driving at Kennon (treacherous zigzag
   resembles hopscotch with death)
as i play Morrissey on the radio and the
woman sleeps, sometimes waking up lamenting the death of moths I ran over, splattered on the windshield, "Poor little creatures!" she said. no, baby, i am the poor little creature and so are you,
    relentless against the dark
  past Urdaneta — her being mineward,
i play with death as i turn the headlamps
off (pure blackness, nothing as if falling
into a bottomless pit as void sits on its
throne waiting) and on (all white as pains
  now, trucks flare up and down the bend,
  the tumbled boulders keep meting out
   some forceful way of disturbances,
  our collapse, the afterthought of it all)

i sensed from the beginning that the
old moon will wade out and soon the sun
will throw dissipated shades all across
camps with bonfires dead and stilled.
at the height of all, it becomes so
hot that the birds leave the trees together with the flowers and the Cordillera cannot cry any longer.

my woman wakes up as if rattled
with different pains, her face floating
past the mountains dreaming at the verge
of birds in the morning—
and it is twilight and still the same birds,

now it is the night and you
cannot see the birds anymore,
neither a hint nor a trail of
where they have disappeared

like the glory of Rizal in Luneta.
the lightsome globules in Paris.
the lions of Manila, now a town full of cowards as alleys fill with ******,
the kids laying flat on their bellies
as the lawn takes its revenge
on the rest of the surrounding,
  
         beheading the tree, and the
       birds fly farther and away.

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

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

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

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

now the word is naked

                                      perched on stone naked

the door is naked
                                     the oncoming figure naked

        stored in space naked

   meant to    contain the naked

                            I try to pry open your  silence  naked

and   caught within the last magnitude of a noise so   naked

            conceived an   outlier    naked

with    an  exact   measurement   that   is distant from  a  scene so   fair  and naked

    
      once  again  uttered  when  ripe   a meaning   naked

     with  the  body   of  an  hourglass   naked

                  whose  residence   is    naked

and an    impedance  of   a futurity   made   naked

                      by a lit   indigo   sky   naked       there are   no   skies   naked

only    clothed     by    a  closed    sheen   when   provoked  turns    naked

              you    are    naked


in  this  performance   from   beginning,    midway,   and   then  finality    naked

      in   a  cavity   meant   for    one   as a womb you   once were   in   naked

     in  your   fetal,  your  styled    font   obscured   how  the   body   contorts      naked

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

i   am   going
into    the    limp    dark
   where   silence   recites
a brief  candleflame
  
    it is   as if  these cavernous   impulses
rush   back    like  children
     whose  heads   are diadems
and   you,   their   mother   of   spring’s   masterful
    hands    neither  went
      nor      came

to   a   dream
    of
        roses  which
trudging    kisses   smite  the loam,
    giving  them   reckless meanings
yet    all    the   same

   in    death
and   in    beginning,  in  these large minutes
your   eyes  contain
such    light   which   all  things  darkled
    are    born anew
with   timid  
       names

Picture it when in a flash of a description, brought you the news
  it said was your derelict.

when    in becoming      we   ultimately   fail
   our   being   championed   by   our   unbecoming

seeking   the   real   scathed   by a sizeable   truth
    like a    persimmon    in  your   tender   hand.

                                   This is the default

sketched    over  a sagging   paper, plugged within the air
   the   motes  depart   and  is  as easy  as it is  explained:  an elusive

thing   that may never   be   captured.   Something   the   arriving
    betrays   then assuages     with   a   word   treated benignly:
                         a    transit.

let   gray  define  the  day:       let   the   file    describe   the   motive:
           let    presence    soil     where    we   stood   our   place
            like    a   monument:         let   it   seek   a   real  object
                or  a   found   language

a    wafting   presence     is    lost   somewhere    gliding   over   unnamed   territories
   commencing       a   displacement   said    was    our    undisputable     location

                     roads   becoming   roads     vehicles   becoming   salvage
                  birds   becoming   orchestra      shambles   becoming   complete
                                   thus      dearth    becoming      us   before     our  denied   image
        from    a    source   that      was     our    implacable    place   like  a   deadspot    discovered

dark leaps when
there is the frothing light
beaming a sizable aureole
on your face
this evening
and its palpable brigade.

dark is having your
inwoven dress free
from swaying
pressed against raucous
facelessness of things
rogue and renegade.

and when i have you
not, shining the light
and its intone,
wind felt like
stabs or
i in attendance
of a crazed vaudeville—
trapeze is the hinge
of the void
afloat, upstream, space-hovering;
a display of love
   and not so much
is shown of the vertigo
trapped in a square,
a face
impinged in the seamlessness
of this fabulation
when you've gone
quickly fading out;
    
     light is my remember,
o, dark my
     forgetling.

