stretching to length of gallows
under faint light of moon.
the dead buries the living.

a thing is not a thing in itself
as it denotes nothing.
like a peripatetic iamb inscribed

persisting in drivel. flowers her face
this evening. pillars her arms,
  i do not have a wife.

i do not have a love undressed
as i examine a pool of shadow
in the plenary recess of silence.

the dead buries the living
within the blue-headed noon;
fascist birds bellow over haciendas,

tuba from the dustwell, from the orchard
decorated with blood. it rings for me
a guttural voice: hustling down

the avenue of the dead. better the alternative,
the guillotine, the small beginning of rage
through the thickness of air.

a marauder sleuths as the living keep
on keeping on, as the dead resign
 a hindrance under dissonant skies.

she is not with me as all the others are.
they have passed on expired limitations;
a flash of lighting at the back

of startled hills. rivers shake cool waters
 down my sleeve and i sleep -- soon fields
will be nasal with dew and the children

will have their place in heaven. the damp
landscape will adhere to stucco, fashioned
to cerements on corpses reeking, rising

to altitudes where some birds
in spring soar, left thriving in smog
as i bid you good night, farewell.

he is not writing boldly to say
that this is for
someone,
anyone,

only for no one.

all but one have so many names
that intertwine themselves
to their own reclusive triumphs.

this is no inner life
or an outward deaths

this is
something only purgatory
claims in prayer
or in the hell of each living.

go on death and gladly begin!

not for someone
not for anyone
not for everyone

but for no one!

what to make of it that
this togetherness is sterile?

ah, what fortuity!
clearly no sizing down one's self
nor seeing one's self through
eyes of others,

just merely being
and coming to be,
without a trace
of
going.

describe this moment by not only using one
   word – one word used is often times crippling, scarring at that,
when all else revels in the multiplicity; even one strange moment
can be duplicated. the allure different, but still enthralling.
  except you are, when one word was hurled. I have all of this
in varying amplitudes. you will take them all like a gaping hole
   in the mouth of the darkest night and overdose in light, you slung
at such reachable height yet gloating in air like you are your own travesty
       deciphered. face as taunt. hands as feat. limbs
their steady bridges.    the guise of your face, a counterbalance. supple voice,
a trembling scenario of infinitude. i hear this is a way to
       avoid hysteria, to identify

all things as nameless, shapeless if possible. only viciously imagined
    form, contoured into the vacancy denied. this is a way to mitigate
                        demands. to keep a thing from identifying itself
so when  it   comes that   these things start unmooring themselves,
                    they will not administer their potencies. so that when they come back,
  you will keep mum like white of camphor, or the black of a hilt,
        the blue of the sky – something that cannot be perforated.
    so that when they come back, the return will never carry
            their attars, that pivotal minute will never fluctuate into an hour
     of  density, so that their namelessness
                         will be easily dismissed as the expected howl of a dog
   in the middle of the already fractured night, or a cat’s enigmatic drone
                       in its concentration. So that this thing

will remain  to have no name and that when
                        it encounters itself in the presence of itself,
     the absence will be clear and the finding,
                                  a release.

“Today, we make a man out of you.”

  Was what I may have heard in the pitch dark, blindfolded, hearing a mechanical arm swing and in full force, smash my hamstring. I was made that day. And for that, I thank them not. I celebrate myself this way, in the full-turn of a dream.

   Was what I may have felt somewhere in Bocaue when Sonny brought me to a ******* in the middle of the night. They wore the same, seductive dresses in the crimson night. They had their flamboyant maquillages. Bodies like curved spoons. Heads billowing and airless, their hairs frozen, held intact on the skull. Their skin smelt of berries. Sonny took two and I took one for myself. How am I made that night? Never touched, never held. Fair enough, I disappointed her. Her name in the Filipino language is asusena. A man’s a man when you cannot fool him into the trickery of a device that does not appeal to him.

  Was what I told my nephew while whetting a switchblade. The grating sound made sweet music to his ears. He was intent and keen at observation. He just got circumcised because the much older, paunchier kids made fun of his boyhood. You are the wind, Calvin. He smiled as I maneuvered into the blank, corpulent space and swung around, pretending to stab someone in clear air. He lauded me and believed that I was a master at that – which he may not have seen, a master at pretending.

