the word admits truth
and the feeling confirms its ruin

of the world i know. trees spar
wind, birds cross tapestry;
the old moon's wane hesitates,
  the bilious lark does not

heed what i know of the world
   and our entrails speaking
a hint of such sorry recall—
something a memory gives back,
lighting a beacon, passing a mortal flame

  into my hands, the heliotrope,
  haplessly flapping its wings now
    unpinned crooning a voice
of the world – twilight in one song.

Mindanao rain

   drain a mind:

rain, mind an a, o (or lack of
      the voweled demarcation)
      
       a man rid
or
     a dim man in
   a man;
  
      Danao
sings something
   blood writes heavily
we have many cicatrices

    mind
the
      now

    arid mind
man rid of
a, o — vowels to
    fruition a total emphasis

     and man
in a drain, no strong aid
        in rain — in the
eyes  of
    god is the
true
   anon man
in the rain
    amid rain-moan
   or nomad in rain.

a **** I On,
  you
complete the atrocity.

petty and pathetic,
insofar as when a wreathed breath
    brings the being to the brim
of each death-defying word,

    a woman. lying naked,
nailed to the Earth, burning
   auburn-bright from windows
a wraith unannounced without a diadem
    even, consoling the heavy lark
of the doused dark with something
    weightless swinging against
the boughs — shuddering after a great
   fall from presence to heart's pompous
   flare. flat is the world
and light, the bendable one:

   laugh, laugh, brave the hill
  and behind the bramble, the dimly lit
   foliage you are there
   from the tumble: an aureole
     simmering in the unbeknownst.

the guttural baritone fixes
the tone of the bravado.
  unafraid of the world's conspiracy
sweltering, is this fan of flame.

              luto
linis
           laba

  thumbing down a prayer
of the last leaf, this wondrous tendril.
   all the taverns shake still
in the spleen of contention.
       this is the penultimate tonic:
when the world is not moving
   and when all the bottles are drained
of their oceans, when the women are
   dull and our lovelorn duties double
  their weights, oh, and when we are
  at the edge of desires from what
   you perceive as "hairtrigger",

    we will once more savour the
  emptiness of all and wring
    the seas of their blue and guzzle
        a swig,
     drink or two even if you
know me not.

silence is sage
and no gold is betrothed
to the folly of words.

wizened of old. i can taste
the word's iteration as the pen sees
the dreamer, as the paper
dictates the fate.

bespectacled, sizing down
the most fortuitous of spectacles,
in the pantheon
   belonging to the supremes
     destroying frailest caryatids
and awakening the mortal flame.

    how well you understood
the postulation of cold.
    how vivid, how precise
is your concept of the void.
  how seldom imposed
the crutch of loves,
    how mystic is the enigma
of the wide-eyed wanderer

    sifting through the word,
   the will, and the way!

outside, the world
half-blind, half-illuminated
       i solder mine tremulous fingers
   to unsullied white and begin
      to pry the promised mirth;

joyously i and the smoke
   of fetal curve, rising like a hand
glistening my forehead!
   death strides past the juxtaposition
of scaffolds and i heed the call
   of the clarion void. the shadow's
pantomime comes to a close
   and the iron sea of curtains
move altogether.

  oh my mother weeps
  and so my father, the nonchalant
    always, my brother
and sister learning the form of
     early departures,

a long lineage of passing,
mustering the immense weight
of dying. we seek death not—
   living flourishes for naught.

never always the princely thing
  to do, but when i have death
   in between the fingers, berating
my smallness,

    it is either obliteration
or salvation, eluding inhibition.

a word, haphazard
   by the thwarted world,
for the word
     and from the word, springs
beyond extension, a cherry-taint
    of tongue and its exquisite redness
yet never what our purloined voices
     hold, falling quick the immense
roundness of the bedlam;
  such is still
in war when all the burly men
and the hubbub of artillery
  make only the commune
this is our utmost, deepest,
   wounded memory.
our life's entrails crouch no longer
  a striped tiger by the door
redolent of the many ebbed deaths;

  nights i lie awake
  and see all language lift,
  leaving in the night sky,
  an array of temporal splendors,
   famishing all the Earth in the dark,
  abandoning it, cross-eyed!

it is the dawn of the avenue.

          the children sing rain
and the fire i burn glowers.

o, it is when the twilight came
i was speaking then, to you,
all the trees beauteously bring
you to me and our hands handle
the hours full of moon.

the patter of the rain they sing
and the bundle of woe i bring
by the avenues traced by
girl-graces, strewn loveliness of
basket hollows and singsongy
feelingfulness — look at what the
wind does to the berries,
and ourselves in brightened plaudit;
hands no playthings, i touch her
silken thighs and death peers
no longer; only yawns in the speechless
distance, frequent dream-pauses
drenched in sweat of nightly heat
  your mouth tasting chrysanthemums.
luminance of voice blinds the shadowy
  corner, light lifts, god pulses in
the deepest, most final mirror of ourselves, supreme over all and i,
   in the most radiant green of all earth,
smiling at my lover's body.

