these dank stares throttle
         clutch my seeing night, the ***** color of the mirage
  outside
                            stills     her   face  calm   like the weather
    of trees,   unsaying      quietness   erupting
         in a groping    yellow     yawn   of
                         splendid     sun

the   sharpness   of   this   incident
    she is    tired      of   all   and of   me,
              stretches her    bones   crackle,     snap
    out     of    ponderous    limit
       staggered      by    the   unsuspecting    blow

rising      from   a tense   moment  and  ending
        suddenly, with   an  obsolete  stare.

i went with you towards the waning of the old moon,
enclosed in a season, stricken with half-glow, i went with
you to a blue enclosure, whose hands cannot bridle you,
as they, hunters all, would a thing that refuses to be held.
you happen everywhere as though secrets alighting pursed lips
and fragment breathing, springing in with the indelible hue
of autumn, yellowing all around me, where I join you, someday,
where trees bend slowly towards a reason, careening and pulling
back days  that closed our eyes and carved in with sleep,
like a prescient dream where all but motioning parts of you
     join from all separateness as though
                                             you were still here and never departed.

For a moment, I doubt your possibility. Like clues to a riddle
    filling its minor gaps. And then, from a seen distance,
    you sidle as if to arrive so sudden, yet slow with great impedance,
    an absence I am familiar of. Next to the sound of the not-so-distant
  I am deaf, wearing the same heavy mask of silence. In sequence,
  when we talk, I am pale wall, I am crumpled flower, I am riddance.
I am the many versions of bad dreams
  rolled in one, deep slumber. Easy it was the first time, when it was said
with precision, the things we were before, set loose in the air. Hard it was
now like a trick I have to unlearn forever. Alighting love a blind journey,
second sight as if responsibility. I watch myself wear out by much dailiness.

For a lifetime, I may, will it short so long then when I must
care less, the freedom, keep your face as instilment, memory, recall. You are
introduced without light; all the more I love the sight, so dark the enigma, gets
lost because distance always is telling of a long path – imprecise the steps, surety
   when feet fall, breaking the bones like twigs. I did not mean to disrupt
     your harmony – that is why dance is always a lack of another,
                             *“Catch the music, love, I must drop movement
   and seek your return.”

there has to be a way
  for a defunct quiet
to find its life pilfered
against surrounding scenes

   when i have your silhouette
plastered to the squalid wall
  when all else kinks in the squall
of the moon and
    everything is small.

  say, when i have you
in my retina and you hear
no communing display of text,

   that is my defeat:

a long night
wordless and slipping away,
   you, going far
unhinging from the verity
  that none has been left cold,
brazenly damaged,
   going farther and farther
streets fat, chance-ridden
   riddled and all too secretive,
verbose as quiet
   still and idle.

November's Daughter


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- dizzy from the silence
     as the rain translates
     the sky's pain into the core
     of a leaf's inflorescence,
     tucks underneath a stone's
     tongue a secret, springing
    from a cornucopia of questions.
    if it rains more over
    the tormented town,
    will God show its face
    in the puddle out feet trample?
    will an angel collapse
    as a single drop of honey
    moves through the lambast
    of a monsoon's arm
    in the wayward atmosphere?
    will its death grow wings
    and carry all of us,
    girdled to its chest
    like how the infantile morning
    is painted in the quiet
    mausoleum of our pains,
    and into our tender lives
    waiting to be examined?

1
Corrections. You drew a straight line and noticed its crooked part. Arrhythmia, was it? Or picket fences for us to blame? The seismic consequence of righting out wrongs. To even realize the thick light
      shining through like some stray decision.
                               The hot mint of touch carved out by concern, and to forbear a slight chance
            at miracles. We have no concept of heaven, this strange wall between us. When I look at you,
   I see myself at bay, multiplying weaved tears for scraps and metals. A mirror of the sea breaking
            amidst the sea. We have no sense of what is right – we only have sense of feeling.

