Here is where the oncoming figure knows you.
   We have no realization of time. Of how long
   it will take for us to both decompose. This is
   already a peccadillo. Mirrors brand conclusions.
   The body lets go of its weight like anchorage.
   How I measure warmth is a device that does not
   concern you. Light inches and asks me how soon.
   Already a blunder, an inner life revealed –

Between this carefully studied distance where sometimes
   lines are crossed, a remorse is hoarded, exclusive
   enigmas of hope. Contort this body if you will.
   Between the barely-living and the already gone
   is where I windhover. Sealed shut in hermetic space.
   My desperation becomes a syntax of waiting

and there will be all beautiful horses, and faces in transit
   everytime you pass is an announcement to where
  I cast myself into a miscalculated sonority,
  hauled out of, loosely identified.

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.

the fabric is still tumescent
with forceful movements. the slight creak of music from a slighter nudge and one can feel the swollen pang of the woodworks. the china in the cupboard drunk in tectonic skirmish. the subtle audiences from the edge of the bend are still in awe from the attentive loosening of flesh and bone and secrets. the moon is brought closer to the veranda where one has peered out of with a cigarette in hand. the clothes pinned to pegs are still dwindling in the heavy air of now nothing but plainly exchanging sights and smiles hanging, breaking to dominant laughter. one had lost count of the stars lost in a nebulous braid of milky hair. a qualitative study of light is reduced to just a mere, struggling study of how things come and go, out of the windowpane and into someone else's doorstep, where sighs amble to reach the calm of beds and the craze of trances. words like these
    are not enough
        still to push you out of bed
            and make breakfast—

Like the audible wane of a train
  outside the dank night,
  or the faces in each carriage
  blurred by the most drenching rain
 the next clear face in the dimming
  fluorescent spillage is the face
  of another. Much has been ruined now.
  What is difficult to understand in farewell?
   The stillness constitutes what I know,
   embellishing the vastness around me.
   Of which spaces here you used to occupy,
   all the others that you have left,
   leading to a possible finding, or an easy trace
   of arbitrary -- it is a blunder to seek terminal finish
   making you less than what was preserved,
   perhaps more than what meets my eye
   in sleep and waking. A dream of some sort.
   The voice breaking when heard, resonates
   with revisions of what transpired, as if to
   always flatten a truth -- some voices do this.

days when all you had to do was
arrange the furniture and watch the passing
of shadows in mellifluous slowness – ready to catch
you in heft of mesh.

nothing keeps her in place.
that is what you said. you said you were
always moving
from the north up to the south,
and at times the north of no south
that refuses to be held close into straight paths.

you gave it no unction – this abstraction.
christened with the water from
your measures, slipping out of grips,
from where you are and where I found you in,
retained in some sense of placeness,
almost cuts with the sharp dagger
of wind in mornings when you peer
into the putrid landscape of Manila asphyxiated
by the rise of smog.

her sorrows remain untouched and intact,
given urgency by the emptiness of her
hand. he had to be elsewhere and you
were in the midst of nowhere but the hollow
oblivion of your home, and I took it, I took it
and I fragmented it to gather from it,
a sacrament or say, the looming of dangers for
  mine to situate in defeat,
and I placed you somewhere like a new truth
that you’ve grown fond of,

like the only voice you hear in the night
is yours, and gathering that indistinct sound
from the stray of light was the
lover having left an impending need.
my father proposed to watch a film
with my mother and I see potential
in something that had gone away even before
  the empty din of the sea played its exhausted
machinery, telling me something known and familiar,
which I refuse to utter because it would double
its terror.

we ought to meet somewhere, you said,
a bridge, a tangent, a straight path
or a perilous curvature. you will never break
as the sparrows close in,
as the disparage quavers,
as an old man stops his engine somewhere
under a bridge beneath rondures.

we ought to meet somewhere,
you said. a word tamped into shape,
lugged into narratives,
so easy
breakable
and false.

