woman – it is when your hairbreadth laughter
spreads into the world, pressed low against the breast
of grass and skirts of flowers,

     like a well-oiled lamp, you proceed with your
terse splendors, your sharp wingtips curved with gropes
of steel with what notion of a senseless blow but a smile
scrunched deep within the water?

rammed into the dry throat of the afternoon,
   a hot flesh half-bitingly rippling, fondling into my throbbing
water – from the abrupt, sweet-smelling rise of tide
    arrives what I am in pursuit as a man, smoothly writhing
the languor of tired believing the always, do you still cling

                              to me like harsh wind in Spring?

you take the fall’s seriousness
         like you were a leaf from the bough
of this tree called love –

     as you were nearer to me than any other
light with its hands clasped, starting rivers in me;

   you, whose mouth benignly twitch to utter
such glibness that even the stinging fragrance
of newness sings in me

the darkness swallowed slovenly as if all of the world
swims past the squalor of my blood – new to old wholeness
bones to a gleam of washlines,

       wherefore there is nothing left to guess
in such hypothetical kisses when you looked at me
with two strutting cities for eyes that
churn to fade out such articulation of sibilance –

     it is like this is never a better fate than plunging,
the moon between the hill and my body
    within your body.

each time the wind turns the pages
of the tree, the sun ripens in itself,
a fruit transfixing the day—

we take it in our hands,
lowly in the grass we lay in slender
fascination, a fresh fruit's glaze
signaling the hour.

this is when my love heightens
as rain falls inanimately on unquiet stones, revealing their naked splendor.
their silences transmuted into undressed
woes of women toiling shorelines and men striding subterranean worlds —

whereas when brightness then quells
itself and tosses you out into the deepest
chasm of chores, your locomotives unction you my sweet lovingly arms
where i bring you close to rescue,

herein darkness prevails and overthrows
water: my hands divest their fates and begin to scour for the nacre of your heart—
and i will take it, and i will own it,
  for there is nothing the blue yields in depth but the lesson it shares,

leaving me a place, flat on my belly,
  with a bounty of flowers in my mouth
your lips have planted like your hand
     on my chest.

an ant fell in between the page
   of the book,

even its own silence it does not understand.
from where to climb it does not know,
all steps carve discourse;

staggering in its littleness, its fragile
  mind takes on the mystery of star
and its delicate body swells in the sheen
   of words.

as in the night, it trails the moon's slender stem that transfixes
   a constellation's ephemerality:
a soldier tumbled over, undulant,
  amazed in betweenness of light
and dark when god himself dies
   before his fall was born,

o trencherman, deep in the peril
  of a word's closing, fusion of
knowledge's breakwater and permutations of bluntness,

the unwelcoming abyss is your kingdom,
  unwillingly enduring the taut blow
    without purpose — when the book is shut, to what dark do you imagine your
  eyes? to what enigma does your senses
wake up to? and to what erudition does
   your silence keep flowering?

an ant fell into the book, and in its turning page, it rides each changing wave like
  the white in its pale, blue horse,

arriving at different shores, yet all the same, a notable fate: stilled and dizzy
washed and unmoving in the abject night.

because love when cut,
lets loose
an empire of blood:

i have in my lips,
a treaty of oblivion—
releasing an embittered lemon.

in the throne of the sea,
waves repeat the crash
of perfidy.
by the mountains they ride,
the thick air of strobe.

rocks receive the genital fire
of lighthouses
exposing intones of shadow
one by one.

the beast maimed
behind the zither of trees
makes no sound like
  an aleph.

i herald the collusion of night
   and children
and weep at the solicitude of mothers,

because pines swoon in the dark
and with its hand, the gentlest war
   threshes the flesh and blood,
raining on us forever.

hostile eyes bypass the silence of things
  and lovers closing doors repeatedly,
disrupting the vale from its slumber.

   it is because when love is let loose,
it releases both of us — weary, inescapably ripe with the wind, looking
   for each other as doves do in flight,
  separate and obscured, opening gates;

                                           nightfall:
   the savage aroma of wood
       on the leaves that sway fervently
          tippling away from boughs.

i fear whose hearth
tongues a whetted fire of dream:

i believe dreams no longer

because dreams smith an immense, black
bell which mine cathedral cannot hold,

because it births an artichoke
strangled by seaweed.

it is because its friction, an allegorical hand denies skin, carries in it an origami
of shrubs and dense fires which smoke
chokes my lost heart.

it is because its machine that never sleeps toils all morning, making the evenings full and tender with scorned
sound of gnashing gear-work, sending
me to unsettled sleep;

it is because i wake where windows
are opened and only the wind touches
my cumbersome body,

it is because dreams slender like wheat
grow molds when striding past waters
takes too long for me to reach
your portico where you wait for me.

it is because i walk past ignominious streets palpable with the disgrace
of the crowds that contain no faces.
it is because when my eyes are lightsome,
such image blurs and i cannot paint it,
and when they close, departures start
bells in my heart.

