in   a    world  filled
                    with    pain
our      arid     inland    whelms  over
  the   swollen   sheen   of  the    borrowed   moon;

      faces     in    transit,
the       immense  rivulet     to   home     rogue without
      source
        people      undulating  like
the  weight of  a   subdued   beast
      regaining     consciousness,
                           these    shoals  rimmed  with  such  whiteness
    give     way.

                           unheeded        are   dislimned
slaughters    voices   muffled    to   fatal  nuances
             fast  days  in
the    rails     spirals      and  cascades of   both
   twined     rain and     tendril
         in   our   eyes   see   the gravid
weight   of   the   world    accompanied  by such    grave  silence
            arranging   a  rendezvous
                                          at   the  next   unmindful   station,
   trains       are       sad   rivers
   belonging                 to    no    one
                                              a  long   conversing   line
    of     kinder  tides   passing   quietly
               think    of   the    time   the   bones   are colder
than      alloys    returning   with  such
      intact   heat   or   melancholy,    was    it
   when    turning   away    was  no     troubling  task
        
                        machine    or    flesh
   forethought       or     afterthought
          outlast     and  outwrestle   the   circling   moon
   surly    from   above  and   swift  with
        flayed     light,   these   things   that    welcome
us   home    
                             piercing   the   solace
       dredging    the    traces    leaving   us   bare
with    intone       the     day’s commute  
                                     sings            tenderly –

Jakarta, 2016*

some say the city is stippled with warnings
but nobody took the time to stop and sojourn deep
  into the augur – there was no price to pay
and no song to be sung. only strange silence trying
to renounce the inscrutable weight of peril;

but a while ago, the tabloids and the papers are
dizzy with tribulations – each word assumed not sound
  but force. the once Decembering wind transmogrified into
a penitent squall of smoke until the city was of a veiled mother
    weeping behind the pretense of a shadow.

not much was said, or perhaps we were speaking
  for such a long time, or we did not mean many things
but wounds and cuts and some lostness to which we all have
  gone blind and deaf: coming in daylight’s whisper.
   we cannot hear. all of which may not be revealed, like
a new phrasing that has not been conceived yet, and so we lay
   in the silence for now, hushed by surrounding scenes,
               in pursuit  of heart.

a glint of the Earth in delight
  is in bare sight and how we leap not with
our body but with our mind.

a handful of air swallowing
  the air – love that somehow
half-rhymes yet not even so entirely with hover
   shows the infinitude of possibilities

when it was not your palm that reads
   an incipient star but a moon half-bitten
by an outraged soul when it was not
  your  body
       I  have  found
but    an   isle  full of  noises
   and I so much  the quiet,
  shall not  return  with  the wind  so as
   to  set  sail and  farther off into  blackening  space
    onto  a realized sea tinctured with
      such  blue  blood, o  sea,  which somehow
rhymes  with but  the  end of
  you and I coming   to   be –

stillness moved  the  air,
   and it was neither a lark nor a flower in my hand
but the Earth within the trees that unmoved
   and the hand that unrest. is it not that petals our folly
and that nothing are we when we live? are we
               not our own brookwater
   which silence metastasizes
       a source or a dart of water
falling  and  falling?
is darkness solely our own light?
  is it not the shadow that we carry in night and day
   but the weight of our own darkness?

so much the weight of our living
  that we, amongst ourselves, are but stone atilt
    on a river – the birds sit well against
the taciturn afternoon and all the homes
   transfixed in wonderment as though we recall
our first storms in the eyes of the old
   and the debris the hand that has carried us
through, something the wind still is a mother
    or a father, gently motioning through the world.

Imagine   hot
water           music
            traipsing  down  my  throat
when you   had  your  sharp   tongue
      shoved    down   my  throat
with   contestations    simmering   in  my   sinews,
  a  few   of    them   scandalous
some    true    like   the   sudden fleeting   of your   crepuscular brow
   to   two moons   paler   than   the love –
or   the    long    traverse   to the   treacherous
    roads    of   your   skin   mapped   out   in excess
your   lecherous   debris   sprawling  everywhere   like   words
   to   a   book   or   silence  to   an   early  morning    commute,
your     undulant  bursts   outmatch   the weight  of   my
     steady  anchors,  imagine   this   cold   wind  sinking  deep
into   the    bone    at  4 o’clock   in   the   afternoon
   drunk    in  front   of    faceless  crowds
hunting     for   purpose,  discombobulated   erudition
      in    sodden   corners   and cheap  thrills,

imagine      the     scrumptious   twinge   of
     the  Sun that  mangles   its   arms   to paint   a new
moon   for   us  both   and    think of  this   as   a  consignment  to
  oblivion    when  the twists   and  turns   of  the road
     remember  only    measures   of   steps that have no  names
       and   not   the passengers, where   one   wrong   forceful
  shot   at   fate   could   mean   the   end  of  all things down
   below  an ocean  of muck   or   just  stale blackness and  ravines
      of    voices   bellowing   to call  out departed   ones

where   you   are just   as trivial    as
    driving  in  Kennon Rd.   at night   without  maps
and   beacons,  only   far-fetched   city buoys,
    the  frigid     wind,  the collapsing   bannister   of the night
cloying   the   turns   sharper than  how  it was to   first  see you   leave
    in   the morning,      bringing   in  the  fog  for the first
        light   of  reality    to   burn.