he is inside out. no time to catch the thrill
   of a ripe morning
               knifes his way through a thick airport mass
   and captures jet-fuel perfume,
      collar squalid as brawling for yesterday,
      in front of the masses is waltz, music is    threadbare, as if left with no choice,
      extricating the sound and all that will remain
      is silence. no more will move the
           body of you, take this river.

  how do i name this assault?
       by remembering.
  how do i exact my revenge?
      by renaming your terror with something
      i have outgrown. say, a roach on the wall,
    or an intense wind turning trees shearing
       the lull.

  you should have disappeared yesterday,
   yet now back with forms these pleasures
    seize. if i were given a reason to abandon
           everything,
    there will be no assault. there will be no revenge.
        only a separate day celebrated by the vital pulse
    of a moist hour, this day, when everything
       should have fallen in place
         but refused to, rivals through settings,
     and slowly begins a rupture.
 
     you are this assault. sounds draw
     naked in the sequestered silence.
     a pigeon darts. the short bus whirs mechanical
      exhaust. hinges twinge like guillotine.
          it is time to go. it is Saturday.

Proof of the past:
    In November, you were born. Nothing here but stark cold,
   until your warmth. Your presence extolled.
        The mirrors remember your vestige. This is the silence
       that extracts itself then exacts itself in this frame. Sometimes letters

accumulate but remain unfinished. In November, it is all clear.
     I have no use for sordid entrails.

      It is the stone’s duty to be evidence
of situation. Its flight, the sum of all its lost parts,
    say when you speculate over the escritoire over an unfinished meal,

burn altogether and turn to scrap everything even the soft presses on the creaking
  metal of the chair where we almost made love but didn’t because it is a surprise
   that in rawness we are ripe more than ever, making our

     life total, if not equal to an immense fault. You are sometimes

the cold metal chair I conjure.   Sometimes just bleakness.   This uniformity

    seeks riddance.

   Proof of the past as surety to claim:
       In November, this year, they have changed the roads. Detours constructed
to arrive at a certain destination. Faces blur past the old university.
Trees    are  effigies.      Leaves wriggle like   the  curtains of  room  201,  2nd floor,

      I do not know what specimen I have in my hands. Bare in lack of worship.
  Grandeur      is  here
         when   seasons   are predictable.    This is the home and that is where you are that translates
      it     so. A wanted want – a dispossession.

Proof of the future:
                        You know nothing about this place.

white: whips like its many
      a name,
         divines in it still,
  my eyes pure engulfed in
      the silence;

       white: which sound
     spills the sud of women
      sitting by the river
     looming clean sheets purulent
       with the Earth's gruel;

   white:
   oh, by the
      window,
   heart's ****** tillage or
      a word unspoken sinking
  in postponement, a moth's
    glide in perpetual motion

    white, many days,
      fewer nights,
         earth sways to crystalline
a tear to light a face
      of beauty once
      tarnished black with
          the blood of roses.

Flower – crouched, crowned in its color tender, entombed, sees the moon.
     she has ten thousand things in her mind but only one heart
     for the life of her. She looks away from light
     through her spectacles yet only has her eyes on one figure, alone.
     somewhere in the mountain, drunk with the clash of land.
     she has her quicksilver of mind. Intoxicates when willed, talks,
    expires heaven a manifold. Supernal silence when nothing
    excites – she has mouths for kissing a hundred things but only
     the kink of fire for one. A wrestled shadow taking form of
     towers bigger than cities. She has two feet for the world, yet only
    one destination – to herself, and herself alone.
    She is much of herself the rest of the world shorn out of wide-eyed
    ruin – say, small bird, wishing her luck through wet leaves
    shake cataclysms down our sleeves – she does not know how to swim,
    yet has the blue of sea; anchored in the weight of unborn laments.
   No more moves the sight of her, but herself in the mirror.
    Stripped of sense and naked in a fine-tuned near-death thrill
    of hunkered ravening, we are left to our own devices, mapping out
    labyrinths. She has heard so many farewells, shook her not,
                steered her clear into the immensity of a wider room,
     her hands steely, pried open and precisely the span of bent tapestry,
                 alive in the receiving dark now, she has her eyes the size
      of Moons, shining on one alone, that is not I – furtively the distance
    calms and there is truth rising from the depths of deceit.
             The palpable freedom makes the Earth wider and she has only
    the world in her hands, trying senselessly not to shatter it.