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

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

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

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

there are only 5 seats and on each end
are metal chapels. time slows down like a slug
climbing a vertical wall, or say, a drunken man
  making his way towards the oblique recess.

the ignominy of an exhausted carburetor
is the orchestra for the night.
lots of women go in and out, out and in,
  whichever is first, but the last is always
just as bland as any other truth:

we go, each foot splayed to cover measure,
  and in the flash of a scene, gone.

I watch their skirts make gossamer tune,
like some flotsam or a poised note being led
  straight to a trajectory disappearance:

the idea of the image is to glide
over them, over flesh,
over this fetal smoke that I will soon toss
  right into the womb of nothing

and fall flat as a key from a tone-deaf cathode,
a spanked melodrama of television with dull cursive,

        or as lithe as justly, the right camber of blues
             ripping straight through my day-old denims,

peering through the tease of a thigh’s penumbral shadow,
the sound of the world being dragged into double-doors

       echoing a metonymy: *silence the interlocutor, her mouth
                          full of birds. Dark birds.

50:53

Strobe
   when  revealing  a  smile  variegated
your polychrome
   soul  within  sight
   does not know where to go but to pine away
from   the single light  to touch
   the innards  of your   button-down
    making intimate the body  contorts  dancing with another
                a minute past  a  gyratory

if   belief  is a  grave:   let   stasis be  metamorphosis.
   this rained-on house will not give way any minute

else  there is the  wreckage  springing from a singular
  hiding behind  the  music ballasting ground
                    and from a convinced consequence of being
   became fracture as if salacious to withdraw nothing but noise

   from the quiet or vice versa. If when  breaths were postponed,  inert – they will
  start    estimates  from  outside
      the   neon sign that  says Pulse and  reimagine the lives when divorced
     from  the daily, and is  then  summarized

  in a  fusillade.   When  on the  ground

    they  must  have been  dreaming   of  wings,  or  falling asleep
               constantly  with   a warm  body   stranger  tomorrow in  that  evening
   a  contingent

                   this   place   they  have   not   reached  yet against  their head
  said  it  was  the   most  sincere of  blankness at  any  given  rate,
               when   movements  statistical,  numbered, unwarranted like a metaphor
     or a glib downpour – the aftermath

                       becomes   sleep so tender with a dream which resonates
   They must  have been   dreaming  of  wings  but  by  the  time  when someone
   waiting  for  them
               inside  homes,   they have  already   flown into    days.

In crepuscular tapestry
   telling of mauve night

and the dull color of
  stones intimate

with waves from an
open  sea of laughter

the sound of you
in the hollow of me

      keeping watch over hills,
my body hunting your blue echo.

water's gravity
moors me to this dome's prison.

washing me to plush blue
is the dream of hands
that puts me out of my sleep's premises.

the bane of existence tingles
the flesh and the suds rise
altogether with the squalor
of its own meaning.
my old hue languishes into
a burgeon of slosh and no friction
nor word could rupture me anymore.

and the scent dangles
mid-air, where all perfumes are born, with sorry fountainheads
peaking through the ordeal
of this sonata.
water makes music with skin
as froth takes to sea, the exhaustion of brine -
all disquiet in foreword
and finality

hung clean, in the backyard
of ordinariness, of consummate asepsis and its breakable concepts,
  ready to be worn out
by a day's grime and back to
its fate once more, all of us.