it is because dream is a flowering
and sleep has no use of its senseless
crown of knives, and i, like a child
yearning for a mother, ambles slowly
in fascination of a hurt underneath the throb of an old moon's wane.

it is because when i am next to you,
i am stiff with the rigor of sleep's pallor
and in the headiness of my dreaming of you, i cannot move to even summon
the brash locomotive of the train

which stops a sudden when i am
a few steps near you.

verily this evening, from the veranda
i smell the fragrance of their arrivals.

the tall, slender, stockinged women
swaying like bamboo in the wind.

the admirals in white commandeering
vessels — the shear of wind, a tractable beast.

the ploys of men to woo the darling,
  the hesitations of dames cloaked
in obvious handiwork of skirts.

they slalom through life's rugged streets
like blueprints of doors revealing
  benign propaganda.

it is all too real to me. i have lived
behind the shadow of words.

it is all that i am cut up for — doting on
it still, yet a nonexistent blossom.

hearing them leave the interior of walls,
soldering the notoriety of burdens.
witnesses drowned in water,
their muffled voices reinvent the quietude. there is a dailiness overmastered by them, such rampant
mendaciloquence denied by me.

i move past cataracts of crowds
and hunt for the silence: this importunate need that feeds my bloodthirsty being.
i awaken the sleeping prowess
of words and listen to them.

now, leave me with my ocean.
i was meant to ***** in the blue
and froth like the last of unburied water,
  dreaming of fish.

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.

your home filled with vines does not know
it is alone — it seeks to become a diaphanous fold of trees, a violent vermilion of skies crushed to clay.

its arms hold refuge, a delicate heart.
the formless shadow there and the unguessed sensorium of furniture —
they do not know the touch of ruin.

underneath you, i am.
soil crumbled by the hundredfold of your
weight. in the air singes the burning of days, punching a hole onto me like
a globule of diminutive fire rife to
cull the vineyard of my body.

your home does not know
the dream of its weight. the anchor of its pillars gnash the acidulous trifle of hours.
doors, windows, cupboards still — every aperture gorges itself with the water
of your footsteps.

your home does not know
that it stomps stonily against an earthen fruitage: my body beaten to a pulp.

each tempered by slivered moments:
slovenly on the floor lay tethered,
both, separate,
honest light.

when it is time that you do not
see anymore, the shadow of my passing,

when the twilight gives rise,
a felled star in the world,

when damp kisses are beleaguered
by the driest of lips,

out of merely, a wide-eyed vainglory,
there will be nothing that all my songs
send a dancing, tiptoeing light
careful to arrive at one day

when you face is held with utmost care
and my hands not its owner,
but a handful of names.

when it comes that we are two fish
struggling in a current's dream —
not a single twitch is born. you will slip
past the interstice of love's net
and i cannot see you anymore in the
depthless blue.

the intelligence of stone tells me
nothing but silence, hemmed in
to a great monolith of daylight.

i exaggerate, the sinking of ships
and amble blindly with the whole of
my motion, like flotsam weary of its
  preordainment. portraits sow themselves
battles, cleaving them minutely against
  the simmer of quiet. when it is time
to let you go, i will watch you leap forth
  into the ripe air like a child seeking
home, reiterates in flight a height
  i cannot reach for.

when it is time all of this,
    mote it be, clenches in thinned streaks
of turpentine, all of my walls will be clear
  and not a sign of your colour
   will scream pain like a tortured vandal.

I take this mangled body of iron,
  its acoustic of all malleability.

the flattened world outside
sings something so slender, a structure
    of a rose.

as long as there is the fierceness of these words,
   they will leap forth, a defenseless vault,
and cry a breakwater of rivers.

these words like caged birds peering out
   into the ferruginous world consummated
by the oldest of thrills crumpled anew – fledgling beats
  of dance, this hysterical morning that slinks to a clasp
    of slipshod music.

when it is time for all of Earth to slumber,
   I am the drapery and all unknowing eyes,
         my children.

When your dance a bounty, yet sing
they fail – I have learned to love,
worrisome mother and adorn you:

such a kiss is planted
a rose on the plump cheek of children.
your girth measures unflinchingly,
the laughter of the world around you
so small, kept in a dark, blinkered box.
your parasol smothers the light
cast unswervingly on stone.
who has long kept you in the caliginous womb,
with all the light that spangles through?
who has snuffed your little arms
and dressed you for everyone to see?
when you are quite flamboyant for
everyone to feast on,
what word passes on as salutation?
when you are festive enough to revel in,
what pagoda tries itself to the life
allowed to gleam proudly?

women, men, children, and all -
frolicsome around the darkled bough
smitten by the frayed sight of believing,
sifting from the way our hands
craft things the dispensable glee
of glasswork: the world is Murano.
and my eyes have seen all flourish
in a darling ebb of curbed felicities – the diaphanous
clangour of steel and shadow.
the slain orchestra of frogs in the crush of rain.
the detriment of the Earth curled like an infant
in the womb of the dark.