I  know  the  world    has only    space
      for    a woman   and  her  heart,   her  ******* emblazoned in  the trees,
her  depths  in voluminous   books – let only   the   saltine  water
   touch   her brindled   body   atilt   amongst  the lilies   in the  silver  dawn

         and   that her    cusped   hands  demand  a softer  hue of  love    whereas
the   salacious  wind  continues   its   grasp  championing  things   both  fragile
      and   sturdy:  the   world  slides  in the  coloured  curve of   a woman
         and  the men dare  too,  follow  the road  where they meet first  with
  death   sitting   still with  the  roses  like   a    splendid   fragrance   stilled in the mind
      leading     you   to a  garden  which   thorns   are ensconced
          in  a smoothness   that  sings    salutations    to love – as  I   remain  to be
nose-deep   sheath   after    sheath,  ****   after   ****,   stalking   the
           perfume   of   the  world  a  woman   owns.

treading masterfully this  autumn-long  road  where
    at the  end of  first light so begins  your fragile  darkness.


i know  not where you  wait for  me as  birds in  all geographies
      land without further   recall; as though   by  saying  that the  Summer
  has   dealt   its   cards   and the serrated  grass   folds  when it thinks
   the  rain   to be everywhere   descending,  falling  as lithely   as a lover
     whose cockeyed    miracle  first has meted out   a singular  trapping  fate
         of hands that interlock    to    no   retreat.

i   know  not  the silence of  the Earth  when all is caliginously
    intact    without knowing. but  then should you  return, your  eyes
will   light all  the   lamps awaiting   your   shuddering step  and fruition
       us  both the  ineffable   rendering  me  forever  the life  of roses.

( i  do not  know which  gravitates me back  to   where we
      first   saw each other; only  something   in me  does not   think
   but is constantly   supremed   by   feelingfulness   when it   is not
    the wind   but your   breath not   in the garden   of   joys but  in the exuberance
     of    all that    is made  immense in me by  your    eyes,
         when    it is     not the   taut   clamp    of   the   sea    at   bay
but    the   island of your   hands   clutching   the penumbra  of my heart,
   shattering     the shadow   and letting   loose   a  sprightly   dove
        here     and   a  hummingbird    there)

do you remember one
     morning when it rained,
  chrysanthemums then lined the streets
  and each petal whirred to the sound of your passing?

you were too, a flower
in my hand. deep underneath the ground
you murmur, letting the twilight darkle
   into twinight. it was the dawn of your becoming.
the sky’s panging brought you here.

you suddenly filled all the mouths
that waited for you, with the marine of your name.
because we were joined by haunts that revisit us
  in this river of life
and that is why the unperturbed stone,
    the incongruent leap of water,
the bodies that sprucely lay adrift with the fluminous ways
      of the world all know you and i
because we are but from one source
    surrounding them in their laughter and silence
when we are apart as though
  they cannot sing when we do not make music
  they cannot wake when they darkly wait for us
  in their homes, trembling with unlit lamps of dust and sleep
  they cannot lift in the moonlight when we strip
  them of their fear
  as though they cannot love in the midst
      of spring when we are but two separate leaves
falling endlessly – finding each other in the Earth.

this is another form I would like to lose
   but what is a man to inherit but the empire of sleep after
being caught in a virulent web of dailiness?
                sometimes dreams are as empty as Manila
  on a Sunday – requiring things I do not understand,
  so as the departure of leaves to bring back the same existence,
   the parallel rawness, and the exact hundredfold inflorescence,
   a blank synthesis of light is another conundrum
                  as sidewalks remain steely and squalid
  holding themselves up to surrender; when another drone breeds
      sound from a distance, one is reminded of how gently songs in themselves
  break inward and release fully, a cloud of regret, leaving things and renaming
  them loose sobriquets;
                  and when all else have gone into total darkness
   I will sit beside everything else that closes its eyes to the world
   and rejoin them in the familiar and see nothing but the rest
      of beautiful things ignite to show scars and leave
       us all wordless, losing
                          this  strange  form of living.

the sun is a gentle hand whirling
  softly past the opened windows

and I am a lonely furniture
sitting still beside restless shadows.

shall I give you my silence and
  come back with fledgling beat?

or be fastened with the riot of the masses
  pummeling the iron and striking blindly

like a palaver hurled in the middle
  of the midnight riddled by stars and

   nothing else? stones enisled conspicuously
like the hands of a mother have well-placed

   pavilions into their order, the careful crunch
of trees in Summer, filling the brim of ornate eyes

  with such redness hazily festooning the avenues
with the lissomeness of the Earth

little girls dressed  quaintly on Sundays
   the fragrance of mildew everywhere

     you against all the surrounding scenes
that break vases, pound the halls and leave doors

                      opened, yourself crawling away
dragging along the weight of your own shadow.

this flourishing silence feels more of
a trite hack-job than it is a writing stint.
     my fingers (frenzied, brazen) continue to tap
and my mind starts to spill like a spigot
   left open. I have taken to smoking and laughing
away

       in an obscured day for myself in the parking lot
and sometimes I can do without company; only the snarl
of the well-oiled tractor in front of me.

    the days are full of yellow and the Sun is a dog
on a leash. the roses smell of brine and their slender
stems bones of the young.

    I can see cheeks flushed with red and skirts
neatly trimmed just above knobby knees
   and I know somewhere in that tender flesh,
a man sifts without knowing what it feels to eat
    bone before flesh, flesh after bone. my silently augured
procurement of today’s induced comatose is but
    a Freudian slip – the world with its burly physique
is a chauvinistic man
           drinking whisky in the red light district of hazy Makati.

                 each slapdash word in penitent reprisal
is the moment’s clearest reprieve. I am glad that this room
is darker than the eyes of the love I have lost
     staring back with a mound of the abysmal or the yearnings
      of a chagrined mother startled back to her home;
  it must be dreamy, the dogs outside pant in heat
        and the obnoxious *** of vehicles outside bears the cadence
  of two people   starting to fall in love:  all chaotic and unmoving,
             fastened to the Earth, aware of the passing minutes,
                                         wishing to be somewhere else but there.