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.

Always when moments slip into
   silence, I dream only truly of your easy
   language with urgent intimations.

I have always listened to the deep
drone of the animal struggling to be
freed inside of you – housing a pain it
does not fully understand, welcoming strange
darkness encircling us like fugitives.

you remind me of my voice so small,
so fragile, so mute in the mutiny of your song,
  keen with listening as in ear to the fullness of the world,
  a form of trying analysis

when it was only yourself spoken with recall
of days when you were young, ablaze, engraved into the wind,
myself looking back, still finally seeing you

  in the continual of running, singing songs,
  trembling in the wake of the blue hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

angels brought home
wired to some memory.
the sea tethers itself
to the wakefulness of beds
as the blue head of
melancholia peers through
derelict foam.
i will bathe myself
frayed into
these waters
and emerge
the victor -
as many a name lay defeated,
stony and silent, pale and white
with forget.
what i came for here
  has already elapsed
  as sleep only is the many pages
  of slumber underneath a somnolent
  done of some peril. untouched
  as a sterile book.

no man figures saints.

   i lift my glass and drank
   as the erected monuments of
   some fallible memory pendulum
   and then topple like oblivion
   in a glass case.

   we defer significantly waning
   luxuries of time-keeping
   as we both pinnacle through
   the mountains and shout
   names unwilling to have faces,
   eyes, liaisons without warning
   and then FALL. CRASH. Break.
   now, habitual clock-arm meshwork
   slurs a tell-tale forgetfulness.
   i am now accompanied by the
   music and we dance in separate
   stages - a standstill in
   imperfectly drawn sidereal
   circles.

my bones break from the sheer weight
    of the imagined moment where
  
  you trill on my bough
  like a wan heron
  or the immense warble
  of a bird

   or say,

where the eternal breast of
  the shore is touched a hundredfold
  by the wave's quivering hands,
  where the salt is poised in the bendable
  light swaying in the water against
    the high noon.

what moves the sea
  is what moves the fruition of
   my being to where you are,
near or away, still like a photograph
    close to my chest, nursing your
   warmth in me, like a fire to
    a hearth but you are not with me.

through the lips of
the horizon
a purple parasol
of attenuated *****
  spread, flagrant is the crepuscule.

these are the exiled
  in the heliotrope world:

trees saluting the length
  of sprinting air to calm
  these undulations -
  painted are the leaves
  with blame.

lips sinking to find answers
hidden underneath the
derelict of sweat, noisome moan
after quieted breathing,
heavy with the undeniable boulder
  of craving's weight -
  tongue naked, freeing itself
  from the oubliette of flesh,
  finding what is still to be
   tasted in a covetous harvest,

it is indeed strange to be here,
  in this absolute hour
  of absent resoluteness.
to deny want and embrace fullness,
my eyes ***** these visions
   and then dive through steepness.
  no words have to be said,
  only their significations
   held secretively as roots
  are unseen flourishing in their
    obligations to this flower,
    your flower

  underneath the twilight
   of bodies crossing each other
  out, love's derivatives
    ensue.

my love,
  when the winds of
    change ravage
the boughs of this union


i will cling onto you
as though startled
   and frightened,
like ivies weary of their
    vertical
          climb
  
   like these passerine fingers
   moving closer to the
     leaflets of your soul,
    perching in warmth,
       my little summer,
   my winding aubade welcomed
with  bird-song!