     - oh trees and their wondrous life of green,
begin to question the wind and its tourniquet;
shadows drunk on turpentine, the spry wilt of hours:
what is their final duty?
   if our laughter is slain in the perils of night,
how are we to become them?

suppose words
are water and our bodies, wells—

flat on our bellies, our unsuspecting laughter supersedes their suddenness.

too late to unsay the space they occupy.
they arrive not with wind galloping
through trees.
they continually commit a nuisance
to us here in this decrepit home,
christening us with depthless sleep.

— what transpires beyond these shadowed moments unlearn the hairbreadth syntax of their perilous measures:

even the morning has no promise of May.
i say that in wide-flung hours of April when leaves begin to smoulder a cluster of red in the brindled breast of foliages, and rushed like lions to a slaughter, paring the flesh from the bone, these words unsheathe us more than the Earth shedding its skin — a dull synonym of how we are pressed against walls, our bones outstretched to breaking, ourselves displaced somewhere where the air of rescue does not wholly kiss us.

there is no image fainter than what was painted. no machinery can outlast the weight that is carried —

persisting lovelessly, a ragged meadow.
clambering ceaselessly, the warmest of bodies recoiled in melee.

suppose words
are such black-red thorns becoming petals and stems merely lovelorn, joyful to the eye
and hands are moons the bedfellows uninvited, you hiding behind shadows
    of changeless flowers:

so much the quiet way of this fate
reduced to hair-trigger.

thighed and pried lilies, dew slips frightened to a mist of trouble;
morning sleighs its brilliant face,
  such a luminous beginning to a dislimned end — far less touchingly than
a lullaby, this hot water music scaldingly
  presses on naked and whispers to them
  a new name without forgetfulness.

the weight is immense — anchored down, full of something in excess. there are doors that wish to commence oblivion, windows yearn to squint at the Earth so timidly muted in the body.

suppose your body is a home and the night subtly the wind that blows,
topples the roof-beam —

may your sleep be still and unshaken,
  your unperturbed garden slouches with a bounty of emerging flowers;
may your windows to the soul
  be always ready for birds that secretly
move in virulent strings of melody,

  something the world sings screaming
of life, something the stone of a fool
  so supple in hearing, something
the heavens hold together with the
  purest hand, something we precisely
    dream, such that we

        suppose you angels
  and us, the witnesses.

I have no interest in anything
insofar as a warm pitcher of spit.

there is a lineage of a plainspoken truth
that agonies itself, a slow ticking of clockwork.

all the pubs are filled with
the ugly and the beautiful.
so much the naked darlings,
so much the people writing,
and reading poems wrung dry
like unattended cornerstones.

when the flower dwindles,
the petals begin to shed.
I see people slower than drizzle,
tread the long line of existence.

as I write all words washed away by the shore,
all separated and lonely,
deeply departed as a parting hand of a wave,
all people continue their sameness.

inside me, a well-placed margin
divides flesh and bone.
overwrought the soul, untended to
like drops of water from a spigot left open.

sound of silence like the reproach of fires.
my mother loathes me for my heavy drinking.
my godfathers attenuate the smoke furling
above my brows back to its fetal nature.
somewhere, somebody is making a killing
in front of the billion-blooded.

misshapen. lungs struck harshly by a barrage
of quiet. i can barely keep my soul together
past the horrible billboards of EDSA.
the lampposts, the sun that looks like a lazy eye
magnifying everything that hurt.
I thrive with faces whose existences have nothing
to add me – damage further
I keep working up the old moon’s wane.

we will all fall to the ground,
we will all have our skin scraped out
of the body
and we will hear the paring of the flesh
sifting away from the bone
and it will hurt
like old haunts revisiting us

not because we are out of choices
not out of weakness;
the simple truth that teaches us
to be kind does not have its same potency.
there is an epidemic of death
crawling past hills crunched to the death
by the unrests of horses.

pain sends its
tired battalion of people
lining up across the turnstiles.
the ****** utter
the flimsiest of moans.
the soldiers beat their
wives to the ground with nothing
but bare-knuckled discomfitures.
I fear that soon enough,
what keeps the walls together may soon
touch the end
while I assault the windows

with photographs of slow mornings
reduced to slower evenings.
such falseness teems where
truth should have prevailed.

someone’s time is up
and death strays in the room
proud of its stench championing the perfumes
of boys and girls in the flesh -

we’re all next,
first one to go
finds the impasse all the same.

eros: to sting the flesh, o ****** shrieks
sweetness steals from: this buoyant word
sinking in the gnash of moon on loam: awaken me quicker than cherry trees
at dawn: don me against lisps of leaves:
rushing the dogs underneath tightwires:
and sing me something heavy the litheness of verdure: make me cling to wind-hours a tournefortia: place me a placeness in untruths reveal: ****** the languor of pillars: sensual the cruise of caryatids: enigmatic the dark of heron:
    crisp the wind of your arrival.