We twirled between the sheets and broke the circles,
   the air in between collision produced silence. Gossamer. Clear. Sure and exact. Where are we headed?
                 We are crossing each other’s worlds with nothing but heavy bags of ourselves waiting
   in stations rid of the populace. Implication: this is the part where I fall asleep standing
          and you carefully traced your steps back to the source.

2

dark swerves to more darkness. Faults. There is a place for all aches a finger, or say a hand where I sense yours, should be. It is here, in this finite silence.
                         I notice peripheries to give them their apt intensities. Say, driving along the freeway,
   you in your night-old shirt, and it starts to rain. I will recognize everything, pile after pile, fade after fade, quick to match this disappearance is your head out in the window
                    celebrating the world and you tell yourself: I do not know, and I care not.
     And I begin to say it without saying it, and you ended it without ending it – this curious case of contention, part yours and lonely selves waxing in complete space
              to the edge of our seats, brought to the brink of all fear but you were braver and I am much
to myself, a trickle of rain descending from inflorescence of leaves.

3

I am looking at the subtle insufficiency of maps, and the enigmas of things their own structures
     eluding touch. Somewhere along the way, we get lost
                    but you remember then, somewhere in the vast terrain,
     you remember where we set foot and marked it with some vague memory of origin,
               coming back to it still untarnished, knowing it was there all along,
and you took it in your hands and tore it apart – your face swollen with satisfaction, we
                     trouble ourselves in the dearth of feeling – what’s left is a naked word
        splintered in the pavement. You told me you will never come back to this
                                strange place.

4

a singular impedance of movement was all it took
       to romanticize what it meant like to be still as your brindled face this evening.
I always held you like a child would, a blanket in somnolence. Rays of sun searching
                 for mouths of flowers – heat becomes its negligible end: sweat pulses
   through open integuments drained of their poisons. The voice from the thickness
         of quiet translated: the moment suddenly hits its sojourn, and goes through
                   gradual dissipation.

   you have missed tonight’s highlight simply because
                  you were mum as a nurse in your camphor of white departure, and I cannot overlook
  how the stars begin to wrestle each other, telling an allegory of darkness and hearing a catastrophe
                begin its fusillade of entrances taking form in tomorrow’s tabloids
  you know not about.

         They say when you hold someone, you transmit something and might leave a thing
worthy of hypothesis. The sound was made clear and I did not flinch.
                            You were asleep the whole time.

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

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

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

Should it rain tonight –
I shall escape the overbearing
hands of clouds
slice into the wind
divide the night
soul and body
rummage to the ground
and fall asleep
in one of the quiet corners
of the world
form an ocean of carnations
that would blossom in the viridian morning.
into the sun
i will leap ripe into the wind
until the horizon is incarnadine,
prancing now, in a singular stride
of laughter.

From the dream you
were |  emerging from  the
    natal hearth |
you go, shedding from the sound

Change the currents |
   their immediate implications |
surreal to touch, a smile stilled lucid as the eye

Sees more than air the nasal
grass | trying to
           speak to  trees |
connecting inner consolation

   Of both waking up |
to a dream so realized, and |
   sleep’s confabulations no less

Than joy | wordless|
  beside every
                      widowed morning.

sloping in a manner
  where outside the brindled
  world, light bends
  like all else in loose wind

  i can almost see
  and make out with what
  secret blueprint your
  body works in its
  mischief - or with what feast
  welcomes the bounty of
  your secret passages.

  take this now. a pint of ether.
  or something real like
  this look on my face harpooning
  your eyes unknowing of their
  consequences.
  just the subtle hint of
  what my mind tries to
  unclose in you makes
  all shadows of my body frenzied
  with tantric thought of doing
  this and that and so much more
  than just
        this and
               that...

  like squeezing juice out
  of the freshest fruits
     or watching the rain
   taint everything in picturesque
     detail - or ****** of
   butterflies on a clad flower,
    or what the sea haplessly tries
   to engrave on the shores with
    its frequent, frothing thrusts
  
    or making it all perpetual in
   motion trapped in the bona fide
      moment. say, i will
   feign a moment of
       colliding into you and
   feel your surrendering force
      imprint small indentions
  without confiding in the exactitude of this domain where
     i have you lured into my song
   like a child put
       to sleep.