I saw the rest of my kind scour against the streets, hands calloused-laden,
wizened by erratic explosions – nondescript music analogous to silence;
terse sleep stiff in wind, homes filled with tension, arrow-headed men
quiver through the busy streets as tatterdemalion as stray dogs.

inverted triangle, sidereal vertigo, mutilated rose and the beheaded tulip.
the ambiguous spiral of the downcast climb. I see all men maddened
by wine over the rooftops.

                   choking in dank light – the night exudes its flayed machinery.
           an empty bottle of whiskey and a body stripped of skin melded with fright
        raised higher than the maladroit sky.

I, whose name is but an algorithm of formlessness. I, whose silence is but the contemplation of stone. I,
whose voice toboggans like a tender ramshackle of incantations
                                   filling tubercular pockets with spare hope yet none are we but only poorer.
    whose fingers are but tired girls tousling in bed lacquered by sunsets – whose nails are paler
    than a ****** of moonlight, whose homes are inflamed hemmed in by petticoats,
             whose eyes set affixed to no avatars in juxtaposition of parks
                                  falling madly in love with everything that glints.

we have and have not,
   loved well, milbirghtlions septembering;
it is all for myself to reach deep within
   like white measure of kisses – the girth of such
world in turn, passes on a wily shadow of beforeness,

when all such loveliness before me was
but  a blatant chiaroscuro and not of mausoleums visited by
     territorial hands.

surely, such warmth
   you carry on, ferrying against unfettered waves of
remembering loosely against   the voice   crossing this  side of  the Earth

I can hear it like a flower,
I can feel it like the strove of warmth from the prickly music
   of an unraveled Sun,
I can touch it like the fringes of keen blackness of hair
  that demands silence.
I can bend to its call,  like a bamboo  in the wind
   or the   curve   of a rose,

     the downed flight of a heron  deep in  the twilight.

the world (with its stupendous body)
      timidly pirouettes,
 all by all and little by little
     deep by deep everyone in the Earth
  reveals the reaping of the sow
     and the girls and boys loutishly sing
 as daisies tremble within the verdigris;

    i know Spring like the palm
 of my hand, the virulent string of birds
     that strangles the daylight.
 this motion-filled plenitude where forgetfulness turned like a parting wave
   back to the sea where we all find ourselves
 afloat, unburied, vainly pressed in the sand
    lifting fish close to laughter; with such keen disappearances the mothering moon swarms our fate   and tossing dreamers
      out of diminutive sleep at her  festive  sight   close to  coruscating here:

    the smallest of voices quite like the  tiny bursting truths  from the  fountain of our lives
           unsaying why    we continually  breathe and bayonet  through the  air like leafless boughs   quivering within  the arms of stillness: life's but a  peculiar  form of  dance
      and  death i think is no  larger  than ourselves.

if love's the gaze of stone and hate
       the water drifting hands to their
   undreams of dreams, then it shall be
     with the zither of leaves a quartet of wind
        sifts inanimately so as dark as the night
    they will not dare speak the ineffable.

  if love's touch homing back to cities as
     spry as an unwound, delicate moon as
        can be, these flowerings drone
           exactitudes the rambunctious plunge
    of the roots to the Earth

                  and i will sing these delightful bursts called    days in 
    April have not the touch of frolicking birds
  and the quibble  of the masses half-opening
        and ultimately quivering are the mountains and the fish dance in the tumult
      of their aqueous variations

       it    is   April,  sing gently, as now all the
    leaves have fingers and  the ferruginous  rivers    have   feet   and   my love
            a   flower at   last!

if kisses are green and bodies verdantly exact in sameness
   let my hands be two birds glorifying the waters in the slopes
of fingers,  
  
if song is but undeath and the rise and fall the unalphabeted siren
      of the morning,

       such loose wind swaying over her silently as loincloths
   over blackred roses,  easily it breaks like a finger of a shadow
     whirling gently through opened windows in candid moonlight

but  if surely does your going signal the dawn but no birds
   wreathing the trees and no gardens inherit garlands,

  what shall then be two birds over waters but a single stride
      of sorrow and whose temporal flights disdain centrifugal faces
of waiting; measured, coveted, photographed, love everywhere fading
    where silence maims sound and music topples over the moon
       the stars  the sleepless nights and  the stellified dust of the world
             that must be opened again

who shall then dare
        dream  the    Sun  to be   a flower
or    a   new, keen city     higher than  steeples   and umbilicus of   wires
     disavowed  streets  and    herds of   proletariats?

      and   if so   then it   shall be   a flower
who   picks   itself   from the    unmoving   Earth  then what   steady light
   will     it   bring?  who  will   join it   in its   revelry  and who  shall be
    brave   with trembling  hands  to hold   it in  hand  taut   like loves
divined  and  forever   is spring   and  forever    is winter   endless with ephemeral whiteness
    and   bells    are a-ringing    and  clouds are  twitching so as to sail where
      nobody   has   ever    visited

     always    it   is   Spring
    and    in my   hand is  the  Sun   or the   florid  aureole
       burning    in my   palm   and  the moon   is my   love
            whose night   is carefully a  fraction
   of   flower placing   an inch   of sleep    in   my body,
       always   it   is  lovely

it was with greater risk that I knew
  that when I let you in,
your metaphysics, my being would acquaint
  itself to such metanoia:

that there was such an air in your voice
  that would sway me a forest and give me
a necklace of sunlight. like a well-oiled machine
  I let your gruel work its way like a beast
claiming the calm, like the youth purloining the silence,
   like the death making most frugal the earth and its troves.

little night, black bird of my heart: when you
take your flight in me, solder me up
  there, vertiginously above the floor:

     all those of much the land that coats
our feet’s trembling aches,
    all that still laughs
   without what joy shapes with its motherly hands
where you assume the stillness as something
  the shadow languages and transfixes
   in all of the days

   lays captured, a darkness too
halved, voyaging without eyes, in every direction
eclipsing with the sound of incontrovertible music,
     echoing, rippling in me with
alterations.

next onset of such peril,
   be much the silent as though concentration
   of stone – have your say, yet the susurrus
   wills your anchored voice.