its stillness presses

    urgent,
      such heavy ardour
   and svelte

  a mouthful of birds crossing
   bodies spangled with wetness.

   again, i gather a roundness
    of rose —

      i echo with the bell of
         thorns:

  with such quivering announcement lay
      slither sprucely
          the drizzle — i have always
    anointed her with grace none
      the fumbling of emergency
         cannot mouth.

i.
on such frigid atmosphere lay,
a serene fugitive.

do not look at me with such lithe eyes:
the sepulcher is only starting
       to begin.

your sleep's regimen twice-folds
origamied on the quiet cloister,
hang there, puts to test the unblinking
certainty of we who bear no retrieval.

ii.
remember when
    all the fish you gut and all the *****
      you cleave were all but meaningless
       fill?

a mutiny of stench is released,
as men continually purged you of
your poisons — us mortised to this
vague mandate.

i have wished for them to miss the mark.
i have longed for them to mime only
  but your placid face.
they have ransacked the quarry of flesh
  flashed bare against mirrors riveted
   to split-seconds of hours.

iii.
when i was young,
much sleep was needed — a noonday travail to all fretting but a dream of dogs.

now this thump of quietness
may mean no recovery.
the speculations to gnaw for sleep are
lost in a blink of an eye:

the blanket that once smelt of camphor
now engulfs in a single blast of cerement.
        — this scrap of a thing that we
             almost have no use for.

iv.
a furious consideration of roomfuls
   disallowed by a heady ruling of
   emotion's precision.

that, of the most difficult choices—
knowing where to fecundate rest.
your body heeds
            no metaphysical reckoning.
  the preordained space for you to occupy, this unwanted silence that keeps
   on renaming things we cease to forget.
a sentence seized by a clause of wood.

  all too soon to wave as a single beat
  is thrown a hundred ripples into my
  eyes, dragged along and trundling there,
     left lengthening to leave, never to wait.

not with time, nor with a touch we choose
to contest — but an eyeing space,
   a moment to attract transience.

v.
i will only look at you once — lacquered
   with solace.

no ellipsis of breath could continue you.
no paragraphs would forgo of your
   punctuations. i deny my defeat
against one who brooks with victory.

    no hint of other chroma.
    a chiaroscuro of beating petals,
   left only to thrive and not swing
    with verdurous display.

how to tell if this is true?
i touch myself as words gyrate
  in the room that received your body
  like the lighthouse that feeds the sea.

—  or maybe sheathed with the untruth.
  this enigma yields no revelations.
  too late to ring yet still continuing on,
    an early drop of dew.

light scrunched, a crouched shadow.
eyes discern heaviness of
ordinary places into various flows
   of gutted fish.

this world gives away a weathered image:
its wraith comes unannounced

lovelessly drags the stooping gait
of walls, obscenely expires
   a small clearing

this mundane home gives way
to a restless flow of other dimensions.

bird of the afternoon
reaches far beyond extensions.
discombobulated tendril of light
   flashes its fullness
to a bedrock of reality.

the kitchenwares start to falter
but all for the way, where once
gray hair graced this table,
her vividly tremulous hand steadies
  a fixed touch on bedspread —

on the wet back of freshly bathed fruits,
  a metonymy that continues to bruise.

morning's watery hands part to meet
the mist of departures;

quietly as we all are, seldom imposed
an overhung dark, and as quiet as you,

                                                do not go.

a room full of grandmothers,

night-gold —

espials of eyes
syncopated.

take this thread and fissure
me love-struck.

tenderly the walls are white,
the mood: all malaise of trees in autumn.

Christ's redness in hymns
**-hum angelward as rain

brings a discalced memory
close to sand by shores of repeated waves, where the gull tirelessly
          punctuates
the water with its centric beak.

all youngness and beautiful
rising like cunning equinox,
slow auburn of eternities commits
  to angels denied.

sharing something a memory would
espouse in lips dry like tropics,
  looking down on familiar abandon,
reaching out with their hands and making
   no sound, felt yet always, in tender
     hours of night.

swift inset of love's Sanskrit,
a thorn of contestations.

make cadence this sensorial music.
centrifugally waiting bodies
to cross Earths.

a plethora of annulments.
lion-telling Sun singes through intersections of infinities:

we cannot wait to quash
the morning, the scent of guava leaves
and the cerement of flour on chicken.
earth-hewn mounds of meat pressed
against beholden kitchen clangor.

declension of memory past wood
and pillars of home. lattices of light
forerunning fingers, let down the curtain.
wind swings with maddened turbine,
afternoons high with deadlock.

of all that is not here, the force
reawakens a long-stumped ******,
beating us back to edges ruthless
with angels entirely curved, singled-out,
wings clipped, dancing at the tip
   of the candleflame.