the sonofabitch tremor
  from a tall cup of americano

i am somewhere in the heart of Libis
  feeling the libidinous snarl
  of trucks, the poignant treason
    of leaves slamming against each other,
  the bamboozle of the youth

   this is my 5th poem sliding out
    of my whetstone mouth
   sharpening the dull blade of tongue
    as the harum-scarum of the swivel
   door crafts a rising hullaballoo.

    spilling coffee on my ****** white
     this sonofabitch tremor
    terrorizes the purity of the *******
       clenched against no succor,
    eyes squinting in lachrymose fretting
      palpebral shade of tossed out gray
        caprice of clouds — no
  
   more coffee
      for me,
          these words nudging me
   keeping me awake with
      persistence.

from the doctor's lightsome bed
   after being examined in the bone
to my side of the lenient road

  we are in the heat
   of assault.
  no dead lampposts
  no macabre of alleys
  harbinger dampened silence.

only this thing of us now
   deconstructed to you
  and i with no relevance
  believing nothing but the
  instantaneous rupture
   of any thrown word
  in the neighborhood of parks.

slam on the dashboard
   and the groan of the engine:
hurtling at speeds faster
   than any ******.
  across the knobby knee tawny
   slivered burgeoning words
  escape compartments ajar

  objects unkempt
    dissipating on the svelte ragamuffin
  linen, faded masquerades of feeling
    trying to destroy the riddle

  lunging with uproarious wordlessness
    like a den of lions set loose
     here speeding 110 kilometers
    in arbitrary roads finding each other
    again, this time
       making furious love.

within my retina, a woman
   sits cursive, writing in the flesh,
  words i could no longer parry.

preening through the brightness,
   its extensive turn, spanking the curve
  of the elbow room decrees

   - we are
         to each other
   and away
      we go
         arriving at unknown places -

  yet her
     multiple gestures array.

  woman
your full fathom's depth
      souses the traceless flame;
  trapeze from
      hate to
          love formless, crossing
paths limbless caught in the spar
     of enjambments

    our then aberration of lips
   sutures something bleeding
      profusely; this morning
   holds a torch passed on to
      your body's shade tossed
  out of nascent states:

     we are young
   yet never younger, chasing
    in circles enclosed in dome-hands.

November's Daughter


oh, say you, zithering delightfully
    the leaf's breath leads me on
    to the tree of your sanguinity.

the wind is much stronger,
    the verdure is greener
   in my side of the Earth
you cross with a single glance
   etching something in the soul:
a writ of marvels or a lace of birds
    stringing across the entire
November morning.

in one of the days made thoroughly
    by careful hands,
  it is you in the flesh of many
   tangible days.

i say again,
the wind is cooler,
  thwarting the summer.
surly flowers glide in the air
   and the clouds twitch in sun-glaze
  and temperamental pondering

November supremed you, me;
   the sovereign of its bounty
  opened its door and let in,
     a crystalline vestige:

the wind is tender past the windows.
  i watch the slow specter of night
    in its vertical climb;

  you,
the moon,
    altogether, hand in hand,
  like water falling and falling
    into my mouth, receiving your shadow–
the world
    moves brighter than ever.

afternoon's glint on the mirror-pond,
  a whirling specimen of fire,
   ocher-speckled, Sun's insignia
     vessels deep into the clammy water;

furiously swaying like a pinned down
    beast reluctant to be held—
  Makati traffic jostles the silent grieving
    of the asphalt. simultaneous burst of
      chrome on the metal bodies,
      oh, the coming and going,

  children laughing vibrantly without
    memory of scathing pasts and
      boorish origins— tossing coins
      beckoning the heaven in pursed lips
    and clenched fists tender with years
      dwindling along with the turning of
    the calendar's page, the sudden leap
      of figure lamenting the absence
         of language;

    i walk the street festooned with dried
      leaves and forlorn seasons,
    hurling no amaranth to the entire
       Makati cityscape.

I am,
  yet one never complete for
much ado has been said
   when the span of the world
ends when the sky-reaching flowers
  plummet inward, breaking shoals
     of fettered clouds dusting themselves
of the ether.

I am
   never a lie nor the truth beset
by trivial happenstances; there is always
a sound heard from a body's eventual fall
   into sleep's threshold—
the  dreams are all imagined realness
    and tomorrow detests, all the
  muses by the river gone harmoniously
     escaping the hands of standstill time.

oh, let red
   or blue define the Sun and moon,
      lunar harlequin bleeding white
  all the gemini! pounded against the harsh blackening wall of eyes sealed shut
    and far away, i go, to where no sound
      lengthens, flames to reach with
    its flumine hands a furtive life congealed,
      singing where no hymn shatters,
       returning to the Earth with words—
            a made man.

there is no stone sewn
   gossamer but your heart;

holds captive, the leaves
   trapped in white teeth of snow,
  gnawed at, abandoning the boughs

   quivering, never still.