finer: knowable as a book is opened and a leaf
          is turned, a star: to exact how it is to float
   deep in the celestial of your body’s ample universe,
    and take the milk of the nebula,
      for mine to drink in this silence whose dress
is white and not   blue, or anything the coruscation sings
   hewn tenderly, swelling in the wandering of words:
   whose ambitions are no less than the swell sheen
    of the borrowed moon, and greater it is than
   it shall be the only thing timid like light underneath
     the fleeting of the shade that has been stripped and
  coursed you on, naked:

  yet my hands bequeath you enough the shade,
and slowly in you persists the evening
  full not of stars that lowered themselves to
    the penetralium but of all time has erected the
day,  the twilight  and your obvious darkness.

it was blandly your image before mine,
     such fern-like hands adjust the moon’s fixated shadow staring at itself
in the mirror before death: who would not linger in such voice traipsing past
     the staircase? whose woodwork shall I seek the fragrance of spring?

also in strangeness there is a glance dizzied into liquor that yearning
    is drunk to: mazy now in the arms of attendance, before they squander the light
and shove it back to its home, they drink as though it was the most final
   of supplications,
     as though a wounded rose is pulled, a hair-trigger that is its call,
or heavier like hair, something weighted down to its empire, eyes that dread
   the dreary glint of the slow, crystalline branch outside my window in the rain
         of all watery beings converging in cusps of the Earth readying to be made loose
  amongst     breadth of  mouth  and shallow  moulds thriving  in the body
   whose house is but oblivion in half-light,

                           nourishing your heart as though it were starving
      for the cold and not your warmth, for the flame and not your embrace,
         for the flight of the azure and not the trance of your tenderness,
         something still that you are not who you were before me, when all mirrors
                       conjured the image of deaths.

the children with such earthen hands opened the book burning in Sanskrit: twilight of  Summer.
now to their own accord, they must persist in daylight, with the overgrowth arrives
           new verve to rising tendrils.
one by one, leaping out of the unclenched hands of faith, pelts of the world give
     them a renewed bounty of laughter; even the days ring true, a consortium of bells
in the nearby cathedral of Barasoain or wherever perhaps, in the streets where
   a different kind of ashen is imparted: I speak of the languor in sleep.
a gossamer canopy underneath the guava, whose leafing fingers signal them like motherless
   beacons to the sprite of the lissome afternoon – such bodies hemmed in inertia, stay
  there in search for light. blacker the wounds of trees yet insignia the name of memories,
      a river of stallions is the blood of fetal natures and I sing freely with them:
         we are the children of the loam!

you are all of the mind’s dirtiest trick:

a weathered image of Magdalena,
a sleight of hand and a swirl of skin.
                        defying the laws of inebriation like a culprit
      set loose, or the pallor of the moon excreting its habiliments.
the old rancor of the tree from its spurious beating. vestal buds of autumn
    frugal hands of drizzle in April, prostitutes pirouetting, pried open,
   dissected in faces of the tabloids (their almost acrobatic supremacy on centerfolds)

   all mangled like the unclear, yet certain picture of a 1990s havocked
      retrospect.

you are all of the mind’s filth: a putrid modal-jazz entrapment
   and I am that sad fellow at the elbow room of some dislimned establishment
       falling as lithe as poppies in spring

  only when my mind starts to sing freely, a clenched, harmonic framework
  will my bones start to unloose in the ether, death with its ammoniac perfume,
   closes in like an unwanted visitor with a bounty of silence drowning everything.

i imagine you anything but     lustrous this evening.
     there are certain points in the pressures of your gravity
that levitate to mere intersections of the finer points of ecstasy.

i imagine you    all soft   and plump  as a word   of salvage
   without the vigor   of   blandishments  when you start with   your
    own   way of  moving i imagine you  as blunt as   a dull  knife
     plunging   into   me – i imagine your  sidereal   satellites  fail  in their   coverage
   over impossibly the   blackest  of skies   in February,|

i imagine  you  anything  but clean
   and   all white and spruced up   with   the most
  drenched   light,   real   to the touch  and swiftly moving across  the afternoon
like  wishing you   all but   perverse  and   anomalous
    and   strikingly   beautiful.

silence is a balloon in my hand. an erratic saxophone with notes as blue as doves
            strangled in noxious space.

            android Jesus, not quite the shadow, verily the toppled light
   renaming things underneath its parasol – hundredfold of monikers
    and a solitary weight of love.

                  this is where the blood starts to make sense in its cold shrill:
   a dagger making its way towards my back. here are few routines of ablution;

a conflagration of bodies. razed sandalwood. first to go is gravity. last are the bodies
    helium-gorged, afloat – there is an immense price for solace.

                                cyclic spectral          cyclic spectral

   there’s man in ox but never an ox in a man. can you feel the tenacious drone
      of the oncoming storm? can you feel the Sun so sick of its diurnal labor?
                            can you feel the tantric *** of dew? its sensorial fissures?
             butchered serrations of grass are like torrid piles of moist ***** ready for ******.
            
   again, here comes the quietus. on the loathsome table lies the shrapnel
     of last night’s carnal invitation. a moth not named Marieta circumnavigates a bayonet
                       of elastic fire. here comes the marauder of quiet again,

     in my hand, a round, red, silent balloon – I let it go, in such relentlessly hoodwinked
              pursuit towards a god that may or may not know how
                                to dance underneath the bludgeoned beat.

life the grandest stage.
     life, gelid waters – I, the pompous admiral.
life, thorns withholding enigmas,
     clenching the true blood of flowers.
  life, the flimsiest avant-garde.

  our measures
  conceal all our knowledge,
    our fondness of exactitudes
bludgeons us to back to our smallness.

  the heart, like a riot,
  will always scream blood.
  the soul, like a jailbird,
will always carve a song.
  the mind, like a grave,
will turn soundless filled with bones.