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.

how you fade out in me:

to the last strand of intruder hair
on the cold tiled floor
no lift of gleam extols
yesterday's rumpled ticket
to a cinema
the blast of light on your
beautiful face
your keen eye on the smolder
of the word
up until the final
worn-out, knotted breath
and the tear-stain when it
started to rain and our parasols
were rid of their jejune roles
and i leaving a space
after the air prevaricates
the braid of trees in summer
still hoping
still hoping
for
you

heady fragrance of drizzle
returns lonely through
the horizon's limpid perfidy -
we have been deceived
by the many days that guillotine.

the wind's lasso choking
perennial trees
big-eyes, love-crumbs,
lion-telling eyes roar
   love altogether
a dissonant song of hurtling;

  kisses are aerials in the
      starry void
  and in your eyes are lengthening
   spiral staircases where my
  glance has grown feet traipsing
deeper into some mystic invitation, a night-displacing fire
    in the harlequinade.

the croon of some
      iron silence cloaked
   in the viridian garment of trees, the inexhaustible flambeau
    of a flower's gamble,
or red Christ burning in the pellucid waterfall.

   out there, love, amid fragments,
is a church
with slender truth-bells
     and my, take my hand and let us dash through the dark!

carve you, me,
made godly a being from
kink of Earth when all
hands and the leprous
sneer of folding pavement sway
swing a swift embrace,
bringing a face
when you read me blind,
crooning a tune
when you reverberate me deaf,
touching me warm
when you swarm me coldly,
fevering me a saltine sweat
when you chase around
a fleeting image,
preening through the impedance
or was it a dance
when you move me, limbless—
leitmotif lures
    to nets of waiting
when you break the hue
   of an adjusted format
telling no lost piece; oh, you,
i, our strangeness, our fondled ways,
  our being taken away to care
for only rogue night. our
   having chanced upon each other
in between mellifluous slowness
   of paces and our frequent sojourns,
  looking for something
     unfamiliar.

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.

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

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

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

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.

all quiet this afternoon, the sky
pulses in its unprepossessing limit

surveyed the intersections with the wane
of tired eyes. in this side of town, yours

the gray-faced pavement, mine the stones left
unturned, pillaged by the children of suspicion,

thrown and must have hurt something,
a bird hurtling in its pace, or a mangled body of a cloud,

wingstalked, stifled to the brim of impinged labor,
  depth of sleep is measured by the weight of dream.

all quiet this afternoon, the naked body
of the sky is blue, spun around in penetrating tone.

quick is the flat motion of the quaintest of feet,
this afternoon in Poblacion, heavily veiled and demurred

the vertical climb of morning past the cranes, the monoliths
screaming broken litanies – strange skies are insipid now

thick with the froth and rekindled petrichor,
you told me you had a view of every inch of world

from the 31st floor and now I circled to cut corners
and fold my love for cold fronts, monsoons, storms.

Nothing like this assault.

In here you were gradually
introduced. The keen sense
for identity realized,

the distance that was a sullen
word for madness, a tender
perimeter established.

The calm wind as not-so-distant.
You in your plain clothes this afternoon,
lost in a commute of phases.

This weather schemes to be
your leitmotif.  This is of no
identical ownership but breakage.

In here you were met with constant
delimitation, yet always you are
as you always were, perhaps,

quite unsure of the next face
dislimned past the delicatessen.
The barkeep yesterday wiped the glass

clean as I watched from the edge
of poor furnitures. You, sudden,

of no warning, no clear word
for objects, has objections for marvels
made clear still opaque in the eye of you.

That when you were brought
into the world, I had you coming as
soft blow in the wilderness

hardly tractable, all by yourself
as I witnessed everything, past dead
underfoot, being all necessary

to yourself,  as you always were
in various settings and adjustments.
You were sure of the unsure and I

am in the middle of things
feeling the winding of it all, the breaking,
and the passing.