  this immovable fire heeds no void
    standing in between us,

how you die in me:

all things twice over,
told, hushed in the senseless
  brush of wind,
  petrified like the tree
heeding no autumn's till,
a feeling
  flailing inward,
  climbing out of yourself.

these winding, blind itineraries
  and their purposeful turns;
  bends on the wry pavements,

  their naming of things
awaiting the return of memory
  with an auspice, or a head with bounty,

  i am but a bamboo in
    the wind — slender gymnast
supple ground's tenement,
   or daresay honestly, a creeping into
the world with roots close to
   heartland, this poem
now, without feet and my eyes
    with surgery-precision ruptures
the softness of all things held close
   and divine like a secret,

swimmingly
   light coming in
unabashed rooms
   here now is a poem,
a homecoming.

there is much to remind yourself
of other's dazed concepts
like coming to terms
with your own madness;

The Smiths
    and this cigarette
reading Life Alone
     by R. de Ungria smashing
my head blood sprawling
   across the page
blasting in my ear a fecund dark.

what am i to do

  with a hand,
           the spindrift by the sea
  blowing against the windows,
     with a thigh,
   this palpable quietude

all mornings arrive
     with a hatful of shadows
vulgarly obtrusive
    
with the night,
        a den of thieves.

     Caligula rearing the ******
to Nero, and I to myself
     in front of the mirror
still
       clawed by the same
beast maimed
     behind the bush.

Your reluctance to bark, your canine ogling. How I envy you dog. Because you are innocent.
      Because you dawdle in your
        coil of tonal mane.
Because you weep no deaths.
Because you somersault no beginnings.
Because you do not heed the call of silence — just stupidly beautiful curiosity you cannot word, a scruff grunt or a maniacal burst of motion. Because you only
    find yourself in a ***-lock
and drowse right after.
Because there is nothing in this
     world too immense for your
   smallness. Tottering behind the furniture, sleeping underneath
        the study, wagging your tail vehemently, welcoming with beastly pounces any stranger heralded by the wind passing
     through opened doors,

because you have no daily commute,
     no dread for the inevitable,
  because your fruitions are measured to no better than
  a toss of supplication or simply
gnawing at an old bone.

   Because tomorrow
i will go to Pasay and earn a living
for perhaps, nothing— my works remain unread, my voice
     still dies in its reticence, if not clubbed state.
   Because tomorrow there
will be a long line of people running
     in circles on the head of the
  nail and soon it will rain.

Because you and I share
     the same air yet never
  carry the same iron of crosses
     or surmounts of ineffable
  boulders — i feel more chained
     without a leash while you
   feast in the manna of hours,
chasing a speck of shadow
      or lounging at every time-trickle.

bleak darkness and its measure:
squandering the light
no definitions
no spectral haze
no inhibitions
its onerous labor is one
    with me.

live life at the edge of the fall.
holding a hand
fallibly.
live alone, love alone —
  these things pulse with strength
      in singleness, even the glances
of prying neighbors are sequestered
   reduced to sealed shut, hermetic,
      no sight or hindsight.

i'll run to where the sunlight is
   and wish for the moon, slumber
like a dead log adrift in the current.
buying myself love and selling its pleasures to defunct markets.
   trying to repair what is beyond salvation,
   trying to amalgamate what is perpetually
        scarred, sundered.

clangorous *** of metal, herding jeep
    and riotous chariots; mad men fill
the lines waiting for encumbrance,
     bardic in the streets of Marilao
hungry for something:
   give me a blank piece of paper
and i will try to reinvent the world
     with impunity and lostness.
the world gives back such awry stare
    and all imperative darkness reigns
supreme, mine are all emergencies
   as shadows are succored not,
retained in their caliginous thrones.

living alone
    yet not so much alone.
the dog outside does not bark anymore.
  the well-placed gnome of stone outside
      stares stonily across the thick space.
the nosy neighbor does not meddle
  through the rusted ocher grills.
the old moon wanes outside
   as the lift of light sways to where
there are no disappearances.
somewhere in the metropolitan there
   is a derby of fools and all mirth;
i wish myself there and curse my presence
      right then.
work does not fill me anymore,
    money does me no good. my soul
bangs the walls and slams the doors
     it threatens to leave without auguries,
and demands a new sense of necessity.

tonight, i will go out, drink at a local pub
   and crawl towards the ajar door of
  my father's car. smoke will caterwaul
the pressing scenes of the vicinities
    crumbling at the tremor of clocks;
i will open my dresser and discover
   all books dissipated, some naked
  in relished pages, others abeyant.

the curtain can fall later,
and the night too, falter evenly
widely spread across the sky.
    — all is broken.

we did what we could that night
and a supernal being is ashamed.

this is the drift of thought
in the vast ocean of gilded gold
frothing at the edge of rotund:
giving back a silenced enigma,
spewing the answer in an exhaust
of white rancid smoke
dharma burns plastered to cigarette.
burning and burning, afloat are the high-pouncing embers looking for fleeting shades and dagger-ambulations
of a shadow's swagger in tectonic soiree.