  some will beat back to the same old music,
  assaulting the others with a concealed knife
gutting all of us as we lay still – the rest shaking around us.

  when I was young, I was unsure of myself
  and now that I have aged, it is all but the same:

I am a horde of drunkards.
I am the incessant pendulum.
I am the night-watch
and sometimes I am being watched by the night itself.
I am the loutish vandal on the wall.
I am hot, steaming music I am an earful of ***
I am a handful of hollow I am the dandelion whittling away
in the garden of full women seething with woes
I am the catapult of air from the sling of trees I am a somber god
I am an ungodly god I walk over toppled waters past genuflected hills
like maddened horses screaming victory
I am a limbless beast crawling back home
I am young I am old
my blood ravages the sinews of my body – I am a binaural cinematheque
   of slow minutes I am a mausoleum of chiaroscuros
I am all pleasure pleasure pleasure
I am just as ****** as everyone I am sour mash stirred in a wide-mouthed
      glass clinking together with this heavy slither of attendance around me
  somewhere in Pasay
I am love I love I am hate and I hate
I am forever the lion that roars at what life has done to us
    and they will cage me soon when the roses shy away from the deliberate daylight
and when all of this is through
               I have only just     begun.

taut the barb which my heart
flung away and adorned – such language is black while
many others have their places that silence
   had fractured.

the punctual shadow of the night,

                                   I converse in them
   through the pulse of the roots and their
   consistent counter-beats.

the many others, whose centers encircle
    heavy in their viscera:
enisled as a conference of birds
    in plenitudes of brindled mouths – the augury
that sees itself, my full being – this nocturne
     of stone-flight. the cosmic working of the sky
that hands me, a necklace of stars which implausible pearls
   simmer in fond gleaming: these foundlings that are
         dreamt away, and named innumerably across
   many other anonymities we recall with a throng of sound.

   in my hands the night folds like an origami
   conscious of its florid ikebana,
       as there could be another splendid thing
          like the calm: glimpsed, coveted like the light
   of all things grave in darkness.

such-a-deep-and-comely-thing
so-fleshless-moments-are-going
shari­ng-something-the-silence
and-the-quick-quiverings-of-flutings
whe­n-nothing-becomes-the-heart
like-a-jungle-stripping-the-panache
o­f-the-viridian-softer-it-is-the-truth

of-the-navel’s-blue-pursui­t
in-the-caterwaul-of-bodies-to-a-spry
plaything-summon-a-laughte­r-blacker
than-ravens-in-the-thrall-of-the-beset-moon
and-the-hom­es-fat-always-with-such-tender-beatings
it-is-the-time-of-the-her­on
it-is-the-end-of-the-susurration
when-the-unswift-hands-of-all­oys
sojourn-and-still-something-a-dagger-in-the-mire
of-the-cloud­-that-egregiously-whispers
a-long-possiblity-of-dreams-and-their-­palpable-weight
(say-it-will-perhaps-contention-of-pulseless-awak­enings
   when-it-was-such-truthfulness-that-when-the-heart-sings
    the-mind-stirs-and-the-hands-dance-to-roundtables-of-mirth
     twitching-such-belittled-locomotions-when-it-was-fashionable
     to-have-adorned-you-the-love-and-not-firm-obstreperous-meandering­s)

darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

beloved    I     dreamt   of you
      dreaming   atilt against   the lilies –
the   dawn   with   its mouth
        tottering before   like   an animal
   shying away from the   automaton sky.
     it     is    in your hair full   of evenings
      I saw the   moon not   with its  tail
  but with the   hooves   of the deathless    sea
      of this droning   silence,
           not with    its stride     of    sidereal measure
but    the    mount of    it past    a thousand  days
       tainted   with    crimson,  it   is not  with lithe  hands
of  churlish   girls   that I have    plucked you   out   of that
         garden but   with   the immense   hand
   of   such obscure   understanding  from sleep’s peculiar
  mouth   made divine    in me, the   word that   christens   what
  felled    star rises     from    the   palm  of such   darkness,
    
     that    in   the immensity   of your   sleep,  I am but   a bird
passing     athwart the    windows and   yearn so   much   the breeze
   that  touches   you    in your timid    sleep
           like     dreams     like     *****       like    sirens  
                  like    love    cunning   with   its     fluent   spires
          of   perfumes.

gOd put a smile on your face
      your eyes (half-thrush like two beings in the dark
and a gladiola of light spurns to chide in its bickering excess,
    birds, birds of morning and paradisiacal streets half-wittingly
       fork to single-handedness, a star is uttered and altars sing
           rarely-beloved, a dance-song of soul) and their parenthetical
    rush to what continues to live suddenly as if to say its conscious
       death is a room without flowers.

it is not that we are far away
but there is   this stilled candor  that
   there    are   spaces,  gaps,  turns  and swerves   that we   cannot   close.

   as in  a star in  its throne will remain
to be  lit in  diadem of white, cannot be touched    or you   in your silence
   with the drone  of such  tired machine:
  moon's all  round and  all i saw, yet not
    always   the visible,  encircled in flesh and
without  so much question, the  mind's a
     quicksilver marauding to  motion all
things  except   your own   parasols bending
    to such   airlessness,  and  to make tractable, this  unstable   mirage

  
      of you,    fulminating in such bright auroras  persisting within the day when you
    arrive  not with   hands but with chains,
   machineries  and not   bones,  no such lissomeness of skin love-hewn but  walls,
    not   the earthen  night  but only brindled   silence like the world whispering ssmething
     close  to the   ear not   love but   pain.

these faces on the wall that have no eyes,
the young children with blood escaping from their hands
   as they    pick up a mound of the Earth and  throw at genuflected  roses.
these battered men   in parks   searching  for light
   and   my woman   is no longer with  me.

it’s all  vaudeville:  this obnoxious working of continuance,
these redundant  flutings,   these  unprecedented fluctuations.