   Was what I may have noticed when you and I were in a cheap room staring at the white ceiling talking about cheap lifestyle. The nomad scent of your hair wafted, almost trying to describe the difference between inhale and exhale. To inhale was to take you in, and to exhale was what you do best. The word “****” lingered by the cold metal of the doorknob and the hinges seem to collapse in their trade of swivel. You were taken into the thrill of the void and I was caving in at the edge of my world. I wanted to kiss your beautiful face
                   but a man knows a device he cannot control.

           and  so
I     heard
      myself
sing      into   the wilding   air,
                        let     myself
                         diminish –

among the tense blackness
of night,
take me as river
takes to silence of a lark
a-trill on quavering beat
and consider
in arm's light mid-step
slowly rising to no more
than a drop of bleak bone,
the evening's behemoth.

a resounding collective
behind a closed door.
a soundless sound.
an organized chaos astounds
this meaninglessness and puts
in it, two hands rubbing each
pressed on impatient bodies
primal without signals
as vibrations prickle through
feeble walls.

i hear some defenseless mess
inwardly break as most of wrung sunsets reek in rain-swathed air.

in here
a cornered hummingbird
of yearning
listening even before i spoke.
drinking in quiet, the water
on the tabletop
that begins to arm itself
with fringes of light
and if not for my mind's frolicsome
fingers send back to glass
for someone else's mouth
to touch...

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.

darkness excites. caliginous walls
    flounder. deepening are the blue grievances.

i should have killed you
  in the stale air of nothing; when it was said
that it takes less courage to love.

a hoarse cry in the obstinate woodland
  insolvent, pressed against the foot of hills.

the quietus in spite of artillery
over and over the deep, droning sound of it.

tirelessly the flowerheads swing forth
newfangled skin and engravings of pious woodwork

tremble in the maladroit wind. the indefatigable purple
   of the very twilight – its slow onset, flays from the air

once it gets into the vertical; I will not speak
  in front of mirrors and curse the fragrance
of camphor and its foretold departure –

everything that is not much of its communion
   living at the small altitude of my feet;

blood rises clean, emerging
  from the earthen womb as I am not hers yet,

I should have assaulted you as a marauder
   arrives in the deep, blackening night

                        of total surrender.

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

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

the frivol of rescue is the promise
     of its danger

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

  you, conversing in that moment of sleep's ravenings

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

1

I  love     the    love    that   loves   to
     insult     the    love   -- so   abject,   giving
berth    to   himself,

  once   i gave    you   modest   figurines
      of    angels    but what    use   are angels
   when wings    are   clipped,  prayers are hindsight
 dashed     with     words     inflamed

    and    once     this   i thought   when drowned
         dies   at    last    but    makes   it as  fish-dream
  sees    the   punctured blue   as the moon  is
      discombobulated    in    the   water  which reminds


        me   of   a  room  so  small, your    face   virginal,
    one   with   white  curtains    flapping   endlessly

2

My      recent    memory    of    drowning:

    A   man    desolate
            trying    some   cockeyed  miracle
  on     beer,  using    a   variety    of    silence
     as    the   world like   a flat   black   disc
           continues   to   show   a  collection
      of      failures

3

  I   am   worried  I might   forget   your  face
  the   next   morning    but   there    is something
      to keep    the    light     from   passing
           beyond   and   not   through but still is
     evident     of   a  day   leaping   off    memory.

4

    My    faintest    memory     of
           drowning:

a     woman     glinting
       under    quotidian     Sun

            quickly      fades,     departs
   from    imagining    this:

      You   know    it    is    bound    to   happen
   and    both    of    you   are     now     drunk
         and   her    face     now    is   the    cold
     brink       of    all   places    so   placeless in   recall


                          and then the world all over, blue,
          deepening, rearing  multitude    currents.

-- a drunken reprise:
   sound of bones crackling
    upon stretch on a limp chair.
   the continual attendance
     of the dark:
      the bottle is streaked with
       pale light.
     unquiet, remorseless,
       thick in secret:
     to drink alone, in unmistakable truth, as i gild
     the immensity of impalpable
   currents moving in swathes
   sudden without weathered image.
     the table's pressing mysteries, the barkeep's maledict eyes. the vagrant wind going in
    and out of panting doors tired
  of the coming and going.
      the night fans, and then flames with auburn fire, and around
   it, miseries fandango through
  the crepitation of drunkenness -

i singe brighter than any
    conflagration, and in the belly
  of the dark sits a god, grieving,
   announcing rain earlier than
     the heaving of trees and
    acrimonies:
  there is ease in between
   burning and ablution
that pass on the soliloquy.
  
       this is the recurrence
  of new familiars, forging without
    hope, rid of blame, rogue
      with only little identity.
    true-telling roars bludgeoned
       into infinitesimal voices,
    to drink alone,
        the wine
            of
              the forgetful.