we did what we could that night.
like a flash of lightning at the back
of hoarded hills,
or say, something brutal and brash with
modern sensibilities we never jell —
we come not with softness or life
peering out of our eyes like little girls
serenaded by mad men in the eve of
forlorn nights. we did what we could
and some god cringes, winces away
like the erratic dance of candleflame.

the leviathan black spreads its parasol
and we are no strangers.
when our veraciousness starts to pierce
the veil, the populace should start
to worry of their trapped conditions.
we came here for something:
be it flesh, be it wisdom, be it plain inebriations — we will never flinch
at the squalor of tomorrow's sobering.
keep in mind, kaibigan.

    it's all levitation and transcendence.

the darkness wept as the car
groans near the end of its immaterial life.
i flick the last cigarette into the grey-faced pavement.
all oceans drowned,
all shadows burgeoned,
all fires emerged plump,
this silent radio rivers
through the wave of this ephemerality,
the onomatopoeia of strangeness,
the   thud
      of the senseless head of metal
     on the body

the   clackety-clack
       of hours thereafter!

ayeayeaye! the streets sing no mild
  appendage. the solstice is lost
    in the length and precision of all things.
bringing ourselves to the brink of absence,
    our pallid selves set ablaze, emblazoning
the quick life of matchflame or rumble of    
    thunder — the steady phoenix of
       that night! this is learning
  to breathe again, o, what currents purloined in vicious swarth as we keep
     this river flowing into our throats,
  jamming our souls to compelling music.

   remember kaibigan,
it's all levitation and transcendence.

there is something
                        that needs to be done,
revere in the plot
                 or a merciless yelp of rebellion;
the night consolidates
          into something no hand could grasp
no eyes could pare
          with stabbing vision, paring the skin
of it, leaving it flayed
              hurtling in the corridor like a child
razed by high-rise of sun
          the bucolic ornaments of downtown
seething with hammered words,
       it starts to rain, diving into the gutter.

there is something that needs to be done.
tonight i look past the haze of the window
and see a vision gyrating, like a hand of
hours full and whirling, preyed on
an iron-wrought webbed without relent
from a tarantula's sepulcher,
a seraph denied of flight.

this is what needs to be done;
all-kissing twilight of paradisiacal twining
a name extolled in all that is quiet,
dismembering parts of you
as i try to once more assemble the night
and give it your flair, your tonal voice,
your riverrun hair, your leap of faith,
again and again the vaudeville of stars
  propagate in the starless morning
necessitating unsung surrender
heeding patterns, fluid lithographs
    drawing a new caricature of pain.

out for no nursery of accolade.
i am trying to sound my way
into a great mishap.
wing me the streets of all and i shall
give back their names to their fathers.

taut as a gun is held,
these words wield their unapologetic
assaults.

the next face i see will be the victim,
and it will be ******.
the discombobulated moon
gloats without a price tonight.
the white hand of it sees a figment of solace, rumples it,
disconcerts a votive clearing
reducing it to a bawl of
a windswept tumble of leaves.

i am now in front of the machine;
its salutary silence, its waiting groans,
its orchestra of trite gears slamming
the ornate of words and cutting
the stem of the flower that once
hurt me with its beauty,

i see your face
in this mound of havoc.
the pain of marvel's presence,
inclemencies of longings

everything takes space and trembles
  in its place.

in the swollen eve of night,
we are light trilling on boughs
and the same bird that arrives
in the morning
is the same bird that abandons us
in the evening,

half-illuminated in flight,
surrounded by the quake of the world,
i take this edge of silence
and its shine-meshed motions
propping up the shadow and defeating
it after with no hesitation, no sallow contrition, no ravening contention;
the night's tenement is the
same clout of daylight's lulled out prisoner: take honestly by saying laughter
and its meager dance frothing in the mouth, shying away into atrial flutters.

feasting in the wind, unfettered, loosely
ambling like waters set free in the vein
of the autumnal world

we've gone where nobody else went,
scared of our freedom, our reluctance to glance back at our petrified images,
willed with a different fire we didn't know our hearths possessed,

on and on, past cathedrals,
     past synagogue bells which word not
  our names, only the mornings we have
   scattered and recollected, bannering
     through our lives, separate, joining all
  that has defied their deaths,
    the unscathed flowers of the garden
and the sheen of whose eyes lost
  their youthful glint,

  on and on,
  never returning, mapping
  a labyrinth of its own.

warm of sun through percolator cloud
      waft of wind stale, flat on surface
  all-fours;
   mezzotint of sky blooms like an aged flower across the skirt of the dawn
     lingering the acrobat hurtling
across hideous moonlight.

   there is an exhausted sundial
in the feeble aurora. one Wednesday
   yet all too many a day, tumble
of the calendar and the pompous talk
    of clammy water over the pockmarked
streets from yesterday's surfeit rain.
    