opening  the yellow gates  to death
as the  automobile churns the  last of its exhausted snarl.
   we    are children   peering through   glass cases
as   death laughs at his   hopeless  clientele,
    sad,   desolate   progenies   in   working-classes,
in   parks,  in factories,   somewhere along Mendiola,
  or  just treading the waist-high  hellish   froths   of   Dapitan,
    there’s   always   death in   the nooks   of the quiet
and from   where birds    stir in  sidereal circles,   death
  with his hands    resting   on the   cage,   chases us  back to  our homes.

death   the changing of the   gatekeeper.
death  the   telling machine.
death   the dentist.
death   my next door neighbor.
death,   this boorish broken-winged   Maya twitching in  front
   of my dog’s shadow  shot out of the Sun’s  shameful recoil.
death,   my loud and loutish muse,
death    the   truant,
death,   the   copious  fog somewhere in Kennon Rd.
   death,   in my   hands through   darkness    and  light,
death   through troves   of enigma,
      death   through   undisputed clearings,
death    the   long line  of red beads   in EDSA,
  death  the gates   of Plaridel,

     it’s the moon   following you,   trailing your measure,
i hold   my woman’s used   shirt,  pick up her photographs
    and there’s no tender movement left but  the still-seeking   lion
prowling   the jungles   of my  heart,   seared by  lovelorn undoing.
  
through   the  bottom of  the sky and the  unchanging roof-beam,
  the weathervane ceases to  a sojourn  and the  wind is  trapped
    in   a place  where we   cannot   utter any word  between the  gnashing
  of   our teeth – through the wasted   years,  through  the sleeping in  and out
  of   homes filled  with beatings,  to cathedrals swollen with  tribulations,
      and to   the vineyards     wrung   out   of wine,    my  lover,   walking  through  fire,
        sound     silence.

and so you go
emptying the room, Evening/Morning
playing on the small, grey radio.

it is not in the way you navigate with the most immense
of eyes I have seen,
whose lips torn with shade have said always,

this
was meant to
fall – when yellow trees outlast greener ones,
i cannot.
we cannot.
you cannot.

and many before me, all the doors have closed
shut, voices cornerless searching for flesh.
i thought it would **** when you first moved
back to where we were once trapped,
like an arcade fire waiting to confide in smoke.

at last, the books can now be read –
first to go are words, and yet in the next moment,
we will not let each other be
strangled with days,
            years, spurning, striding out of windows.

our discomfitures are made clear
when I dug my hands deep into the grave of your own,
and in pure wonderment, neither the lights flinched
nor the darkness congealed – it is only enough
   that when you closed your eyes, they will never
open to me any longer: our waiting has only become
  our most obvious limitations and we have been
  held    we have been taken in     we have fallen in
      we have learned each other    we have unlearned each other

and somewhere in the next room,
   a door slams – someone is tiptoeing masterfully not to topple
  the Victorian, not to
startle the oncoming  shadow of the transfixed   furniture,
        careful enough    not to still the voices   that I long for
and fracture     this man,    this being    myself   and all that staleness.

it is the wrong  voice in the evening
   and only the silence impales with   surgery-precision.
they   all   have feet    thighs    calves
   drunk in merriment   looking at their lacquered   nails
fixing their    stockings   and lamenting their men
     in   all the   roominghouses    of the world there   are but
  silences    that ought    to be     fragmented

   but     not   tonight – there they go marching like   a sad
  army waving farewell   with bayonets in   their hands swaying   like
   light from a candle’s  anxious  flame-tip – and they promise   me
   kisses    and they tell me    temporal   splendors   I have no use for
     it is    not your    tenderness     of   your     being    here
     but the    assault    of your     being     somewhere  else.

there are worlds underneath words
swathed inward, swirling from
rondure of moon.

of all that i have loved,
you are the only one living

here within the lining of my skin,
or thinning dermis of turpentined walls,
same as the ponds have their
   curved silences, i have nothing -
a river bled of its source, living in wet verses.

what the turning of days might
bequeath you, as cunning as the mayday
of evening with its susurrus, is what
brims over diminutively, a glint of star.

i believe in the empire your love
spurned from all that is ruined,
drained of their excess. how i have loved
to trail you, across the crisscrossed roads
and receive such fullness no purer than mine:

all your sweetness that is for me,
the implacable honeysuckle and the dew
of mild beginning, i believe them
   all
breaking loose around me, perduring
   still, lorn and born only of visions
all yellow and filling up trees so as the assault
   of light spreading maps through the  sky,
      looking for its home.

it happened this morning
the air ripe with contention.

the unsustainable weather with its
impertinent grip on the bell-hand,
no light could shed the shadows unbeheld
(umbilicus of steel, remotely the
       dense crowd letting each other
    go, searching out fringes of moon.)

days and their forlorn bannerets, from farewells wrought
    into the world by a steady hand
 i say to all:

 labyrinths with no hint
    of darkness
(stillnesses immensely froth out,
   searing the islands of eyes)
the turning wave of the sea
     slants into the mountains, so we shrivel
  whatever is left of our implacable themes,

  i have here, my heart as clear as a rose's
     geography, thorns the clarion of trifles.

feet–dance–bounty–when–it–is
your–engine–that–sings–nondescript
music–shadows–left–wrung–out–of
drunk–in–dense–marshes–of–life;
your–gyrations–foretell–my–weight
as–in–the–home–of–verses—
strophe–by–strophe–endless–is–its
undulation–stamping—imaginations
two–fold–in–flounder—

it—is–like–you–are–deep–in–the–grass
and–the–wind–slurs–summer's–penitence.
    with–your–eyes–purely–the–tenseness
  of–days–like–dance–and–stillness
     meeting–at–the–edge–of–silence.