let startle inlight, if not so lifted
in peregrination, a lavish seeing.

two eyes are worlds in
tippling axis.

taking deaths,  a wreath would a candle,
a prayer would a body thumbed down
to wisdom our backbones break.

to see    death    like a rush of flowers.
great the sight of such illumination.

swiftly going to god's dark behemoth,
  metaphysics of bone clenched—
   darkling like obsidian

a complexing fault of road
     as the same vein of Earth aspirates
       the wind — whose exigent fire
  cleaned her bones back to
     pulchritude: her face a diamond
     in the rough — never to speak
  yet to clamber with summarization,
    realness and revelations of roses.

they took you now, contraptions no longer. there is a palpable quiet

      in the home. o lattice,
o vase of concrete, o smolder of onion
and the grave death of sugar;

the splintered staircase creaks
on no footwork and to go back to
cerements of this ceremonious banishment of shadow peals through
  gates opening to blue depths.

tonight, the room is as haunting
as old pangs. gnash the light of
moon past mud and linoleumed floor.
cross out my eyes and empty the
visage of their macabre.

   going back to tractable beginnings
as the bell tolls for no one:

  i stagger and startle the cornerless
  shadow, waking the orchestra of
  dogs to fracture the stillness

  like how drunken men curse at
  wives and throw vases against
  roses tossed to the dead.

  flesh warms no longer.
  garlands overwrought
  with serpents.

  glimmers of stone as dead
  as petrified oak.

  streets begin to narrow
  as light starts to pass on
  as answers.
  we make no sound.

you will only look for which road i have
  passed, with girth of oceans startled
  to hip-curve, bow-legged darling
  hiding behind pretense of rose frailty.

when words ripen, they fall.

from vaudeville of fools to silence
in all its exactness, i take my place
amongst people in stations, machines
adorning rotundas, courtyards to a flourish of twilight-bells, the men with retinas spry behind cloaks of smoke—

        plain, **** drunkenness assaults
the billion-blooded sea, each line fraught
with inebriation: a god is borrowed with
what light fruits from a slow nature, quick
to burst and torturously maimed in stride.

fated to arrive at one morning —
being in total placeness and making merry
once again, the dreary face waiting at
the portico of days collected.

when these words start to wind-hover,
a string of birds will appear clearer,
mounting umbilicus of lines.
as in hounds shear the metastasizing dark,
going back to chagrined kens,
i make truth out of the tragedy:
trace the source of this stream and find
my trampled body, floating with
   the sandalwood. when the still, clenched hand clock-punches,
   make real the insignia of my arrival:

words start with limbs to cross
  this scalped Earth which moves suddenly naked, leaning in, gropes you
in stillness, resuscitating the moon from
the working of insolvencies we rear
in derelicts of days.

drags it closely to ends — left trundling
in woe's wearisome vessel. and if in
this newly thatched home it screams,

let this voice deftly shred
so i may once more lie straight to your
half-illuminated faces, a call i
only hear.

goaded by a stereophonic monotone:
a flumine voice waxes with lovelorn dregs.

i heard the plump word of rescue
dangle from the heady decibel of song,
winterward, blue-veined and stillicide.

no more, shall the wind traverse the impasse of the verdigris. the incertitude
of beginnings sigh ultimately.

o people, your darling children soldered
to your denims. o rosefrail and sightless
bannerets — we mourn such coming.
it sleuths with a tangle of fingers
underneath fringes of flesh-warmed
draperies with a different temperament
as moderate as climates in squandered tropics, flows with a truth wishing it
more of the untruth:

never shall return, in faraway lands,
never shall look back and lay in prairies
attenuated, continue to sing oblivion.

milbrightlions of December —
you come announced in multiplicity.
even the night-herald blooms through
the beams of astounded simulations.

buoyantly uttering a word
of light, stilling itself in the sky,
unasked for.

surmounting the Narra and the mangrove,
sieged to a halt in its exactitude
like the uncomplicated machination
of what makes fire simmer in a wick.

all of its brazenness hearten
in easily toppled altitudes — even our
battlements scar our unexplained
liminality we grieve at first glance.

airless are the spaces we lean on,
testing their capacities. shrills bloom
clearer. our mouths plump and glazed.
our flesh hurtle all incarnadine, all true
unlike the twining of roads lit like
faces in the marketplace —
       a dynasty of brokenness.

even the dullest of knives
can **** —

a smile has fallen deep into
the silence.

wincing on and off
like terrible vertigo.

it is you lashing across
dispersing images

seeping like ruthless mileage
underneath the bone.

you come in the room
full of these hours splintered

an outpour with a foreboding,
like spindrift you wet my lips

sealed shut and silence
is all the language i understand.

what good is there that this hungry
cavalcade gapes its mouth

and metastasizes like an opulent
laugh as maniacal as drum-taps?

your are river with feet or pond
sprawling mad, enigmatical.