i enter the hellish car fostering
   the sun's fervor in the subcompact
like a tiny universe, constellations of
    sweat on my forehead, a crumpled
  carton of Marlboro in my pocket
   whiff of dried leaf clinging to finger
     this formidable silence across
      the lounging Mahogany, on the road
treading homeward — caught in
     wave of the next moment,
    underneath the rain of a once tear
shed facing walls slouching towards
  despondent sheets and scrunched body;
claimed whoever sees the
    face of indelible yesterday, tremulous aspen tree dressed with cicatrices of old,
  birds unraveling incarnadine wound from
     upheaval of scabs, disheveled dog
  naked without any reason at all,
         weak in dog-joints and reeking
in dog-flesh carrying on his back the
   supremacy of the sun,
  
i too, here, homebound and downtown
    sings sleepy the reveille,
   bridging the darkness there
    letting in all aches and dangerous
  playthings for strange men, open

   the gates, mother, the pearl
of detergent I smell, in my hands shaped
     cleverly, the rust of gate
and the saw-tooth music grating the
   afternoon frightened and small,
resigned to bed; dark's afterthought.

pious claptrap of hubbub
across the room;
you are some slender bridge
  over my waters
skimpy passage, bend so obscure
there is something
that i always take
away from you
and there is almost always too
something frequently given
back to me like a stare
even so you are eyeless
and still despite having eyes
and tender with movement,
our silence pointing out
the salacious clasp of shadow's muck
on the repugnant wall,

there is so much in common
to a body of sea and a headless sun,
where sometimes when you enter
my mind, i purposefully leap
out of it freely moving, hovering
in austere blankness, almost
cerebrally assassinating imaginations
and their claimed realness,
wishing you were somewhere far
yet within the eye to hold closer.

is the world real?

clambering the wall, this inner turmoil.
a sensuous solitaire
of sorts
my 10th beer
reading 2 poems
in the total, stark blackness:
receiving me
like a fresh fruit's glaze,
the tumultuous hands of Ocampo Street.
half-mad,
half-believing

there are already so many writers.
there are so many Lang Leavs,
a choir of Pablo Nerudas,
a cacophony of Paolo Coelhos,
(never have i met
     Geminos
  or Yusons
      Arcellanas
Joaquins
     de Ungrias
Sawis — always the realer form
    if not imagined only experienced
       through dumb senses still?)

always their inner sense
     of self conjuring
   others giving back the same image
like a prayer's way through lignin cross
     thumbing are the fingers
small in rumination

   so many of them here
and there is only less of me
   less of my voice
   less of my laughter
   less of my caprices
   less of my whims
   (more of my drunkenness
    trying to feign sobriety standing
    at the edge of the fringe,
     more of my poems here
     and there yet nobody
     grasping anything at all)
   i go home
   chasing the pattern of this
     cosmic solitaire.

what it meant, first time, felt,
the night blacker, moon daresay zither
of birds asleep somewhere
stone whetted by air, lingual and sharp
with reticence, that obscured
     thing of beauty at the edge
      of forget— ah, our memory
  that picks the derelict, so much is truer
    in abandon: tear-shed, stifled, watching
  the word dart through the carapace
       pulverizing a sensible universe
tracing the line of shadow
        immaculately awed.
    inward gush of blood as always
    and a smile feigned,
  running across the turgid avenue
     burning bright, the rebel,
             fading out.

this machine; a father on the front porch
of the universe reading existence's papers lunging at the printed word,
meticulously punctuated ebb and flow
of silence across the giddy trees crossed
by sunlight — the universe knew very
little of the incertitude of tongues
until the pain of all exactness worded
the void into a singular nomenclature:
a stifling and precise, simple, quiver-maimed often fighting through panicked streets and gory waysides. a hoard of no less than silence like a stone dropped
into all that is the world: living.

blood for blood.

it is clear, verily, this evening.
   the tabloids blurt the truth
    as the populace clutch
     the paper.

somewhere an explosion
   will be heard.
a child will be beheaded—
the land is tumescent with bones
   and compost rotting away, rotting away.

TV continues its comical static,
playing the music in contrapuntal satire.
  in the morning is a dog, trampling
the streets soldering a scale of metal.
  in the evening is the same dog,
sleepily cycling the humdrum town,
    his face a faint lamp, slowly dying away.

attenuated by either
   love or no love
i drag my sorry shadow across the avenue
   and a deathless cathedral is crowned
    by faithless ****** of crows.
god-driven or godless
  i awaken to the same strife-torn sky.

there is a love so immense
our bones are crushed when
it grasps us, yet there is hate
  and love altogether
intermixing, demanding another hue,
   a troubled one.

they burn the effigies.
they thump the metals
with lignified sticks.
they create a noise enough to
drown the world.
   blood against blood.
more hate to fuel more love.
lesser gods to **** all light.
the dark reigns supreme.

last night, the earth moved
and still,
  blood against blood.
  death peers through
the windowless hour
like an eyeless mannequin.

i look for you in the frantic hour
and found all loveliness gone.
the glint of the edge of what has once
  cut us laughing in the shearing wind
has died out — i dance to a music
  only i hear, bringing back the dead.