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—

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.

the pall of a long day
in sheer white burden
lay inexplicably all
deaths unrehearsed

gargantuan immovable and relentless

like the wide wind cutting through
the blink of an eyelid
or a mortal's fragmented word -hands fret for amalgams
of all brokenness cupped to
the size of all that is loved
in hundredweight

casting their heaviness
upon all of us, pinning us down -
mildew to grass as the hours
draw emphases

             (displaced
               stilled, looking
               outside the
                 window.)

the afternoon's gravest inset
into a summation of yellow—

all strangeness purely sing
mellow of birds,
cacophony of trees,
the automaton shadow
fleeting underneath the shade of brows
and foetal natures
candidly bring

a yellow
   in all of the afternoon.

the world underneath
the thatched bowl
of night
is waiting for
vernal beginnings.
sleep is
transit.
dream is the
locomotive.
the wind blows through the window
with a sequence of perceived ends.
my only moon reels through
  everything's impending newness,
  trailing a far-flung equinox.
clock's fulcrum turns a page
  and the now dislimned words tumble, scouring to be seen but
   denied of emphasis.

if only we could singlehandedly
blow each of the candles on the
night's banquet, we wouldn't be this restless in waiting.

i am never travailed
by all afternoons
goading me
to

the door of poetry.

all of them sleeping heavily
shelves, these gods
where i imagine my fates
far-fetched,
perched atop an illusory cypress
like a dove oblivious of home,

Villa
 de   Ungria
        Joaquin
            Gonzales
  ­    Tiempo
  Dalisay
       Abad
          Lumbera
     Gamalinda

  these imperious tyrannies
   sovereign in speech casting
   my storms to drizzle alone,

  where all these words go
  where all these fates wander

  i know not.

     all i know is continuing.

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

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

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

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

               only to find its birth.

outside the mellow moon
swells - honeysuckle circle
of supernal immensity
athwart the window
shoved into my eyes
undisputed, sempiternal lallygag --
   rolls away into
   the tapestry
   as the mildew starts
  levitations, blowing into
     our windows.

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.

toppling the gait
  of trees in the bluster.

we do not like it when it rains.

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

in this knell

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

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

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

  i may become a daub of perfume

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

I.

I trace you against
the skull
with the old photograph of

age 8 and 7

aloft and angling down some stage, or performance

in
this perforated dome I call home

trace you against
the map impaled to the wall
and locate you amongst the
geographies and heed
its brash distance

shake out its potency
like how my grandfather murders
the brief matchlight

I trace the trajectory
will not pivot to return
or scope rescue

none like this force,
the insufficiency of maps,
the harsh terror of adoration when
like a fruit ripened

will fall to the hand waiting
underneath

II.

    Propel me to where it counts

into the masses transit-worn,

shorn out of the flyblown-dry in amazement
or immense performance of breaking

outside the window
when it rains forever

to Icarus in his blunder,

from the dilated pupil of my father while
   watching television

from point-break of time
  and sense when nothing made one kind word
as salvation

out of the tangle of clouds,
    the skytilt angle where heaven might topple
at one point to scatter my reckoning of a god

from your place of interval

III.

space – where you will it,
when the night shining in,

          far are the noctilucent skies
  place me in the soft ease of beds when
   burial is ideal

make me ****** than light at first glance
    or water upon initial drop

and then in space, where you will it,
    promise-tender, drunk in shy altitudes,

this most biddable machine will spread to make way
    for weight giving in

to assume so small a drop of the pin in the ocean
   or to cannonball – fitting  chamber of a gun,
  
swimming in a mess of no restrictions,
  prepared, contained to carve deep

in the night writhing in with him
  with no need of hands to break point.

where does a flower
   keep its flaring memories?

in the petals, loincloths
   light-skinned in
   resplendent ephemera.

or in the thorns,
    prickly music of
    an esoteric cadence
    without falter,
    blood upon blood,
    flesh upon flesh,
    ash upon ash
    tumult of pains and the eclipse
    of a broken archipelago.

in the stem,
    bending to the oppressing wind.
    like your body upon my body
    swaying to the sound that no
    ears hear underneath rivers
    and the sorry tale of
    weightless drowning no eyes
    ever witnessed.