i pass on a story to empty barstools and
     cathedrals -- that i will remain as
      inconsolably so

  and ask, shall I be free so as to
      suffer myself?

 admitting i am shaped according
     to your demands,

    where, first there is you and the last
 always the prime of days;

where mapping out or telling a thread
   is inclination to never mind

our place. the need to bury you
   in my own Earth, willing to make you

meet a darkness which you once
   were as if to swallow the entire verity

of common peril. this perish, this drown
    first before displacement, to conceive

the evening within stories you have
    created beginning with a sharp departure

making your silence and abandon final,
   myself less than total.

that when i look at you, i want to burst
    into meaning like stone being taught

to speak, as much like your study as comparatively
    a bluer dawn rising from your feet

you passed me on as someone else, a makeshift freedom underneath an impalpable source,

that i am sick in your densest volumes
    when you speak, all the more when you dont

realize that I am trying to gravitate you
  into something, say to allow me into remembrance

and you, an insistence to function in void.
    that whilst you remember, you forget

   that in the tense moments I am trying to unlearn
you, as if there was only I,

    the city we were both in underneath a senseless moon, and whatever it was that i saw in you

 in such an imperfect night -- taking all your debris,
     the body of all this sliding into reticence

  as detritus, the unflinching weight of yourself
     as time stumbles to shuffle absence.

 strange now as the morning peers through
   the wide aperture, there is only I,

  faced with rivers as transit; when there was once
I moored in place and you have learned

       how to walk, and further away.

the eyes and their drone
seizing down
a vision -

this jar of clay
  is molded to its finite figure,
and when it is done,
   we delight in its exactitude.

it is just like any other
  languorous toil
yet i am less of what i am,
    and more of what i see.
how penetrating is the mundanity!

  these conjured appendages
  storm over this lockdown
  of phases and transitions,
  and the next thunder of words
  shall hoard in their immense
  hands palpable presciences;

ah, without eyes, what to make
  of everything? their boldnesses
    go unseen, their reticences
  remain to be something lulled
   out deeper trekking no contrivance,
    and i, livid in living,
shall only saunter through slackened space and only that -
   passing quickly, even the
shatter of moonlight and
   no words are born.

(Pastilan!)
    this is where
     no words
      break
      fall
     shatter

it is where now,
    a barefoot army in the wilderness
tromps the silence
   leaving it trundling
  in its wagon.

     (Pastilan!)
    this is where no love
     thaws
      petrifies
      stunts.

it is where now,
  many skeletons are
  unraveled, unsheathed as a melancholy ***** in one of
   the quiet rooms in Hagonoy.

(Pastilan!)
     dogs
      all
     barking
     trying haplessly
   to bite without teeth
    fangs yellow with old.
   mane squandered by steps
    of light.
   woebegone are the paws
     and the only thing
  we do best
     is howl
    at our
       pains.

Pastilan!

for when a season shall pass
   and in passing I have gone,
 only to announce have I arrived
      and am here,

this aleatory, the next face waiting --
   whom arrived but is in
  fraction, for whom she is that I will hold
  but is reluctant in her grip

  for my face yet unsure, is sure
  of its coming; hence the volition of fates
  a tight contest:

 for two of us we shall seek ourselves
   in places where we do not know where
   we are going, and as this goes on
   in a circle, we have been far too lost
   and wander-wearied,

  seeking rest in the next embrace
    awaiting.

these durable vicissitudes —
all enduring
like brightness moving;

i hear the noise of darkness
waking the bone

of this hound,  wayward from home trailing the pursuit of this drone

hearing the stillness nailed in the
day's dormant intone—

wherever you go, i go
vanishing in the marmalade

is the cadence of melodious names
singing renegade

a song, welling up in the dark's basin,
pouring light shattered, flayed.