meanwhile, i ravish
   the streets mad without chance
and supernal, my bar-drunk soul.
   in the weekend, I will read my poem
to a dead crowd, drink more, jousting with a fleeting shadow, and toss
   the final cigarette into the
      stillness of the void and fade out;

it is blood against blood.
   the knife will slit.
   the gun will ****.
   the fists, clenched to the size
    if two worlds, will claim.

the earth moves, and you are not here.
the leaves abandon the trees.
the park-benches are heavily laden
with the yoke of the Earth.
the mouth of the gutter receives
the belch of a passing automobile.
the graveyards are tender
with bones.
the parking lots are vacuous,
and only the moon fills the world.

  it is blood for blood,
  love without love,
  hate with love.
i will look at the photograph
  of a woman i never touch any longer.
i will once more ask the gods
  what they have done,
but never the blur of answers to myself.

i am drunk without chance,
   and the knife invites.
   the portrayals of blood
     inveigle.
  the whims and caprices
    of the masses have no use
     any more.

it is blood against blood,
   hate against love,
and time
    is running
   out.

how i wish to hurry
  back to arms, hurtling

bearing me into the hollow
of hand full of hours rearing me prolongations of wordlessness —

   bell-jar, your lip,
  smashed into concrete, my lip.

  bleeding, your lip,
quenching the tractable beast, my lip.

  silence annuls, your lip
leaving the noise in me borderless, my lip,

wanting it more than
   how dead trees desire autumn
     light, your lip
  left nocturnal, pulse dare drunkenly away, slovenly from the ground, my lip

  i cannot have it
    anymore.

deep sepulcher and shallow pavement.
     a sharp exchange of glances,
     and then like snow-bed,
     gone at first feverish light — all!

in me, the world is still,
   (you are my
     world)
   growing roots, a throb of petals.
  you bequeath me, a necklace of hands.
   railway of stars, like the white
    of your silence and mine,
   inaudible stone of our
     ever growing distance.

scraps of metal archipelagic
    in Manila and the immaterial
language of billboards:

my mind, the crepuscular garden,
     your memory,
  the overgrowth,
never plucked — stilled, unfazed,
   your slenderness a sign of
     eternity: lignified.

have we not stood
under the grasp
of one trade wind?

i look at you, and you return
a broken image–
my eyes have lost their irises.

i speak to you, and you give back
a mouthful enigma–
my mouth has lost its language.

i gaze at the sky, and it relents
an anguished star: it is you,
in the belly of the dark releasing
the moon and its lunar tail–
my days are fragmented
and all there is,

the night and the fall:
we are,
we were;
away.

cast death to who hears it most reverberating.

he hears it at noon, at sundown, at the
raising light of moon, half-mast set
glaringly through a pond of the word.
he hears it goad through the synagogue,
the pew, the assault of avian,
in the most chilling cold, in the ferocious
water of heat sinking ships to
their metallic deaths.
he heeds it now, fencing thick air
attended by the densest shadow,
he moves with it, its compelling invitation
from darkness to darkness, the faith
of contrition fizzles into the splintered hour,  moves with it, moved by it;
he writes, tottering animal of furious wording; the hill there yonder draped
by heavy cloud, rinsed by rain salting
its *******—

cast death to who feels it most sensuously.

he opens his eyes and darkness is infinite.
he opens the window and no light
lifts, awakens.
these juxtaposition of roads, the feasting
of the lamppost, feeding the wick with
infinitesimal flame, quickening the twinight, the courtyard, the amble of strange populace.
he words the earthenware, the figment of deepest abstract, says her name,
            Martina, he has her gone in
  the ashen hour, the wind that once blew
   spruced stillicide on the roof of this home has dithered away in the inexorable.
he squints to inconsolable brightness
     Martina sheds trembling in her
       eyes ready for ever now,
and then writes as time trickles from
   the ephemeral gush of spigot,
slivering the horizon by the unending stream of the familiar dawn, repeats its hymn, beheading the garden.

   he will not name the end of all,
   he will not count the hours dead
   wearing the hand like a glove,
  a word from stiff dark to flagrant one:
     cast death upon him who knows not.

Eros:
the days leap as they should,
over serrated blades of grass: brightly,
transcendentally.
i open the voluminous page
of the twilight: it is October bruised
with brindled water.
white is the color of your laughter,
nourishing the noise of heart, crumpled
over the virginal sheet.
in the staring mirror dizzy with life,
shining with a sudden image
in sempiternal fume: both of us,
twining, entering each other
even before the world was complete,
heavy with your hair, lithe with
your embrace, eyes gorged with
  naked visions,
hands flayed, full of hours—
i make your ample sea my scarce wave's
anchorage, erasing the twinge
by habit of shores.
i weep: you are filling the world with your own light now drowning the shadows
in the depths of their caves, choking
the silence, wringing out the leafage
of your body's inflorescence.
in vivid decree of your smile, you have
made me the cargo of minutes
rummaging across the dunes of lust:
the tousled sheets,
nearing, coming to me, swarming
soft body: we fell into the hollow of sleep.