Nothing like this assault.

scent of the newly-bathed
hot off the ironing board clothes, pulse of radio

  your smooth, round
  perfume   wafts

into my  distant home,
  making your absence

total    
                         keening
  through   the   anger   of   the feeble wall
  in front of   me

your    smell
   I     love, my love when it is time
I will    be   less than
    soul  when it   meets   body’s  persistent
     pleadings,      

lay  down    eloquently   bold
          for   mine   to    stray   thinking,
    here     engraved   to  bone
like   pompous   woodwork

again    and    again
   your   scent
making

your
   absence
total.

i have not seen it in the
surge of the next moment. it arrived like a letter from complete anonymity to the familiar gape in the doorstep.

i wish sometimes, now that i am
full with age yet none the wiser,
i were a bottle of wine sitting in hermetic space, where no breaths could go in and out of, as disconsolate light trudges the finite spaces its fingers like a taut grip to a gun, able to drain completely of its poisons.

i have you in my blood
and sometimes its immortality
coils into morbid contortions.
a rally of aches, scraping the sinews well and accurate, paring them of their pretensions, this kinship.

i have you in my mind
and sometimes when the impetus
galvanizes me into stolid incitations, my voice lifts and then vanishes into its shy desolations and without sound,
i pass through the deluge of
all this - of i being you,
and you, being me.

i have you sometimes in my eyes,
when these two brown planets
  wax in their postulations,
nebulae of emotions explode
into tiny aggregations and now,
  i am a lone star in its celestial ambulation through protruding shards of our battlements.

i have you in this warm fount
  and sometimes, like a dog
choosing its memory, i sometimes
wish to forget my station and elude its equanimities and only have in my dull mind, where all
  the bones are kept and
  guard them in the midnight where they shape themselves into
   massive morphemes digging deeper to soft skin and mangled, looking
down on me like a prey caught in a hawk's periphery and lunged at,
  where all aches are awakened
with recalcitrance, casting
  me away from my own tenancies.

i have not seen this in the
coming of the next moment -
we were firstly, laughing at
the smallness of things, sharing
light and other affectations,
until we came in the way
of our trains and closed their
  stations, looking for
a place to go now, anywhere

   but home.

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

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

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

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

timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.

we circumambulated the cathedral
  and whose face of gray for I to wear
  is insisting that I have been dead for
  a long time as obvious as a bell curve?
whose cross is this that I am carrying
  all across the firmament repeating
  in a yelp of command: salvation?
whose nails if not for knives
do I smother at dawn? stone’s hindsight
and a fool for the world deep in the night,
  beguiled – waters decide my home
is permeable. I must have drowned in sound
a dwarfed image when I shouted

your name in all of my silence.

The poem was something in me a land
   beginning its history and I dug.
        a wind carrying a dove, en route
     a reachable reality stretching, floating towards

        a  tree whose body is its own frightened muting,
   a shoreline lapped by repetitive waves
     that is the poem, trying to erase what has been
   long  engraved in the sand, sand in between its
  very small distance housing  the salt of this wound,
      an addressable stream -- a signature of the
   not-so-distant past, which aches I trust to live.

A cresting wave then descends
and somewhere, distant bells toll.

It is the twilight of the palabra.
Soon word falls at last
when ripened.

Gild this image and come back
sullied. We have no use for memory.
Your presence less than total.

The mutiny of this calling is the
silent margin dividing the dark – how to awaken
the sleeping when dreams sit still as cold chair
punishes the floorboard?

This is how its ripeness was felt.
Surmounting what remains to be, a fixation
of a parched region. Grazed by the crosswinds
in front of the decrepit hut staring with some
kind of hunger for a visitor.

Failure masqueraded as conquest,
gravity of no gravity is but levitation – or the cost of
listening. No sound will be absolved.

In a short instance when to lean into everything,
the round vicinity of the ear and a plummet of hush
reaping underneath a swollen moon,

It was how it was felt, and began
a refusal worth mentioning. What’s seen by the eye
is nothing the hand cannot reach, say the horde of cirrus.
The intolerable sky tender with silence, afterwards we partake
    that one word still nameless.