your night-rose, sweet
yet such honeysuckle hides   in your
    girl-graces,

in the gravest mirror of my eyes
  rises    the frailest rose,

       its unmindful bend and its
return to my hand's deepest grave —

        o, the wind sleighs my hair
unearthing its roots — in this summer-gladness i am
      one with the morning's terminal
   flush, its beforeness is my sleep
       brimming with the waters of waking
    and you, whose eyes
             inevitably, the day in the horizon.

a    man with his
     heaviness    weighs the
masculine     waters

    be    like stone
its depth    of concentration
  
   wherefore     birds  lose
  sight of their    rapt flight
above    waters    stills a man
    whose mirror     is not of   a mirage
but       a    man   flat against    the seductive      rose
  
   to     hold  his     breath
and rain's      supreme bullet
       are    but simplistic    maze
again     the   stone cannot  reveal
the     man   in his  proud   geographies —

      such   trouble   of mortality
begins,   a wrest     of bones,   the volcano     defined    by  such earthenware
whose   metaphysics   unalphabeted
  like   fellows    going back to god's    arms
   sitting      well   with
          red    roses.

farewell and farewell—
so this persists, the night
unraveling
its exigent face
as delicate as daybreak.

each window shunned, each door
left open for the wind of your red feet
to enter a plenitude of vagabonds,

goodbye and goodbye
and nothing has ever changed.
to remove yourself from me
and retain, a dagger:
to seize with your hands, my blood
and to bathe your body, with
new darkness.

to move away from me
resounds a bell, a prayer's end,
the birds are in their clandestine,
the felines are in their rendezvous
and your body assumes
liquid measure, surpassing matter.

let us not converse grief when it is
fancy to speak of embrace — you
are a rusting machinery left in the
ferruginous dark.

so we have never returned
and i no longer grieve you:

you are as untenable as a fixture or
a sepulcher.

i desire for your
  inner light to awaken:
itself, a budding flower—

growing roots in my silence,
  foregoing the panache of air.
your petals assist my peril
into a curtain's closing.

what transparency does my hand hold
clearer than any day when you
look at yourself within my eyes,
dizzy with the image i give back,
  a startled child?

the Earth's jar topples, waters breaking free, loosening its girth wily against stone, rinsing us both with purity.

the lament of fixity
gazes on stone, its death-fires  encircle
the slender body of the doting Sun.

this is our time spent again
when our days obdurately say
that our inimitable skies smell of
wet willow—

our time has come to sleep.
the soggy horizon closes its eyes
and darkness enters like a thief.
aureoles criss-cross into
touchable delineations.
i am closer to the Earth than I was once
before you, bared to profile
like a fruit pared by your teeth.

what awaits in the gleam of one's
waking is the fruitage of nondescript music flowering in my ear:
the curved entry of your breath,
receiving it, my ear's bell,
shaking the cathedrals and by the pews
of my somnolence,  a trespassing whirlwind, a dewdrop, trickles of flame.

are there lips, with there power enough
left to clench in their growing?
this den of such tender love,
when i roar ardently dressed as
  an admiral in sleep's sea,

i, mounting the waves of your body,
  dream of lions.

your furlough, even
across the world

so beautifully ****
made immense by the primeval crush
of light.

there are places in the world
filled with soundless bones,

women in their lifeless braids
and swell sheen of moon

this bane of such swollen river
aching back to its source.

it is that your departure has the
scent of olives crushed against
the squalid home,

    and that your presence never
lights an incense,

   like death wafting searching
for flesh, or a lone animal
left cut in the wild pursuing rescue
with a hue of damp mauves.

It should’ve been Bagan –
she always loved Bagan,
Myanmar.

look, woman.
I am a dog outside your home,
overwrought and disarmed,
hunting for bones.

inverse moon over Pasig
tonight and I am on
my 4th bottle of beer already,

barking without teeth.
raged behind the typewriter
with nothing but a visibly

veiled waiting
this stance so
obscure,
so absurd
like the abrupt life
of candle-flame.

I was the lover
and you cared for flame:
now the fire is dead
and there is nothing left
for the sea to lambast,
erased by the shores of feel.

symphonies out on the streets
like leprous children scrunched deep in
the mire of the streets for alms.

it is now my 5th bottle
and I **** on the stone-gnome
in my mother’s lawn
and she will know of the reek
of this pungent disbelief – scorn me for
my heavy drinking

but what is a man to do
when he
is as destroyed
as

the morning

outside?

quite drunk in this evening tender with rue – there is a gentle hand
that whirls against the bougainvillea.

things remain to be constantly in the tranquil as I am not
yet shaken in my fragile frame –

the leaves rustle in the 19 degree cold moon,
the beer bottles emptied, stacked beside the receptacles.
she and I could be dead, and it took me 3 years to know this:

there is a photograph of her thrown somewhere
behind scraps of metal, caged there, like a jailbird
in a jailhouse, screaming blue against redness.

I had love, and love died.
you neither flinch nor move at the very slight of me,
passing over the porch of your reading.
the thing that once moved now festers
with stillness, and so many vibrant explosions begin in the sky
and there is nothing discernible in her abject eyes.

I remember driving past your home in front of
a little, quaint house and I swore that the even your voice
speaks to me in evenings full with the thought
of never knowing you again.

you are so real like the horse that grazes the field
underneath umbilicus of power-lines,
yet so fake and feigned like the truth that tries
to assess itself , crawling mazy back into my drunken arms
like a child startled speaking a thousand things
I have already no use for.


sometimes the sun is like a house on fire.
sometimes the simmer of onion smells like ******.
most of the time, the look on my face, half-drunk and half-believing,
looks like a night distilled and fractured by voices.

I will never ask for your hands to touch,
I will never ask for you body to make heat,
I will never ask for your footsteps to chime in grave music:

I have my own defeats to keep me
that way: toppled and scrounging for light.

let me be.
I have seen many warfares and not a single shot of a rifle
has broken me into the man that I once was.