in the rain striding past closed stalls
and bottle shops, my head the
flickering lamp, my fingers dead candles,
my eyes the last flare of splayed days.
i roar like a lion — stubbled, prowling
the deserted streets but flinch at the
first sight of shadow. revisited by old
haunts mirroring strange voices, distorting their claims — in my retina
is a woman sitting idly sewing lissomeness strings to bed and we sleep.
   i wake up quicker than any light.
lift words, chain them and sing steel songs, carry volcanoes, herald ravens.

i can't stand the populace, can't live
without them. i squat next to the fire-hydrant and imagine hounds *******
at the world. once, the sheen of the little
sightings festoon, borrow the moon and
i was once levitated into meaning. now,
i want to hang my head next to the old cypress and scream, "Forever, the peril."
   but i am the thrall of the sea.
immenser than the leviathan of ache
  the last scream of the perished hills,
forever, a clout on the grey-faced asphalt dazed into the lenient whiteness of paths,
    i still sing steel-songs, solder volcanoes, chase the salutary ravens—
  i see myself cringe but i will not cry.
the woman sleeps and i am awake,
  a gentle hand will whirl upon her
lithe figure and then gone. i am the
   tear of the cloud in their exhausted tier
but somewhere here, i am as perpetual
   as waters, tracing the end.

In some odd, conjured up way, I might say under
a lethargic light of a dream, as if a housing roof-beam,
that underneath it (mine, of course, the dream), you are
a carefully placed furniture and around you, children scram
for joviality, passing and crossing the shadows that blot
on the floor, where most of your stagnant life, you have breathed
under me, in the same net of which nothing is cosmically related
in some way or metamorphosis, under me or you so quite new
possibly, consciously aware of each other’s settings and adjustments.

to accept our nameable days,
   the plenitude of them,
  means we are to be forgotten;

to come in flesh with
    our words and clothe us with
      them, will mean that soon,
  eyes shall, through malleability,
      unsheathe us all
    to our impurities.

a gaping orifice is in the seascape
   singing elaborate music,
  and to gyrate to this
will mean that there is a hand to
   hold until the songs fade
   to their closing.

to become love means to be aware
   of what our hands can do,
   what our bodies can flinchingly
  shut with their capacity to
   mend distances,
    what amount of words could
  hurt, what silence could scar
    and what nuisance could
  stir mundane abstractions,
and to become presence
    means to embrace our departures, why a thing ceases to
  stay is a question in the pristine void and beats back with a voiceless answer: love, and its
   telltale askance!

  to become and simply be,
   coming to be and ceasing to be,
what to make out of it,
  that in the flesh and the indelible mark of loving,
  its rampant depictions are all
     but ash.

the idle mountain of laundry
  in the corner smelt of saltine sweat
a shadow deliriously starved
   on the bedraggled linoleum

simmer of onions, the feral trample
    on iron, there is a proper pang
  in admittedly blurting out
       Never
   Again
        Are
We
      To
   Be

   falling into the well of the ear
   to surge anew, a slovenly love,
overcast of the body now gone
    and only fulgent lamp-like brightness
   unmoving in its resort
       tells me something hazed
and invisible enough to be seen
   yet painstakingly entering are these
reminders of the remainders - the only
   resolute and reachable object

  is this photograph of your
  once bright smile
  illuminating all mirrors
  dizzy with the image of myself,
   alone and bedimmed

to pour water
into the velvet lip
of a jar
or the lobe of your
pale ear dwindling
like a bell
        unsounded
      in the consolidation
      of both the unclear
      of words and the
        unsaid

to pierce the silence
with the stem of breath
and break the curved bow
of the moon with our hands
that fritter against the meandering
of our eyes leaning against the walls of returned glances.
to postpone a voice
   mid-birth and embrace
     encumbered enigma.
to sing deathly dreams when
everyone sleeps dreamless.

to pluck the strings of
  a guitar
  and pain in the fury of love
and its accompanying bafflements.

to have ended the fire like
   the brief life of a match-flame,
  and to want you again inside
   the windowless room of my mind.