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

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

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

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

I once bore witness to no soggy corner, a seedy cinema, or a vile discotheque
  when out in the open, the somnolent air on face smashing the distance
  often times misappropriated as meaning, or desire – that we hold no choice
  to circumstance and acquiesce: I have become consequently obsequious
as in April’s proper warmth swallows the coldness of metal and mostly words;

it was when nights are spent without maps – roads and their meanings,
    separated by lines – washed with the squalid metropolitan living,
down from the urban thresh to the empyrean glower of a slow moon beginning
  to ignite in someone else’s but mine only and nobody else

aches and persistent meanings, a hand reopening
   a long-forgotten dusk –  painted anew with a chance never off-tangent
   but always at the cynosure of things

   this glass with rondure of your face, the valve of shower
   your hands or simply the droning sound of driving homeward
  
      that I cannot escape, a voice leaning in, saying something
    in the calm wind.

every dog has his day.
things are good
as i am not dead yet
as the people are homebound.
the same familiar palms wave
the same dogs stray
the same birds dart in the sky
there is not much left to look at.
give me a few more years and i can
unlearn this gambit,
give me a few more years and i can
learn it again

i have a voice in my head
and they put shoulders in there
two eyes, two crazed hands
pale fingers, and in some evenings
a palpable laugh. so real i can
touch you.

and you say a manifold of things,
and apart from all of them,
one that will never leave me
even with absent eyes:
   something in me laughed
   in your arms
   and in your arms we have laughed
   each other away.

that laughter soft
that laughter raw
that laughter warm
  like light
  like life
  or a hand on my chest
  with blood running in veins
  together with the days
  across hills like wild horses
  and then
  gone -

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.

what would take you away from place – a slipshod
   route of caprice, or was it, this silence in front
   of a pool, ripple after ripple, still the silence
   I have learned to love?

to have faced north and swallowed the Sun
  meant the desire for it.

spanning the freefall from a tall drop,
threadbare net of hands ready for the catch – unlearning
    whom to fall on, what else is there to be part of but lacking?

between now, this oceanic expanse, is a need
  for letting loose, a part of once only and never whole,
  unlearning what must not be held now, your eyes they

do not see, but entirely space  to clear everything
  and put my heart in.

this is when
we keep on keeping on

our fingers laced and kinked
to some incited cold

gives us no unction – i leave
you with irreparable harm

trudges across flame, guesses
the assailant of aches.

when these crosses straighten
within the whelm of your mouth

i will curl them again in sweet,
successive manners of graceless joust

and then when you come before i,
or is it i before you — whichever,

this music is never a notice of
ease — only rescue without warning

or attendance, seeping underneath
pallid floor work, lips puckered

pursed to attenuated form of bow
and mine eyes arrow through

your triple deeds arraying
and i can never ignore how immense

the moon is in the river of the same vein
riverrun, away, wayward—

lisps of white and red
and soon obliterated when both our

avenues close and we walk
home, hands separately yearning.

(i, continually,
      in the terseness of
         things

     seek gentle reminders which
        when it comes,
      straightforward as a gull,
        that i cannot
     utter completely,
       speak into beating,
      about love then i shall
         write about it)

say, i shall plant a kiss
   in the landscape of your cheek
    and gravitate like rain towards
       your soul as we are higher
     than any hope that in the
      reticence of our mouths,
      our eyes would gain courage
        and converse a secret
     nobody knows.

or carve the words onto your bones as they tremble backward when we alone don moonlight and
    dance sprightlier than
   parting and when it
    comes that there is no music,
      your breath is the sound
    where my movement is born!
   our lips shall grow wings
    and flutter into the
      starless evening and perch
     at the boughs
        of love aquiver.

  the silence promises all of this:
     let us go!

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

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

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

light breakdances
   seascape as wave labour
     on no man's end.

there is defeat in common grasp.
  what shall we do to keep our
  hearts from breaking?

  to make tractable the creature
  or to cast tacit upon stone
   a noisome mutiny of cicada.

this is where no words shatter.
this is where no fool's beginning
is the end of men in sheer wonder.
this is where we stop our
hearts and deny them of their
    pains:
when the moon plunges deep
  and breaks into a song of star,
through trail of air,
    the morning - all friction
      yet no sound, shouts
heavy without artillery: frangere.

here is the cold
heralding my bones.
shivering in the cranial
are the spine of many visions.

here is the announcement
of it in mid-step:

space is our station.
movement's tenure is endless -
a separate illusion
bleak like an unwanted behemoth,
gnawing the skin like
a raged lover would
in summery heat of body.

here is the miracle
of its pursuit:
mind extricates itself
from frame morphing solitarily,
squandering the mist
of this inward-breaking commune.
like a prisoner swallowed
by a garrison, lapping in recalcitrant afterthought,
eyeing for conflagrations.