think  I  shall  be springtime; such   clumsy
scent  of  the world   collapsing  not  with  nets
but   hands  not upon  trellis  but    bodies –
    sleep    shall   carry   us  to  inches
of  terrible  speech    such somnolent world senses
    quietness   in  the  rivers   of   our blood;
how  murmurously  veritable    moment
     leaps   forth  ripe  in the   air   of such  splendidness
when  it   was not   mountains
    but    your   *******   deep within   the    Earth of  me
and I  rain    cleaving  the   scent   of   the world
    into   two   separateness   until   the
enormously     ****   moon   plunges    within;
   I    shall   be   a   tree
and you, a rose    or   springtide, or   everything
   that
            blooms,    withers,
dances – new  beginnings;

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

1
There are more penetrating people if not the death of, as in living in this very livid moment of the unsure which is a surety.
Falsify me. Growing heavy with the absurd. To face you, me -- more mirror the blank end of a chamber, or if that you must **** me, do it at the plaza in front of my mother. That if you must lament me over the lapped up moment of some false life the invented and wrong, do it. Do it. ****** me the unassailable truth that is, I am capable to splinter this moment and that it still lives like a sprawled body spilled from the mouth in the bathroom -- it still lives: you have to be quick.

2
Once have you been startled by the form of absence as a letter slid underneath the soft and warm pocket of your mouth like it was the first time to have a naked body pointed at you, all with it trying to predict you in a sterile room, and is more shattering than an aggravated twilight.

   Who, at first thought, was there behind the trigger, and was he/she drunk with any other pretense apart from the face that he/she hates that common meeting within the day’s fine-tuned crosshair?

3
If you listen to it carefully, the music is a mosaic shifting the hypothesis into a pallor of a question back to it again with its basic agony of becoming so bent and so small on paper – which is to say, that we are, if to listen to a droning sound, becoming of it delving deep into the center, checking our own weight like our name after a fall from a high place, they said they would.

4
I have left something in Baguio that I cannot take back – a monochromatic caricature of my face shoved into a crevice waiting for a revision. What have I furthered into?

you are all of the mind’s dirtiest trick:

a weathered image of Magdalena,
a sleight of hand and a swirl of skin.
                        defying the laws of inebriation like a culprit
      set loose, or the pallor of the moon excreting its habiliments.
the old rancor of the tree from its spurious beating. vestal buds of autumn
    frugal hands of drizzle in April, prostitutes pirouetting, pried open,
   dissected in faces of the tabloids (their almost acrobatic supremacy on centerfolds)

   all mangled like the unclear, yet certain picture of a 1990s havocked
      retrospect.

you are all of the mind’s filth: a putrid modal-jazz entrapment
   and I am that sad fellow at the elbow room of some dislimned establishment
       falling as lithe as poppies in spring

  only when my mind starts to sing freely, a clenched, harmonic framework
  will my bones start to unloose in the ether, death with its ammoniac perfume,
   closes in like an unwanted visitor with a bounty of silence drowning everything.

i imagine you anything but     lustrous this evening.
     there are certain points in the pressures of your gravity
that levitate to mere intersections of the finer points of ecstasy.

i imagine you    all soft   and plump  as a word   of salvage
   without the vigor   of   blandishments  when you start with   your
    own   way of  moving i imagine you  as blunt as   a dull  knife
     plunging   into   me – i imagine your  sidereal   satellites  fail  in their   coverage
   over impossibly the   blackest  of skies   in February,|

i imagine  you  anything  but clean
   and   all white and spruced up   with   the most
  drenched   light,   real   to the touch  and swiftly moving across  the afternoon
like  wishing you   all but   perverse  and   anomalous
    and   strikingly   beautiful.

They took you across the home
like an uncharted furniture as the walls lost
gait and stumbled.

       Before I could shatter a word without
compunction, they took you before my eyes laid
lattices – they faltered, officiating over space that
fails infinitely when turning you away before

I could understand, say the day again happens
and my grievous art flails like a ******* child.
a deep dream within
a shallow sleep occurring within sundries –  miscellanea
  collected together, put to question but no answer folded

to be sure in its destination other than where they took you:
  the air minting the world on your face wanting to move
  and remind a fate of decay: to be malleable within clay,

and hunger for a face they stole from me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   it was a fine day in Ortigas.

when all of the home, or underneath
the bed, or even throne of dream
  all lay with life of felled bodies,