to this
        and to
               that

like a map that's hastily drawn.
i have felt myself stride
   like a wounded beast
  inside the bramble of
   obvious hesitations.

      what to do?

swell of silence
  and the wrest of stars,
o'er the river my heart sings cooly
against the face of the
        somnolent moon.

my heart is etched
in the sand and the dunes
tender on in the tense heat,
and underneath the bowl
  of the afternoon, the shadows
are stripped, shattered are they,
  mending to pieces;

i see here clearly yet no sign
  of you. birds are ailing in the
distance, the boulangerie of clouds
   and the automaton trees,
  yet no you, neither an espy of you nor
     a spry child hiding behind
a flower,
      still no image of you
  here, i go mazy now, into the
   fleet of hurdled moments.

awaken love in me
gently. fallible.
     spontaneous.
     alive.

laying beneath the sense of each
word is the armistice
  of mind versus heart
  of body versus stillness
  of sound versus silence
  of distance versus proximities.

this long-winded gasp of breath
     holding on to gravitas
     keeping things in their
     designations.

or this desperate hum of quietude
     yearning to be noticed,
    concealed in immense portage
     flowing to be bequeathed
     to cupped hands and touch
      a face callow. mild. tender.
  
like water falling again
    and again in repetitions
     memorized - permitting
   desire to utter plainly rendering love's easy, breakable structures.

the dawn of another
tempest and the twilight
of another's sleek extinction.

i roam freely
without fences so i could break
free with even speed.

this is where no men
traverse.
this is where everything
remains limitless.
this is where all fires
raze whatever has been uncovered
and deemed vulnerable.
this is where i imagine
realness and put to realities,
whatever is imagined.
this is where everything only
amounts so little,
and that in its smallness, i only
weave an immense thatch
for the asylum of these words
and watch them come to life...

it starts with a pencil of light
torching where silence beckons
and words writ strongly in
bold intent

and ends
where all of these syllabications
take their sojourns in one's mind,
pulsing with life and one with blood in the sinews of mind's faculty.

this is where i meander freely,
and everything exists
in illustrious wonder.

i need not your voice
to sway or dance,
  just the mere sight of you
   muted still in distance

a bamboo in the
    wind

i need not the air of you
  to float or wind-hover
  past the trellises that separate us,
   just the heady fragrance of your
    entrancing thrall

a call of wild in
   the elaborate dark

i need not the wine of your stare
   to inebriate myself
dizzy with the fine mirages
  of your clamored presence,
  just the thought of you
    infinite in me, pattering the roof
    under many a bed that i slumber in,
  that lewd yet saccharine rhythm
    announcing your coming

     and going,
  like a nascent furl of smoke
    from a match-flame gone,

   eloping with you.

where i go
cuts the loneliest melody
of this inner twilight.

it is where hands cease
to reach for certain things
and ****** only
what is immense in nearness,

and that is
a memory.
it is a pain imagined -
constantly shining light
into its clutched darkness
and releases from its hand,
the birds of dawn - these words;
or gently sways the perennial trees
with the verdure of its spoken
word and its unimpeachable sensation burning through leaves
like the sun's peak biting off
a trace of a leaf's inflorescence,
or that somewhere i,
together in the gathered silence,
   fathers an intimation
and comes back after
    each toppled song,

to the world and its formless manifests.

the way i
     do things
   is my way of
        undoing.

        do not take me for
         a fool - a flustered
      butterfly's well and
       love is not,
    thinking the paradisiacal,
        soldering to the squall
     of a senseless moon,
       all of me bursting
      into all the fraternization
   of stars and then
        the squalid dark --

slowly moving are all,
     and what slithers in our sleep
shall purloin our senses and in
  beds of old haunts
    will all be pure motions
    reckoning the void.

shadows assume our parks.
silence heaves our decimal places.
observe me when i utter a speech,
  yet in a quickening,
     i have already unspoken.