in the hands of the wind
   is where they are kept.
   moonlight shines its
   perihelion mouth across borders
   of untouched reminiscences
   and we have called them names
   and similar aches as rain
   dropped like a net of sadness
   or the debris of a ruin,
   betrayed by the thirst of our
   lips when we longed for the sea
   and failed to heed its
   cerulean calling.

dark as dark — held secret
in TV's hoarse static. lining up and
scuttling across the thoroughfares,
vineyards wrung out of blood,
stomped, crevasse pithless.
willowed and scrunched up, a camouflage
of sorts to masquerade proper terrors.

ripe for Decembertime. magnanimous
assault of buses athwart carts jaded
somewhere between the bend and the fang, shadow upon *** of shadow and
the jiggling of loose change in mired pockets igniting a cadence of dithered flame. later, the lights will cross-fade
into criss-cross. x marks the spot
of burials. content with locks secured
by keys and vice versa. hermetic word
sealed shut in the eyes of the sleepless
children. naiveties suckling our mothers.
songs stifling our fathers. bamboozle
of radio intensifies to raw warfare.

our dangers go to work,
unfurling age. septuagenarian is rare,
and in any common rate, death teems
full in the disappearance of mornings
promising river-flown stories of
how everything was once in our hands.

Tangential   is  this  dispersal
  of  things.

Greased   like    chain
slipping  from   the   curve
of  the neck

it   is
mundane   that hands
  have no   sense   of control
and  abandon
  is kin

as in  a   home
  furniture is   desolation
made absolute   by
  a   visitation.

better   it  is to
know   the finest   day
  is  only  death  in the  afternoon
like   piecemeal metamorphosis.

Nothing  like
this     oblivious  day.

We fumbled within ourselves as how I came into myself purely coincidence
     a repetition of a fleeting truth, or an elusive thing in its flight,

   let music remain in echo
                                         let  real be a reprise of tenderness
    let this patent be owning up to, a conscious enterprise its own   frailty
           do so let this body
            sing:

I am cold-blooded, I am metal, I am completely aware of presence,
     this elliptical voice keeps hunting rendering it false, breakable – this machine

    taking place over  navigable portions   of  myself when I trickle  down,  awaiting
       a prophecy:   we   only have what is now,  aspiring  for  the possible
            a glimpse   of   a thing   hiding, approaching  an  anxious   story

taken  as  hand   me  this  structure,   haul my body  out of,   break into,
       end  it  beautifully.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

pure eyes mapping out
    secret roads

swift onset of kisses
   colossal than
    still-seeking monuments.

supple enjambment of flesh
    fuller than moon.

only her one side showing
   in influx light -
      eyes yearning to discover
    what is behind mystery, as if
   to say what lies in front
    is subduable with openness.

       these thoughts naked,
        as we are both nailed
         to the same tapestry,
        clothed in honeysuckle.

I WILL CAPITALIZE THE
EXCLAMATIONS OF LAMENT
AND KISS YOU WHOLLY

as if nothing happened,
everything rearranged with
careful hands like furniture
in a household

I WILL SURRENDER MY
SUPERLATIVE ARMS
AND THE GUILLOTINE
OF THEIR REITERATIONS

as if everything is ripened,
everything repeats with analogue
flame and reappears unsullied
as a chastised vestige

I WILL TAKE THE SUN AND
EAT IT, SWALLOWING THE
DAYS AND THEIR APT DELINEATIONS

and whisper to your ear,
the night where everything
emerges fresh and anew, glazed
like budding of fruits hiding
behind brambly walls of leaves,
as speakeasy as a salutation,
as formulaic as a synthesis
of light,
as unprecedented as a salvage
of lightning at the back
of silver hills,

take you in my loving arms
and tell you
everything i feel.

these blatant exhibitions
of frailty

man is need
man is want
man is punctuation
man is ellipsis
man was
and still is

an aged man leaning towards
the ATM, eyes squinting,
body in slackened cursive
drawn by little light,
commandeered by mechanized voice

enter
the
amount

the price
of
existence
wanes
slurs
laughs at us

what does life mint
in the blank paper?

man is want
man is need
man is slave
man is punctuated
survived by no ellipses,

only by a continual drudge
of need
want
fools
all.

the wind howls
like a hound
  (sans the totality
    of sound, as the truck
     slurs its final groan)

bespangled crown of the NLEX
festooned by pearled light
all across its furtive stretch

the heaven in my darkness
says Now as silence is drunk
in funeral hilarity. the truancy
of populace says Who as the
morning beckons with its blue entry becoming almost whole (and
ethereally exponential)

Pildira sings like a bird
  and self becomes so
quietly rational;
like my heart, (the metronome,
    settable configuration of
labile fortuities) gropes
   a perspicuous vision and plants
it to mine chest.