         — lest I feel forever the joy
              of the fall,

when all scrumptious light bend in
incorrigible water, strangeness pursues
all dark;

    soft, soft,
soft, encircling in cage
   the soft,
soft, aloft hills and dead pools
  of sweat
soft and supple      skin
  raged thud of fragmented name
on walling up lips

        love is man and man's prison sees
to it all silence when everything is set free
and we have no use for them anymore,
    
     imprisoning us, the love–

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

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

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

when damp kisses are beleaguered
by the driest of lips,

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

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

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

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

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

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

this marauding dark.
  a bleak behemoth ---
  the head of the chimera.

  integer by
  blind integer,
  life's
  absolute emptiness.
  a sidereal zero.
  caught in the web
  of a relentless
   tarantula.
  this
    dead end
      or this ***** in
   the armor.

  life's what you make it.
  i make it like this:
  intractable like a fiend,
  these words unsheathe like
  rusting swords in old scabbards.
  i astonish death with smallness.

Nandito na ako sa labas, sa ilalim ng payapang ilaw mula
          sa poste kasabay ng pamamayagpag ng mainit
          na hangin ngayong Marso.

   Nag-hihintay sa kasunod na pigura na lalabas mula
          sa masikip na daluyan ng tao – ikaw o ang konsepto

ng    ikaw   na    ‘di   dapat,  maselan
   kagaya ng pagnanais,

       pagkakataong mas sinungaling pa sa
pamahiin – mayroong napupukaw
    ngunit   hindi kalian man mabibihag.

a nuisance
scraping the sallow pavement

is what it was.

P ondering the truth and throttling
A cquiesence like it was a familiar
R use to be outplayed by vision plodding
I rises holding us against the
S ubtle egress of omens.

W arble no longer, paradisiacal birds.
I   gnite no longer, city buoys.
T his is where they come to salvage ire.
H arbingers — dark, something fire

L eaves on damp graves
O ver grasslands lay quiet, felled dew
V ermilion   eye seeing all
E rupt in a flash of a gun.

the horse rummages on the track
and the victory is owned by the ****.
soon sleep will engulf my body
like the oblivious quietude of Aokigahara-jukai.
things and their semblance of utmost care.
light begins to burst
and there is little left to see,
wide-eyed, crunched by the efficacy of aches.
taking all to the very heart of hurt
as gamblers wager,
and coming back with the sound of completeness:
a man is a man in his chronology of defeat -
left torn by madness,
a cornered beast pressed against the woods.

the moon plays its lyre, white-washed,
sound wading in the very source of quiet,
hauled out of the Sun, its mother.
this hound stalks the world
with woebegone legs, a reflection of the entire world fractured
by a singular shot at the end.
i hear the guttural snarl of engine
unwavering in its limitations. say, at first light, all exists to paint darkness quicker
than any obfuscated conclusion -- hiding in
itself, its mood for squalors.
the mud dug deep for bones
pared from the slaughter of midnight,
hiding them to mask my defeat:
everything around me sparkles with
the vigor of frailty, all the same.

the nights are too long, scarce as froth
from an opened mouth left flat,
a dry gin bottle.
i imagine sad armies dissolving in pale moonlight, and crosses thumbed down to the snaking hiss of its nondescript prayer.
gears gnash like teeth in anger
of you in your young clothes, the pace of cars
hurrying back to homes.
i remember the splintered wood burning
the last in the round kiln of the Red Lion.
the upholstery of night is the twilight's
catharsis. the coast of dread widens like
the vernal metamorphosis of a young ******* in Gibraltar,
come in, come in with undecided ******.
you can hear the fall coalesce with the levitation of ember, landing like feet blunt
on the asphalt beside desolate bicycles
    in seedy parks.

the surreal tabulation of analogue repetitions:
death's myriad, in all corners screaming
the countenance rebel, against the floored masses.

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.