you said, at the end of the rotunda,
there will be a shade for me to seek asylum in,
and it took me in without hesitation in that blank
moment left to my own device,
not my heart’s control but yours,
I drew a line for you to cross and pithered in excess.
     you have gone far enough,
    this March afternoon – you said,
   there is potential in this, smiling, you in your
  tattered jeans and timeworn Chuck Taylors

staring  indefinitely at fretful space,
in the falseness of things, you have gone somewhere,
  I in the shed, inched along where
  you stopped to dust your clothes.

learn silence
and unlearn thought's blear.

must you love.

love its workings,
  its affectations.

  simply by saying
  that to fill a heart
  with all that is clear,
  pour silence into
  the hollow of it
  until it raptures
  and emerges
  complete, hymnal.

this is how i remember you
meandering by, plainly,
like the mouth of the morning
and its slow auburn,
telling me something
i cannot understand (something enigmatic, enciphered in a cornered circle) yet prodigiously
delivered to me, at the verge
of speaking, divining in me,
an intone of solemn invitation.

blank spaces sharpen the same way a whetted blade would
   in a dull moment of assault;

the sky above me, I wished for, over in and caving for,
  a gun doing its own sinister deed

of shoving into the highlighted realm of some peace-distortion
  when it is done, I will hear laughter shearing

the wind with its beautiful imprint
  unless it was always darkness and just that – a place for passion

and so much of it in the middle of nothing, I cannot
  bid well into these frenzied moments of tense

stillness – when it is done
I will hear you laughing, screaming into the wind,

    a name,   *someone else’s

body haul
   in slouching orbit.

   x sight. jesus christ in
              staccato
    running through desolate pews,
     bicycle on sinews of blood
       scraping macadamized walls
         rearing pains
   everybody's a stranger
    in the celestial hall.
  what part of this do you not
      understand?
   i will say it without saying it.
  everybody's a
      stranger. arithmetical concatenation of stringed lies,
       chalk faces smile at me
   through heads of tacks;
  midnight's passover:
      before dawn, its eyes
     squinting at something
   named demolition -
this evidence of stolen-into-place.

much that I rue this place,
you are this night’s bleak behemoth –
your full volume of absence
displaces the air.

where darkness asserts its terrors,
the heart knows no clearing;
stroke slow at first say, accuracy
  of all knives absorbed or when you
said remember, remember – supreme over
this tower of silence, like the last of your life
before you slid into easy sleep – drowning,

nothing can drown you, I say, this afternoon,
pulling at the sea, both of us, separate,
  your moving in all places,
as if pushing me further into the taciturn water.

Bare-breasted this afternoon facing the Sun
   northward

   there could be more places for heat like this in homes
so shattered, their faces of malaise – a hundred days of gambol
     boys in their sanguine shirts; the myth of sun
                     is truth of soul, or moon

            clear vantage of something – neighbors leaving
radios wheezing in tetchy static,
  dogs panting in dry ***, lawn the verdigris,
                   the marauder in the market, all moving towards

even sounds shorn out of the daily are pure:
           the prattling neighbor again back in the foyer,
  the revolution of an old van and the dismay
                                   of a septuagenarian, the harangue
  of a mother, or somewhere, the marching of
                 soldiers shot dead – sun’s always painting pristine
  the milieu, so we can see now past the papers,
       the truthfulness of atrocities;

there came by you,
        in your full brightness, blotches of sun – untouched
by the heat, you’re passing and passing – in transit, nothing is snatched
    as the neighbors beat through.

Now it all comes back:

in pursuit of you from the basis of this armistice, when in the swelter of this afternoon
I wish you realer than anything imagined,
                 in confidence   that I may   arrive at a   hunted  answer.

But the question, when hurled, broke into the wet back of mound’s infinite silence,
   like a dog with its paw leaving dog-signatures on the bedspread,

at twilight, flowers shift from grace to melancholy, rail of stars in sight now,

I amongst the darkness, waiting – wishing you again underneath the dome
   of this immense night,

prying amongst stones their language of truthfulness: Have I not loved enough?