is this the clearing motes depart,
unhinging the crepuscular

and fade out, as a cat shrieks tumbling writhing fornication of metal and rust?

even sleep cannot manage such realness,
and the doubleness of its comatose

or say, a war in spite of its radical
artillery. between two cities lost,

its indefatigable exertion pullulates
to a hand, laying garlands

over the same blue lament of sky
and the unawakened orioles.

my poised mother stances
to behead the onion—
begins a murderous sound brigade
of simmer in the home.
the fizz starts to assault the restive
pulse of woodwork,
the red plush of air in the heart of cauldron — little child you are no longer
  a boy; the furniture is arranged and
the nail is hammered to its deep oceania.

the feeling of stillness,
  a saboteur.

a stasis of dark flounders a steady lark.
headiness of scent peregrinating
toughness, the countenance of walls.
i am always the egg smashed opened,
cracked, bleeding clear, yolk gallops,
  slides like thigh upon fault of pond.
i begin to understand the curious case
  of feral, the benign death of rodent;
the cupboard infested with species
  running around China plates.

  the quietude starts
to confront the little house
   of moon — the silvery mane of water
trapped in the Earth, listen to its bell;
the shiftless rotund of its footfall,
    these are the hooves of it, rummaging
   past the minutes like a horse.

air pours alive in stringencies,
fall of tor and expanse.

mazy-eyed,
casts a syncopated hook
amongst tulips beheaded

by the toppling of a leaf
bracing for departures,
something else holds back,

furrow—
the thatched morning's serious mien,
the arrow, whirling in trajectories

one with the dive into red cauldron
of infinite scar of water,
Śiva, sighted footfall of the condor's

verdigris, this simple rustle
of your scourge-gowns
insists cadence of flutings;

i am one with beginnings.
swarming poultice of the inflamed grass,
obscene lines of shore in twilight

unfazed virulence spreads
like an epidemic of kisses against the
pulsing loam, cries like breakwater

lorn the fault of men, death at one's
trembling hand — sound the tribulation
of slender bells to a gather of pallors.

it is a stopping in-placeness
like crests of *******, a beautiful woman,
shiftless weight of light on glazed    collarbone, Śiva, the enigmatical paradox

beleaguers a concatenation of
unloose chandeliers of appurtenances,
the unblinking aperture, widening in sky.

waxing, planetary
odd moonlight—

the faces are whetted to diamonds.
the paralytic shadow begins
to twitch;

benign light froths to full afternoon,
this sedentary creature in between teeth,
a clear consonant of dull air.

thereby gleaming, tapered to
a nightingale's song;
i take my place amongst the elements
of night: as if to say a new portrait in mausoleum crossed by grass and aureole

the laughter shattering its dull one—
a lurid memory, all to itself amongst
kindred of parks.

let hands speak what mouths
   cannot prattle

                 let eyes dream what sleep
               renames with its tranquility

let love undo what
hate has wreaked and

                 let fingers saunter infinite
                 strides when feet sojourn

let this quiet bellow
a hundredfold of sound

                  and let soul dance when
                  we have departed,

enisled here underneath the
brow of a terminal day,
  
                  its numeral tasks unfold
                  in the night full of silences

and let the world feel the cold
of brookwater when we cannot swim—

her hand will be moonlight
by him: quietly

have we become beautiful
sound? movement of dancers

and fangs of music— birds
stirring elsewhere,

abandoning trees, you
and trilling waywardly across sound, me

all is disquiet in days your lips
have sung honeyed softness

i could hear it like a flower
whose petals are blue

deepening in silence.
her smile will be harlequinade

by him and an adagio of scherzo
by her will make feet trample

the accident of water: pond-strove
of love's bend asks

have we become rivers
leaping in temporal splendors

as when it will never
give sleep its ****** whiteness again

i sing through morning's trek
and we, deeper then rain-washed stone,

will be all but moon and dark,
oh, you, me — unclosed without protest

pressed against the wall
of love's domain.

madmen fools and nothing,
the mien — brazen, stupefied glance
and hungry for light, our words gutted
like our enemies in our ill-thought.

this road dredges, the aporetic line
sifting through new divisions, something
an equation forgets the dividend
and almost always a salient permutation
of men and women and the "takatak" boy
peddling cigarettes to claptrap ***
of metal envoys,

  reciprocating some chances of restive
dreadnaught, diffusion of sweat in
scalding heat of 12:41 afternoon sun
and smoking with bystanders
unaware of the doldrum and the ennui

   it was a fine day in Ortigas.

i was thinking of a love divined—

or an amaranth held close to the Earth.
i tossed it into the graveyard of names
and when i start to cut
a dozen more of flesh,
it will then begin to rise
yet i bequeath it no unction.

it is never a clock nor a pendulum-sea,
spindrift sloshing forth creases
of fabric, spinning a cataclysm
leaving all solemn in a torpor like a
tractable animal wounded behind
   the bush.