Pardon me while I remember.

  when   sight scathes, used upon,
  this glass shatters I love the sight of you.
  in days the Sun trembles
   through a fist of streaming light.
  I can only think of objects the size
    of my clenched hand

  a pear, an empty basin, a flower deep crimson
   between fingers wanting to break
       stem twice-told pains the sound  of it,
   a flat black disk on the turntable bellowing
       sounds of the bones we made in love.

we are mirror
      facing mirror -- our distinct quiet held us
          shattered,

  standing apart, I running towards, and you, from,
     feeling the wind glaze the wounds retold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what am i to do

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

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

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

We rarely go drunk, or perhaps that is I, when I told Marc that all people are nearly up on exits
   and barely exists now is feeling – he started swinging a running joke between the two of us

facing the planetesimal – lights their strobes of secret I am on my 7th beer and still nothing
    when being listened to by frantic fret of fear because indulgence is key to demise

when it is said to pull apart but didn’t, I halved the 7th beer and felt my gut cloy itself with
  the muck of fat from pork rind and stale chicken

I deem myself incompetent in the slug, gild of attendance: freckled wall with dotted red,
    linoleum plastered, defaced somewhat, Marc moves to Hannah and I further

the dark with my groping hands – I do not smoke inside my car.
         Ortigas is unusually dull, minutes trickle slow like *** or un-***,

whichever it may, I quickly said as I stole the mic from his hand the words I imagine
    to become filled with the purpose of frayed upon exactitudes.

He always brings his knife with him and I always ask him even if I knew
  that it’s somewhere in his acid-washed jeans – I have always been fascinated

by the lives made better or worse by knives. I remember Gabriel and I talking
   about Holden Caufield when all we ever wanted was to fall

immensely in love with girls we  chase around   in sophomore year, Gabriel
I do not know where you are and listening to Radiohead now reminds me of

something   strange   with   unwilling potential; perennial silence permeates
        Ortigas and somewhere a couple is hot and *******

whereas I, asleep on my 9th beer, probably my last,
         willing to give   up  for  a   laugh or   some     sense  of place

  while I hear them all
    laughing   in front of my parked   car,  poking fun   at   something

I   can   barely identify.

let hands speak what mouths
   cannot prattle

                 let eyes dream what sleep
               renames with its tranquility

let love undo what
hate has wreaked and

                 let fingers saunter infinite
                 strides when feet sojourn

let this quiet bellow
a hundredfold of sound

                  and let soul dance when
                  we have departed,

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

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

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

throws his socks missing
the mouth of the laundry bin.

exhaust of television static
as his mouth opens agape

receiving the dizzy fizz of
turning channels

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

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

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

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

as shadows curb themselves
perfecting their disappearances,

the madhouse women
rehearsing their discomfitures

time swiftly passed
through the very past of things

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

there is principle, there is mad luck on the streets
 but then again, i have neither one.
i assume the idleness of poles underneath the roof of a cafe in Poblacion
   and wonder where all my poems go,
 the value they impose -- only there's implosion   and not   so much sense
    so i go out to seek tenderly in the night,
 a cheap moon trapped underneath the bottle   of a pilsner
   as i hear one  of   the patrons call out
  my solitude like a ******* on all fours;

one afternoon pursues a following.
  i have wasted my time writing and stopping
 to   watch   stray hounds   pant   and
     ****    on the hot asphalt of Plaridel.
the   papers   retch  at tyrannies.
    hands   for  mechanisms  configured to
  a heady bias of  probabilities.
 the   house   next  to me is  being
     overhauled   and i  imagine  the incredulity
of   things  not their own  meanings.

  a pair of old Chuck Taylors on the bedspread,  a decrepit  bed for making love
    or passing time or  wasting the night away.
somewhere, someone  is  reading my  poems  and  weeping at the  cadence.
   most do not notice -- it was the caprice of things   not mine to  commandeer.
   the sound  of  stone masons hammering
boulders double the  melancholia.
   the deliberate sieving of  sand and  stone
      felt like   sandpaper air.
 the matutinal  sky split into dire condition
    much like  mine: becoming   and unbecoming.

all the   ******* are out in the streets
with ladies wuthering in high strides.
all the priests are in their rendezvous,
killing buddha heads.
the police have silenced the sirens
and behind pairs of old navy blue slacks
   and mobiles covered with dust,
the  captives scream mercy.
all the ATMs drone the pither of metal mouths.
a widow in Bocaue holding a picture
  of the departed.

i look up and see my face in the sky:
  if only i could **** the man and be the man,
fill his shoes with flesh, his movements my emulation, his enigmas my clarity, his day old denims my best dress.


more than beer and cigarettes have done me in and more to myself much no less
   than a cat hit by a speeding bicycle
  somewhere in Padre Faura.

madness hurries like a lover and hands me
   a picture of the moon.

i've got something and that's good enough
  as the police leave the grime of times
   and evict drunks off the streets of Malolos,
  as the priests step into the showers, naked
  and bloodied just like the ordinary man,
  as the cat that was hit
      by   a bicycle
   goes   back   to   the dark
  licking   the   salt  off the wound,
    bone fractured,    still alive on the  hot roof.