Thanatos:
here at the lip of the bed
receiving our smallness, the days—
felled into the night, stilled,
in this finite hour a darker blue
is given; i speak not of love.
how are we alive here?
raining inward, above the brim
of an open window, do you wind-hover?
your voice has escaped the dungeon
of my mouth, and the twining of
our fingers give birth to a forest of specters and a moonless love demanded.
i beat through your harsh curve;
i go tracing your eyebrow
engulfed in the festering fever
of half-light marches and the faint spark
of autumn leaving no tawny scent—
there is only silence peregrinating
in the room before you and after I,
it began to pour in our room,
both of us struck down to mortals
together with a feint recall i cannot parry:
we fell into a bottomless hollow of eyes,
chasing our chained breaths, wordless.

speak, also you—
the night is cut
and the moon is beheaded;

a mound of silence
collapses,
outlasting the lucid hymnal.
the clinking of glasses,
the guffaw of the gull trilling
  on no cypress.

god has meant locks
   and keys.

chiaroscuro is the form
   of oblivion, river is the voice
   of the dead: the throb of lure-call
  poised at the hollow of the hand,
    this evening.

there is a sadness that is drunk
   with something a lasting recall
   wuthers without a name:
the wayward moon hangs,
  the guillotine of stars
     spreads black blood on the tulip,

drinking as if there is no water,
    only that of wine and something
   that has brought us together,
     separated in the evening

our life, pithless against the wall,
     engraved there, unnavigable writ:
      sundered, washed ashore.

wherever you go,
i go — wind tracing the child,
warm, outlined laughter;

the twilight-telling
bird of mid-flutter's lightness
erasing the night

and here is now, you
trilling amongst the ether,
moon shimmering bright.

carve your heart in me, love.
deeper and away, our tender kisses bid the full moon farewell.
the pungent swelter of breath and the verdure of leaving furiously sway in attendance.

i can see you now through the pane of the next minute,
moving near with a moment's fervent undulation.
together with anonymous eyes, the stars watch in glee
unsheathing the night, flayed like a bare bone.

your thigh's silken river, brindled and flowing like words
from any loose tongue fragile enough to break.
my shaking hands tremble with a fresh fruit's succulent emergence,
rid of alarms, wringing the wine out of it for mine to drink.

chanting the mellow, the bed whirls with noise
when all of these volumes slither back to their caves,
i will touch with my territorial hands, your body's ample darkness and choke its depth,
concluding the sepulcher with the lightsome fire of my kiss and its workmanship.

all the things we once left trilling marks on
remain stilled,
watching at the edge of the pantheon, our souls unashamedly admitting that we are uncertain with ourselves.

i can hardly surrender fears to your brazen feelingfulness yet as your fingers try to unclose what the winter of living has hidden in the shroud of cold,
i find in me that we are each to ourselves
like autumn's tawny daughters.

the gentle ray of your wyes searches me
underneath the tumble of virginal sheets.
your ******* tingling fleshly in the sharp
stab of the air's crisp arrival through
the windows.

going down and finding myself in you
(my tongue breaking free from my mouth's dungeon leaving all words
and soldering this avid yearning)
dancing inside you
in sempiternal motion,
i can feel the sweetness
at the verge of breaking
like the length of words reduced
to all-telling moans.

rising and falling in the stillness
is the aftertaste, leaving me bright in
youngness, laughing freely
behind whose flumine hair sleeps
in the eventide far from ending

as my hand still roams like a starved beast
in the jungle of slackening breaths
and gushes of blood,
hunting for something still,
drunk in believing that this moist venture
will lead me to an unfaltering belief
that it was your heart that i have had
in my hands, forever to endure—

these moments
and their stark absences.

somewhere in Antipolo
tonight,

let me tell you a lie:

the swell sheen of the moon
   is borrowed.

this laughter is, too.
the streets with their
useless names,
the stir of the wind through
the dark's basin.

these words
purloined from the gut,
out of the frame,
and onto paper.

while staring at the moon,
i have this melancholy string
of smoke twining in its
  foetal nature.
a threat of storm is coming and soon
together with all the dead specimens,
    i will be buried in the rain,

yet now, locked in the arms of
   stillness
  yellow and blue and red alternations
    from the edge of the radiant void,

    goodbye.

o, anomie, the gnash of train-gear
its locomotive song
a non-metropolitan shadow carrying
the weight of all:

life in grandest scheme—
nothing pressed against
nothing,
like a boulder dragged to the
pinnacle of no preordained vertigo,
to be watched to fall down
in rampant perpetuity,
o, Sisyphus, the world spirals
in an indifferent universe.
must our lives tilt to be nourished
by the water of despair,
   this is our fate yet still
i refuse to believe. there are finite
truths to accomplish:

the lucid invitation of the desert's fever.
the deepening dark, the fugitive pastel-hued sky, the intensity of rain
     in complete darkness.

it is the dawn in the Mediterranean festooned by supple, tawny women,
    as sunlight moves past
    the fused shade,

  my, i have died!
     in this exact moment, or the
ordinary yesterday,
     i know not.

in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.