Pildira flutters like an
   old butterfly in this new morning and i, with the net of
   my hands cold with song, will be
songless in the moon without stars, or stars without moon.

Bellisima! ****
descending on the table, a crash,
a severance, a banquet.
   the linen is white
    aflame,
   a pond of light underneath
    sorry elbows and frantic
    fingers (thump!
               thump!
                thump!)
   a dry *** of inquiries
engraved in heady crepusculario.
   twilight's fingers chiming
     my heart - lute, mine strings
  outstretched to breaking (a tremendous pang!)
   but the sound it makes
    is a coveted amaranth.
dark outwrestling
     dark.
         in front stretches a
     white river of wine - we will not last until light seeks its
      calm home
       but we will stay.
    we will remain tasting the brine of what immense sea,
    licking the salt off of the
sweetness,
    gnawing, falling off the
   curbed bone,
   this p
          o
            e
              m ...

to Martina - with love.
your tiny feet hang over
the modest tapestry.
you assault the morning -
   my own, rueful morning
with the harangue of your
     viridian kisses.
in stolid nights like this, Martina, the bowl of the sky
bawls in silent ruin.
    distant roars of flightless
voices fracture the night
    your dandelion smile gone
from your primrose mouth - Martina,
   full moon, incendiary star,
in a slew of love and vertiginous
    height you danced sprightlier
  than any hapless dream soldiering on in the tight solder of the threadbare midnight. Martina - you had us trembling before, and now again, as you dash with your superlative shade that fleets,
      i wake in ruinous mornings.

deep within
  this walled, scrunched heart
  a flower (a fool)
  whose mouth is open waiting for   the rain of words - we all are.
stretching in the dark as want outwrestles need in a melee
  of hands, of populace bumping
  into each other in an enclosed
  cage like two birds wary of each other's movements,

the threat of its gate, opening, freeing one, the other, staying,
  is the lilt of a song and the wilt of its sound dwindling as the urgent questions gnaw the bone of
silence trying to wring out light in the dark's tumultuous passing
  waters turning luminosities
  into liquid under my feet.

and now, the brew of unspoken
   petrichor stirs in the ground
and the clouds gossamer than ever,
i close my parasol with my head
    into the sky, waiting endlessly
for rain to quench the ivies of
   love's battlements!

There is so much     space demands
and it isn't just     minding it.

Feel        space
like how you feel a hand glide
over your breast and      ****
   your intricacies with surgery-precision.

There isn't much     space when
there are two people in the room.

Heed      space
and soak your body into various calls
like       coming
             into world with fullness,
you     arrive and take
     space,        therefore, you are.
lewd   fat air circumventing past
  open windows announcing more

       s p a c e

on the fryer or inside the common
heliotrope of dawn lies     space
and its absurd eyelids submerge the
  soul into inconsolable mouths
    with the droll of a wilting word,

  there is much ado said over
certain vacuities    and its sole kinship
  is always its emphasis.
  it takes being alone    to sing beautifully
       yet a marginal dance of    swan
meandering    in    space takes    two
     (as mortise
                       and tenon)
  each without,      senselessly moving.

in the stern per-second
  a full bloom
   ushers

neither fire
    nor blood

but two
    sizable lips
   purely almost kisses, dank like
    a rose in the rain, keeping
their moony arc hidden in
   the daze of a color's prime

to make yours naked
    with a smile by a hurled
  word from mine to yours,
   what beauty of it?

there are many others--
  flaxen hair
  dew of earlobes
  riverbed eyes
  sinuous fingers
  tiny feet

  take all of them
   but never
  your smile.

daylight frets,
trembles, falls
in a vertical climb
pressed against
pried open lilies.

the svelte upholstery
of dark vanishes

as i swim like agitated fish
through liquid measures
of minced light
through the small hands
of the world
like rain through the lips
of serrated grass.

daylight morphs
a half-concealed stone
into eyes sizably owned by
the spread of mildew
transmogrifying its secret
into a single beat
of flame.

digress from this river that flows into a straight line. the following here
   will be that there is another body waiting at the brink of
      another figure lacking in speech: brook as excursion.

