    herself   to be seen
   not  by  the moon,
not  by   the   hale  of such  night  that struggles   not  to
   tipple   over   her hair   that demands    a   different hue
  of  silence
   but    by  herself     in   the mirror
the   metamorphosis,
     true   to  the   claim   of   the   world
  except    she   is   not   to  flutter   away,
                             just     yet –

in that lightening moment I was stricken
   with a memory – quickening, swiftly, and then
deliberately: a bamboo in waiting yet akimbo,
    a sea unfazed yet stirring internally,
taking in the morning’s tremendous yawn
staring visibly, a thin line dividing soul and body,
    ephemeral and perpetual, vivid recall
and faint oblivion;

was it the wind that she borrowed with her
   presence or was it the breath that once stilled spring
like an invisible, yet felt river in my blood?
what impeccable maquillage was it that she donned,
      dawn or twilight?
something the silence waits with its mount on the boughs,
  the munificence of such plural modesty,
or everything the noise tell me which isn’t exactly
   but still is, a memory.