I drive back to you and it is never the same:
it is banal to say that you have yourself
and I have my own, deep in study.

let us drive back to roads whetted with kisses
and from there, start to disentangle
like leaves from boughs
deep in December.

we are each to ourselves, selected amongst the few –
yet you cannot help but
be mortal.

you, mortised to sleep.
I sick behind white walls that will never
bring your laughter
back to that small frame in front of picture windows.

I look at the world around me
reduced to a grey-faced elbow room,
as the flickering lamp lays out
all the sorrows we forget in our sleep.

who are you?
I pucker up and pull this bottle
snuggled in my clenched fist
and I cannot help but think of any other
thighed upon the cold brink of this bed,
I cannot unthank the existence of flowers
that refuse to bloom in the Sun,
all the more the birds so clearly far better fate
than this enigmatical.

we are each to ourselves and selected amongst the few –
I am the same bar-drunk soul
you met years ago, and will perhaps be
that in all the hours that lay before your callow eyes.
when it is time to draw
the knife,
blinded by the glint of your bones,
wired to the same mind that has once
had me tippling over furniture.

you are this very distant portrait in the
mausoleum that I told many people about,
wanting to go there but my feet can’t – there is a slender
thread eyeing in itself a margin between
the two of us.

and now you turn in your great wave of motion,
next to me, pressed against the sheets
far from being tossed out of sleep.

and along with you, the wind drags a cold, lunar tail:
they are marvelous in their slowness,
and the dark grows more immense than the probability
of you sinking and I, emerging,

turning, turning,
breathing,
so much the turning
and never staying still – there is inimitable life
in this dreariness,

half an elbow,
knees pared to moons,
collarbones and all that music
hung on some frail home,
sovereign of nose
and that whiteness to a paling mood,

almost at the verge of leaving
but cannot because there is conscience tossed out of sight
like a living work of guillotine

immortalized in this sleeplessness that begs
for more waking hours,

continuing in darkness, your eyes close and close and
close like the many doors
that have disappeared
    before me,

     and the frailest thing that
we have
       almost, if not always
loved.

I, whose sleep gloats
searching for answers, steering for a dream

I take my place amongst men
in parks, in alleys, in trains,

and the Sun unmasks itself
like timeworn skies of linoleum.

trees their bulwarks realize such oneness
and birds start to rain

where time wounds all feelings
and lovers innumerably lay flat on their bellies.

mountains ***** as tall as truths,
and the sleuth more than my body’s engine

turns less than a seraphim – dizzy with the
night’s utmost haranguing.

I, whose soul returns not with garlands
but with chains as my phantoms go with them

swimmingly across the blue Earth
and a man brindled, tussled against

space that so distant the star becomes so near
and all sleep lose names of dreams.

this unruly night
is macadamized on the wall,

whit its bare-knuckled steel mangled
to a ferruginous glaze of rust.

the dismal kiss of
      cold on the unclenching fist of the dark
is irretrievable in the grass,

soon, glass-faces will break as my simian jaw
was once shattered by a scuffle in the twilight-bells
      of recess.

  it is like the night dances and in awe,
struck by some rude awakening, we sit forever
  emptied of beauties.

even the flesh rouses to startle the reared relation
   of calla – its hot-flush widespread of petals
  thought I am given always, an intone of forgetfulness.

   such pure lunges and gyrations – we all have
spaces to cross latching us in total placeness like
    black hooks impinging voices to a shriek,

  yet surely they go off wandering in sunsets
waning in the formless crepuscular, waiting the night
  to pour stringencies,
  
    small-breathed furies futile
        like arsenic.

you are slow like daggers or
        cancer.

this is what it feels like to travel
on a discourse:

something about you metastasizes
in my mind whenever the silences
are no longer beautiful;

and just like that, I thumb a prayer
to the fallen obsidian,
this harbinger of marvelous calm.

sometimes all the rooms are white
and I am immersed deep into pallor –
when both our eyes do not meet,
I wring out a cockeyed miracle:

dragging the blood of the trees with me,
these bushy polyps,
   these benign volcanoes skin,
ashen and dull like a heart – these agonized
appurtenances, I gleam like light
   cut from the mirror and fade out
as my visibilities hide.

something in me smiles when you
are flattened out – cross-legged, interconnected
  unloose a star fettered somewhere deep where
hands cannot reach for the inside of a tomb.
  
  this suchness that when I feel your sensations
press their threats against my skin,
      you are a salutary squelch
in this pure-iron condition, or a heavy-earth machinery
   moving inside my marrow, that deep

  into death like a morning waist-high
with tears, walled in by requiems.

it seems to me that the child is beheaded –
there is not much to look at in this paling weather.
moderate climates douse their bleak, blank face-ovals,

their frigidity has no relation to stone,
their silence, loveless as a fabric is torn wild
by a rabid dog, dragging it senselessly against the furniture.

outside, the whiteness bears no reputation of laundry
impaled to clotheslines: frilling at the collarbones,
fringing at the high afternoon, distinct flutings
of iridescent night-gowns,

they want the life of some lovelorn progeny.
the scald of water is his trademark – it seems innately natural,
those who, someone else lauds the **** verdigris
  of trees, able to tell how immense the stasis
  of the darkness is, outside when all homes bellow
a concatenation of absences:

  it seems to me the child is guillotined at this
moment, verily, in moderate climates.

silence, an immense room
        then so suddenly obscene.

memory clings longer than imagined –
I say this in hours where I touch you
   not with hands, fret you not with fingers,
kiss you not with lips but with words prying open
with gestures which unwound us ever so softly,

I unsay your memory shorter than it was held
far beyond what spring embraces solemnly inward,
     that in light structure of night you will be wholly made

true in calmness what the tremors of my home
        unravel with little dints of December keen with
   its thrall,

touchingly you

      without a flounder of breath or an ounce of caress,
  are still written here, like the world answering
           for our questions –