this plaintive leitmotif this afternoon. everything smells
        of old furniture. something this is trying
to preserve wrung out of suspicion, shorn out of air
        and unrest. when I begin saying it, and when I become
what I want to become, I will fold you in a manner

of houses. tell me of the footfall before I plunge.
   outside my home you will be waiting

for a question because you liked the idea that
       askance is the heart of all assertions.
and I will slowly begin to realize that imagination
   as machine, has not failed me.

when moved by the sight of you,
   gradually dissipate.

when halted by the inching step of
   your basis,
take a moment as evidence

and use as ground for furtive contest.

when there is evitable cipher of silence,
     I will phrase gestures into something like a metaphor
would induce

    when there is meaning, there is the moving away
and coming unabashed, pendulum your way into two walls
   as weathered as this house. Your face, a thousand adorations.
                  your heart a truism in the heat
   of naivety in place of a wild embrace.
              your hands this evening, tremulous, nervously seeking
to be one with my measurement: this thing that has nothing to do with me,
      except we have such fondness over allowing sorry states.
that we have use for what we have no use for. This thing,
   a fragment so foreign to me,
                            like hearing my name disintegrate, as if a thing
     of obsolescence, as everything is.

I jump out of the windows of my sanity
  just to go back into the utter shamefulness of the page.
- self to self, Feb. 2, 2012 (drunk and shattered)


i have gone back to
where i do not know,
but i know my place
in this finite moment

there is an echo exhuming
the silence,
minting something in the soul,
flowering first in the ear,
and into the overgrowth
felt by the shaking hand — this andante
    of a following.

i come not with light,
only a twist of a shadow.
the night is absolute with
garbled song
and i struggle to understand
as all other slept on such lissomeness
of beds that i do not know of,

i know not where i am.
my body has already gone rogue
with its proprioceptions yet,
i doubt not my place
in this moment — this poem.

god's plaything -
what is the colour of rain
that paints this city
with the havoc that once
trouble wreaked over
our sorriness?

god's no god
until he is god
in someone's throne
and i may be a fool.
he is a cool cat rolling
thunderously over the silence
of our homes or
perhaps a soldier
marching his way
homeward amid
the tatterdemalion
of days.

god's temple
is the body and a body's
oblivious of this -
    god knows no "sigue sigue"
              nor "sputnik"
       nor piercing the helm
       cerebrally

god's no fool to goad any gambit
or watch the wane of old solace.
or is it that i am
a leitmotif and my peccadilloes
are a path's adagio towards contrite?

god voyeurs over the
windowless hours
of my sanity's eclipse
and soon, when all of my prayers
turn to ash and
no sound of me is heard,
in the evening of this tide
is deliverance
and i have slept.

this, only a feeling,
or time demanding to be owned,
desiring occupation
for its relevance is something
that space tenders us.

amongst the peerless lampposts
stabbing the silence with
daggers of light bent to
infinite smallness, so breakable
and so falsely fabulated, is this
scene demanding a name:
flooded are the elliptical interstices my heart's waysides, close to bursting
with waters rendering me repetitions of ablutions, pain is as thorough as a mother meticulously
thwarting dust off of sacred things.

these abated breaths rehearse
their oblivions.
these hands pardon their
callouses for holding too tightly,
the craggy exterior of something
that quavers to be freed.
and the soul turns to leave,
crossing a fine line of distance,
midway pivots to squint at a still vibrant recollection then
pretends as if
nothing has happened.

done over this afternoon I only have one image
and about you were many other surly things

all wrapped in the sudden heat of happening
through the clear eye of a diaphanous world.

inmost spring of an unreachable bud,
a raw material for hurt kept in the after-hour

of a dwindled morning charged to dark
moving with precise instep

rummaging for completion
underneath an untamed sky

left for claim but not entirely as to be free,
no remnant of the hour’s expensive thrill

where I do not find you in me,
as I am still down on your able ghost

pinning it down to where it will never
meet its breakable place:

a wondrous dawn, or the fever of Maytime afternoon,
  in your most excellent clothes

or else it was simply desire

this is now your

        a
         r
          m

      and all the fingers now mashed for
   love is an ellipsis
    
    and these are now her
       l o i n s
        and there
        a flower untouched
         by the somersault
          of summer
           and *** only a folly
            of fools
             there is only this.
               poetry of the senses
                that when we both
                 die, i have gone,
                  and she is still
                   alive.

a memory is brutal.
a chronic paring,
with knife-precision.

        •

a memory is fatal
only when it rains—
all the rooms are gray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!