twilight hewn mauve
from lightsome fire of eve —

of us, knowing our ends,
sighs finished float upstream

of you, knowing your beginnings,
flashes of flyblown leaf dropping
into the paling autumn

of i, wording it fresh out of
unapologetic twinges, dropping signs
on the world, their sorry beckoning

of us knowing
our ends shying away from
a once-told beginning
when silence fell
on our bodies, it is much more
telling than the last word
unheard by the sky.

who were you then
in the passing of that moment?
no shutter to capture nor net
to lattice over,
a thing refusing to stay, willed out
of the chancing upon
to engrave something  to the bone,
profound like the deepest of moons—

it courses on, your elusiveness
only feeding my vision
squinting at the edge of the void,
in this sea of many names without
faces clear and familiar,
striding past each other,
    gone away, your smile
leaving a trace in mine.

father arrives carrying lovelessly
the weight of his own shadow
across the furniture.

throws his socks missing
the mouth of the laundry bin.

exhaust of television static
as his mouth opens agape

receiving the dizzy fizz of
turning channels

like spindrift through the windows
moist, wizened on his resigned couch

he falls asleep like a pin
dropped into the heart of the ocean—

life, what have you done?
mother lacquers her fingernails
as the dog wags his tail furiously

the mirrors ache as dead moments
grow roots in the viscera,

as shadows curb themselves
perfecting their disappearances,

the madhouse women
rehearsing their discomfitures

time swiftly passed
through the very past of things

that we have forgotten,
late to unsay the day struck by wind
and too uneventful to even plead
for undivided rest.

i have no other means to see,
only through the intervening vacuities
of the word — out in the field
there seems to be no end seething
to the very beginning;
these words now
appear limbless yet still make
their way deftly, scrunching
against the wall enough to toss the
body out of sleep.
i have nothing to offer
only my despair
and in this, myself, have seen all
too pristinely without a sensible trace
of fear or a mitigated feeling

i am all words and no conversing,
addled by the thoroughness of it,
ample warmth of a makeshift fire
  thwarting the involuntary shadow there,
  hiding behind the renegade
  of thought or a portentous rearing
    of imagination's hearth:

i am all words, no other than this alone—
having achieved this noble sense of
  swift perpetuity, no other means to
    this end than the poetry of impetus.

somnambular sinister of night
through the flayed clockwork
unhinged from deleterious labor

i cannot begin to fathom
with my hands somewhere
i have not yet gone
but to trespass like light
in ambrosial air
through the eye of the needle—
such impossible task,
a lover caught in the clearing water
seeing the moon
fondling the heavy current of a fall's
equivalent - oh, in love, tonguing
my way fallaciously

unpinning us both.

tantric sensual muck
clothing the stiff body of
this silent pleasure.

in the provincia, scarcely dense
of terrors and their territories,

oh, why the familiar "magtataho"
resonating in the hollow gray-lipped gutter

the batter of eggs and their absolute
nuclei in the dome of the bowl

so trilling of birds christening the town
with their sibilant breeze— myriad gyration of the "banderitas",

aye, my heart gallops in its shearing throb
and no moon shall eclipse underneath
the unheard druid of strife-torn memorabilia;

all green, prancing and zithering the shadow of the bramble and the tawny
body of this brindled Earth, all mine
to take in my mouth
the supplication of silence,

all mine, the fine afternoon!

it is  continuous there—
a bleak sign of sleepless feeling.
sharp as a rose is cut,
or dull as a petal is wrote out
of peril.
red is the eve
of all eves, eyes of the mayday
making the night weep all blueness
and breaking laughter crudely
there— austere shrill of air
and starkly absolute,
continuing its trill,
all the stars and your beautiful face.

be blunter not, be no folly still:
this is our heartland's voice.

we are not this land's tenant,
nor are we the shadows that inhabit
  light — this is out highest meed,
we go on with nobler steads.

  languorous scraps of warfare
  and a ****** of metal heed the
  clarion call of our oneness yet when
   it rains all shall rend in rust
    as how our nation
    furiously drowns yet emerges
     victorious past the renegade of hours!

  in it and from it
shall rise the true meaning
    of our blood.
our large voices mellow down
   in our guts outdoing our smallness - there is a river of
   phantasmagoria yet its
   rustle is same in its breadth in
     our deep land. o, yelp never a lie!
  
consider truthfully brutal
   affording solace:
  it is our form reshaping our body.
  it is our wills carving our flesh.
  it is the dreams that are ensanguined
     in us that forge the arms of
      our fatherland: language!

black crushed pupil tipping at its
  peak with a mild sheen
  discombobulating words
  to their own contained madnesses
  putting an apostrophe
  on everything
  it lays sight on

  a salvage of disrupted vision
  wrings true wind blowing through
  the white steel of dangerous contraption
  in the hand and takes to leaping
  of faith, a restless voyage:

  a volute image lightheaded
  still with the passing to and from—
  nomadic breath still splendidly
  penetrating through all sound
   and silence and words
    like fire wily without intent,
      the moon. only there. without a name.