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.

let me fruition this now
with emphasis. There will be noise
disavowed, and only the full metal of silence
would indict the plenary moon.

       whatever you say, it shall will
itself to the ground, obvious of its
decay long overdue. This time, precision
of aches outrace light – only this night,
and in some other nights when there is
only the blue glare of your face in the
nauseating vertigo of words intimated.

     now, in the barenaked room,
everything will enter as if the first time,
the last ones too – all at once so suddenly short
and handsome with abeyance.

   you were out into the world and I won’t
flinch nor blame. Soon when capable,
all of this will whittle into one fine laughter
pivotal towards the wary sides of mercy.

soon nothing, as changes
were inimical, silence will champion our
places, remembering you in the unclothed
sunlight of the South when we faced North,
watching boats wade in speeds of your freedom,
   in the boulevard where at one point in time,
     I have left you spaces to occupy,
   only mine errors found.

the lowly moon
verily traipse still
scalding hot light on ill-tempered motor hums
the snare of the muffled sound
the ecstasy of its incandescent flare

streets fat with fools
streets fat forever
streets squandered
by tiresome motion
in perpetual hymn
the wingtip of candle-flame
swaying like
a skirt of that one girl
i kept looking at
in a pub in Chicago

moon bellowing yellow chorus
singing flat tones
of death
mine to hear pining away from
its cunning edge

i've none to offer
anyone
but
despair.

dark inwoven vision seeking clear,
   pure — smiths a dagger.

when you told me
some are the abeyant,
  in that terse communal,
some out
   of print

     Radio
Body English
    Silent Radio's
writing of an english
   Body cursive and lithe

i arranged all things:
TV, escritoire, left a place for
   a machine, drone of minutes
and the fixed gore of absence
  all wounds avulse, words
to wring realm of bones.

image of men is no huddled God
  in the synagogue pew;
this is the distinct cadence of
  the indescribably beautiful:
when words continue to bleed
they will never go out of print
and they will mint something in the soul
without a word, or a gesture,
   or an insignia of attendance.
their benign  dreams   prowl
    upstream,

     your dreams,
i willingly go, rising, falling
   riding all the darkness.

tracing the stone throbbing in silence.
they're just shoes.
they're just letters rid of ripostes.
shades fleeting tell no significance.

again, they're just (more than) shoes.
insignias emblazon carnage.

the Earth is prone. it's just land
seeking fill. supine on bed,
it's just
a
land
seeking
fill —

they're just shoes
worn by
flesh and by thinning air.
light toppled on the grave of my fingernail. it's no paroxysm of macabre.

they're just
there, sitting idly,
like beasts in final stands
limned by sudden emergence of woods.

just some
of its non-existence,
my mind's concept of I and
all things refuted
    its sorry
plaything.

rain glistens the gray face
of asphalt in this lurid eve

as the trickle-song thumps
the chords of metal,
the frequent hum of a passing mobile, a trembling moth in sight
pursuing the stillness of this
      eve

i remember once my hands touched
multipliedly the work of bone.

this too i remember: when you
were hesitant to say anything
yet eyes were as consenting
as a portent of rain, and as crude
as any language shouted
in between the rift of river
and hill -- there is much to remember in the field tumescent
with aromatic carnality.

it is without speech that everything desperately tries
to signal me something incipient
like an unknown flowering left
to be unearthed.

tonight it rains endless
with memory. the moth
unfolds its fictile allegory
without having to cocoon
around an unfazed inset of hot glow
in this eve of reminiscences
summoning you through
this flight of esoteric moth,
through the rain and its ephemeral burst of bloodless ripple,
through the sensual globules
of lampposts telling me of
a once familiar batting of eyes
and disappearance of darknesses

when our bodies made fire
during the eve of our discoveries.