(i, who have died, making this)
   looks at the mirror
     of this
   and sees clearly
       tastes freely
       hears soundly
       opens delicately

    a god in form.

    now the windows of my
     soul are open
    now the doors of my
     heart are unlocked
    now the roads of my
     sinews undone
    now the home of my
     laughter loose in
      the wilding air

(i, who have lived, ending this)

    still sees a god
    in the many haloed hours
    i am truer than any water
    sloshing against the blue
    dream of shores,
  
    now my feet tread softly
     the illimitable earth
    now my hands rest like
     children from a day's frolic
    now my heart is wan as
  a seraph's musing is sepulchered.
     now my mind sprawls endlessly
    amongst cathedrals sleeping
     immensely in the night

(i, becoming a god,
    in believing and denying this)

i hate
   and i love
as life and death
   pull
  a long-drawn tide
between
  body and
    soul -

there is not one
   love in this world
  of mortal men
that could enclose me,
  as loveless as love
could be so dearth as to not make
   roses grow - hate with its
ferocious hands, swift-bladed,
   cutting all foliage at
  the garden's edge.

i hate
   and i love.
forgetting's hands
unsheathe the moon like
  a bare bone.
i hate, i love,
   and if you ask me how,
  i do not know.
  i only feel.

daylight does not
   (and perhaps) disrupt me
   as roses are put in
   pressing questions

  life is neither
    an ellipsis
      nor movement

   and death (cessation
                amid
              words where a locutionary, alone, dropping
     into the world
           sends us to places
        of silence) is
       nothing but a remembering
   of this and things anew
    yet old with pains
       (tender
     with parenthetical kisses.)

dripping and naked
underneath the dome
of some outwardly pouring
wet measure
of lip-meander,
or
as if caught
like a hapless prey
stripped of freedom
fastened to liberal lattices
of a kiss and its lunar cosmogony -
and perhaps
a farewell to the gush of
wave carrying with it
gossamer bodies of tiny memories
worthy of forget, worn, lauded
by sepia hue
exiting languorous doors tired
within cold threshold

sweet science of love, unrelenting
afterwards, so strongly bold before.

I take this benign hour, simply disappearance,
before you – you have allowed entry uncompromising
as rain would, a cold envelope, or the waft of foliage

the impenetrable silence persisting within stones unturned
and trees impaled to the Earth like fate would decree
a sudden glint of circumstance.

the throbbing room of grace that folds a hundred measures
realizing it was easier to say nothing

and witness the rest of you flicker.

our bodies are worn out
of transitions yet we cannot complain, because with this,
our supplications are temporal
or forever, it is much to our liking. numeral once more
are the aches of toil
and soon enough, there will be
a spark to put an end to this
darkness of living our lives. we cannot complain anymore. our soul cuts itself in our movements yet we go unaware of it, barefaced with pride over the things we own, things we want and do not need - we remain to be the culprit to our own soul's demise and what do we do to fend of their emphases? we cling onto things without thinking their affectations, and we blame the pressing happenstances of our deprivations - bereft of soul's spruce, lights flay over our homes to illuminate what is touchable, what is frantic upon sensorial matters. we dwarf ourselves down to the size of our own shallow ponds and like fish struggling to subsist, we flame in the water and drown in potamic navigations of our tired limbs. we search for meaning yet we resign to what circumstances allow to pass through our structures. our soul is famished over the drought of our landscapes - we resign to its surrender because we are frightened to smallness by the weight of the duties we neglect to ourselves.
this mortal flame is close to dying
and there is no enkindling it
to its full glare.

what have we done!

words, forever,
and their pressing occupations
of living.

the multiplitude is something
that crosses a territory.

say a hand where, somewhere impermissible, still ganders over,
warm to touch. a filigree of
fingers reaching to where
enlightenment is something so small
like a match-flame.

they inexplicably dress themselves
to the soul's penchant
and their redundancies are recurring most over tongues of flame.

sometimes when there are no
words, silence continues to
resuscitate them in their
stations. a mutiny of stone
under the shade of a nook,
or migratory horses seeking
rest at the foot of hills
where their crests look
at them painting them white
with blackness.