i was thinking of eyes unfastening
the lovelorn, arriving with an image
i have long feared—

i walk with no clothes seething
with a bulge of life.
it's a cold room, this peregrine of silence.
i see mouths reduced to creases
on the wall. hands unscrewed to
loose hinges drifting apart.
teeth biting the lip of days in disquiet
as surf takes on multipliedly by the shore,
a hoard of wave-rustle.

i was thinking of something pure
when all yesterday's tumultuous memory
tumbled down like a reared on avalanche,
tossed to a basket, folded,

poised to be sullied once more.

i remember
(a pluchritudinal memory)
when almost so effortlessly
our lives lied to us most indefinitely
in the hours that return with
lashes and chains—

as in clothes heavy soldered
to washlines, the waft in the air is as familiar as the rain cooling
the blades of grass you speak of,
something the dark only conjures
waiting at the brink of my unclosed retina.
i know all of these well-placed memories
like furniture you have arranged
under the hollow hands of the home.
yet barely even so, a fond memory of—
the daedalus outside or the cut
gladiolus, plucked out of the moseying hour's vicious wingtip.

we do not always die like this.
when all our dying whispers are thrusted
underneath mouths of stone,
when all of our wishes hold a flame
paler than a vague rekindling of the dead.

sometimes promised something an ellipsis would half-ponder and postpone
in word's mid-birth.

the raging moon had waned.
all the windows shunned — hermetic,
air outside potent, leaving all books
half-read yet fully opened.
the children hide behind thin shades
of roses,
i can hear the steely grit of the flesh
pared from the bone as my mother
guillotines with kitchenware

we do not always die instantaneously.
most of our ways to go leave
demarcations on soul — something so easily displaced, doubled array of its arrival into half-wakefulness.

something only a last prayer thumbed
down to the last bead
and we cannot cry anymore.

night's flumine seeks to rebuild the wound undone delicately
leaving my breath and betraying my body.

we somehow always die like this.

the world utters few,
light treading its way
through scrunched up space of tension.

inimitable
as all images
burst a flounder in colour.

spectacles of past
pullulating retrograde,
moving past our photographs.

difficulties ascertain the tremor
of the displaced stone in the corner:

stones have truth, and life so much the not, like the lilt of mendaciloquence
dispersing in a dearth home—

everything else is rinsed,
assuaging the dermis that continually aches forever the thorn of a rose ripened,
  just as jazz is as always the music listened to by fellows hungry for Earth.
the wind blows spindrift past
our opened window when we slept next
to the churning sea. shadows renaming space: elegies of old metal rusting
seeking more than what silence provides.
roads confused to a kink. furniture kites along with it, a toppled light like sinking the fruit deep into the hands of a river.

  our flights become only so heavy
  when we become wary of the love we
  drag along. when we the small of our
  back and the bony protrusions of arched
  bodies become
            aware of the detritus. when blades
  of grass rear weight of the air bracing
  for the fall.
    
  our flights become only so heavy
   when we look back at our point
  of departures. our spanked curve
   of trajectories, permutations of
   open doors trying to do away
   syncopated tapestries anchoring
  our dripping bodies wet with what
  the snow has lent our
       numeral summers—

           forget.

i hunt for a sign
of you in the vernal sky—
all summer and breeze.

desultory moon
over Chrysanthemums tells
solitudinem.

vestal nights clamber
the perennial diadem
of quiet mountains—

here is something they do not teach
in school, that is why
    Juaniyo put a bandana around his head
in red and like a sturdy kalasag, he raised
    his hand high, championing all —
nobody shall strike this country with
    impunity.

Juaniyo was an anarchist — a decibel in the  voice of this nation, standing strong
   for the deprived, the voiceless,
    the pithless. this was inscrutable force
       awakened — they did not teach this
  in school. they taught us that we'd
    be winners, hotshots,
millionaires, tycoons, dogs and slaves to
    capitalists — this total equation
  they didn't tell us together with the
   suicides and the extra-judicial killings,
the limp democracy of the state,
     summary executions, the displaced
groups, shelterless mothers with children
   suckling their ******* while seeking
alms, the downfall of all economies

for Juaniyo, a hurled rock is the imperative as a thick wall of alloy
   and fiber glass drive him to the edge
of the street where somewhere in the periphery, a bombardier of water is waiting with a steady aim;

      they did not want their powers
challenged, they did not find it appealing that their oppressive authoritarian stance
    is put to the test and is at the verge
of being dismantled to be replaced by
   freer, egalitarian structures.