where words go,
we follow. even in the tracklessness. our pursuit
knows no ending, like the turning
of a day's page and its finality.
like tasting truths for the
first time, an old moon's wane.
lights athwart where they
cease to fade, a confection
of colours where all men see
fairly, what words inscribe
to riverbed quietude.

| masalub-on |

to bellow
is far better fate
    than silence.

what the world never hears
will be forever buried.
the muteness encompassing
all our states has its way
of burying things and emblazon
them with nothing but monuments.

nobody hears a creature
  when it is wounded
  in the dark bramble.

nobody sees the crossing
  of birds at dawn,
  and if you do,
  you'll never know the
  memory of their flight.

nobody knows the existence
  of rust in the gears of
  a train slumbering somewhere
  in Buendia. the resilience
  of its song, the allegory
  of immutable abeyance.

all matter consigned to odes.
punctuated by time's manuscript,
and all derivatives of sadness
   mean only this:
      
        it is time to go.

i like how your eyes close.
voluminous quandary of
a naked rose.
the agony of the brine
beating through the night.

i like how your eyes swallow back
to smallness
and then open
like a gossamer flower in bloom.

i like how your eyes flicker
their transluminal joy - i like what they do to me - so quite a new and tender thing. under the ocean-liner of your skin and the waiting islets of your shoulders, there i am drunk underneath the twilight of your wide eyes, outwrestling pains, and then closing, outlasting the nightfall.

my unbridled dreams of you
remain to be all celestially wounded
in this nebula of emotions—
when i close my eyes
   and take the dark like you are for
mine to own, i think only
    of the stars and the moon
  the way a man that hungers
    for a woman thinks about
   what is underneath the vestal chemise,
   yet stumbles upon
     a nameless constellation.

i know not how she twists her
aches into the reprise of her
heart's persistent pleadings.

   her hands touch marred walls.
   her swift glanced put to rest
   some lost vision waxing in
   weathered trellis
   which music ****** her ears
   with temperamental ballad.
   how my day slowly unravels
   itself from the cocoon
   of questions
   and answer metamorphosed,
   a fluttering butterfly.

but i know when she moves
i feel the Earth move, as in a club
of wind pursues the willingness
of each leaf leaping from their boughs.

but i know when she converses,
the quiet rests its forlorn mouth
and shudders to some acquiescing commune.

but i know when she loves when
she does not love me, when she hates so much with her furious heart when she loved me still
in imperiousness solely our own,

   there was a language only i
   know her lips mouth to soothe
   the paroxysm of consternation
   and lullaby me through
   the wakefulness of all things.

****
sharpens
clears
the smoke
of obvious
hesitations
after
the
spar
of senses triumph
over reasons
and now here
lies
everything
(real
  and earthen,
ripe for
  taking):
feelings have
so many names
and we try
to adjust
it into singular
etymology - something that
is easy for us to make
  and break
like

****.

i love the music
      of rain.
  it is like you
  are nearing and
  i, behind walled silence,
  waiting
  for the sound to
  billow immenser
  until my worrisome
  body bursts
  with a certain gush
  of anticipation,
  and it is you
  in all that is the world

and when i peer through
  the window, the earth
  is soaked with grace
  as the trees are stuporous
  in their roots,
  as the flowers bow
  in acquiescence
  and the peripatetic air
  foams an amorphous figure,
  your silhouette naked in
  immersed wonder and when
  i close my eyes, only exists
  your touch and i am one
  with the world dripping in
     wanting, trilling and naked.

Plaridel Moon
upon us shows
only a quarter of its
churlish grin

this circular deathlessness.

the moon's harp
evokes sound
as vermilion stars
and crepuscules
shatter in the distance.
i sit still about
to lose form
as waxes melt
dislimning even
deeper,
the night
and with its hoarse voice
through the window,
it sinks
deeper
deeper
deeper.

lightly, in the indivisible dark -
    without
        sound.

i wait for brokenness
    to spill your name
    outward, like water
       from broken glass.