   Juaniyo leaves the class in total pursuit,
  heeds the call of heartland.

anything    that       is,
must   bear light —

transitory, translucent: perhaps, winged
  and conscious of space, mindful of turn,
sizing down height. vertigo of all that,
   shining no ambivalence.

this   is the way my world will end:

the room still reeks of sour mash —
   Pablo the dog, oblivious, marble-eyed,
yet some pitch-black hound's awakening
   from steely sleep.   the pages will
fall flat on the doorstep unannounced—

   it is difficult to   imagine angels.
  it is difficult to    deal God's infinities.
    they are each to their own
           faults.
  heaven is    meant to scar. still drunk
     in fearfully fretting butterflies
     tilted in slaughterhouses   screaming
       ****** against the crowd.

    there will be no falsetto claim to
  sovereign —    a drop D, e minor chord
      on the guitar, strumming, swimmingly
  discolored    and only resounding.

slugging and chortling all infinite and lax
leaning back on monobloc chairs—
  
some borrowed courage    some borrowed reflex       some leased home
to a figure shadowboxing     in stereophonic eclipsing  volume

         sentimental love song,  some humdrum alchemy    of ale and whiskey,
   feeding us with lies straight to our
fallible ears      as guava and atis whiplash     in inebriated sensurround
of     playful mirth and feelingfulness

   toppling the signs     painting the avatars    incarnadine with black-wounds
again the music     rending the vale
   lying straight to the face something the
heart still is— gears and clash-work
     of    analog deceit  and fecund belief;

some permutation of early, imagined
     falling     into fledgling    beats of
pining softly dancing     in echoing beds
    watch this twitch of my finger
meets to cigarette ember afloat
   in verdure-jazz, lunar offspring of the

tubular     deadbeat  —   crossing this
   side of strife-torn  street,   hopscotch
     in staccato. i believe there is rescue
in here     somewhere as a tricycle blares
   its rapacious   orchestra of metal
underneath the makeshift moon,
  
    why, it is   so much better    to burn out
than    fade away, the song lying
  again     straight to our disgusted faces.

flayed shade      of peril

         i
           gaze
   into
          the
     sky
        be it night
or
      day,
          and look
   for something

      i know not,
even the moon
         and the sun
     are famished

     and
         that is
why i still
       keep
     on
            looking...

— bard of night,
         keeper of metal.
furious light flaunts no avatar.

            shadows chant a sequence
              of deathly ire. loam, dearth and girdled to
         silver mane of canal.

     Dos has died.

   father took him into an unfamiliar curve
wandered off into a reverberating
      disquiet.

                  i have buried him
      together with all loyalties — concealed
him in thin space,  decreed him
     all dogdom with     unction,

   swimmingly now, still you go, leaving
     us. it has been six years and all eternity's motors gnash
        
                 afloat is the bird
     and in the nearby ken is another dog
     panting in death-daring heat,
          
      Dos has died.

(  to which temple shall our in-betweenness       kneel before

       reft in ****** dark?

   housed in parenthetical arms,
       graver than a tomb's rhetoric—

washed in red of flowers, a swarm
    of light arrives, waking the undeath
                                                      of stone.

  from glib strife to downpour of
    leaves — a morning unbound, unclose

the    sojourn     lay by the side of the
     river, the single-minded cruise


     to      appassionata,

                                       love.)

once
it
          has snowed—

  helm of pines

whiter      than
      doves,        wind-flumine,
   trapeze of
       boughs ache the

                                   lark, bowed—

  inward, curve of  Earth,
      gentle ray     of light
   lifts
        like hands     holding
    
     the sky above, birds roared

   through
               the interstices,
  strophe       by strophe
                homes thwart fires in     hearths,
                 no warmness

                   gilded the vertigo of pinecone.

milbrightlions of sky
where the brindled Maya
begins its escape
from the wind's seething hands,
O, celestial machine
of pompous working:
when the day breaks
its shell and births
a yolk yellower than
all dandelions,
the world from
its shell will rend
the horizon and there shall
be forever the two Suns
stamping the raze
minting in the livery
of the world, each to
our tenderness sings
   humanity, purely—

(everything happened while
    unloading laundry from the car,
  a speck of light flaunts.)

daylight penetrates—
saturnal globule.
exeunt: flicker of firefly.

All the roads are closed. Silence metastasizes through the stretch of EDSA. Cold seeps in bone. Sun still flagellates.
        Oscillate through sound space and whitewashed walls. Seismic grunt of jeepney awakens the signs: no avatars, yet. The night was as deep as any lover, a fine blistering moon glares through lit rivers.
   Nothing exists except heads of tacks and maimed populace ambulating across roads sequined with ermine light. The disquiet approximates   the lightness of
buildings in repair. Scaffolds, ubiquitous lovers,
    clouds explode into white, and everything else like pain, pales in comparison with the slow twitch of everything.
     Today there will be no siren nor
   simultaneous joust of cyclists in perpetual motion— just you contending
   against hues of all graffiti:
Cataract of anguish. News of killing.
    Incarnadine trees netted with aureoles burning bright in solstices. Penumbral undulation of
           forethought and afterthought.
   Dislimned – all; you, left
       in polaroid taken in solitary shutter,
    in pursuit of light.