Manila    is  fray

Tough enough to die,
    Brave enough to see ****** against
        the billboards

   ***** on the marketplace
   ***** men haggling for prices
   the corners are squalid -- rats with ambitions   of men take  their places    in
    the esteros

   a car-horn blares, wanes old moon music.
      I sing songs of malversation. Trains all graffiti.

     My heart like a jailbird freed somewhere
         in the big sur; love assuages nothing,
    comes with a cheap price
          a freak December night in Roxas blvd.
     i sit on marble benches and dream
        of artilleries, garlands on *****-nosed
            barrels, nuns   grieving  dust
     in    the ground.    communal bathrooms
         drunk in foolish caricatures,
   the tabloids     displaying  flowerheads --
        the democracy in the streets a ****
    for      kings,  no    love to   lull
        me    to infantile    sleep

         tortured are   the   bulls 
   matadors    hiding  behind    faces red   like
       faces    of    statesmen   flushed with
          the   spirit   of   bourbon
   whereas we are    here   river-facing
       northern tip of its  undying source
  like    wives    on  balustrades   waiting
      to catch   the fragrance   of   inamoratas,
   light  reenters
          interstice   of   chary webs of  dull heads   hemmed in like   canopies   in the throat      of     overthrown ponds,   scraps
     of metal    sold    for a  night's  worth
        of    gin   and   Sinatra,

  Deep within   the   grave, the dead   laughing
       at the dead living. Atop   waters,
   yachts peering   into   drowning  fish,
       in   the middle, a   jam   of buses
         belching    lassitudes that    strangle
    the console,    the man    in all  of us
       the same,   cursing behind   the wheel
   and everybody    else    different
              dancing    at   the   top   of our   heads.

Soar with me, the young
     we are a flock of marvels
       roaring vertical

claiming it, the laughter
  and so years go running around

the sturdy, brindled narra, trilling of birds,
existence born from

Elsewhere it was     heard   and  then lingered

    if  not  felt the disappearance of:

for this to happen,    involve yourself.
   it is   the   natural order of things   not  even their truest selves
     but  when     unseen,   becomes.

  who   has  come   up   the vertical   but  has
    fallen,    who has  curved   into   the meeting
        and  has  gone  wilding.

today   you   were   surprised  by
     the    nothing   as    today

if   then  yesterday  was  once    a hand  clenched
    on  your  chest,   or  touching your face
a warmth   the frailest  issue,
    or         once    the   shape   of  the morning

   we   assume  freely.

Plaridel

Plainclothes this Saturday under the brusque heat – trees burlesque from shedding,
ripping orchestra of motorcycle: this one – too blatant to perform, to shrunken to
notice. What if I never reach you?

1.1 Crossing

There is an unrelenting transaction of birds in the surest sky in the surest day.
I can hear the rumbling of thunder behind its natal. If when found, discard.
It is easier this way unless inclinations are definite: the trance is to come,
shorthanded. Consider this day your being spared from.

2. Toll

I remember the identical traverse. It was when I was unsure of my birth. My father
had recounted and numbered how many slopes and trundles along the way when homeward
is turbulent, angled at such pace which could have given me another face. I have always
found it impressive that a person can wait for too long and waste away in hours that seek
no relevance when the daily is diminished.

3. Balintawak

You said that behind the marketplace is a dense crowd scouring for loose change. You wanted to supply them all with your adequacy that was rife and deft for sure in the turn of your hand almost a finger-exercise: that is your skillset. It will rain soon but the heat refuses to decline. You thought of the cumbersome bodies washed away by flood, and how at times, you remember them being randomly stacked at your doorstep, eroded by some wave.

3.1 EDSA

Space we have no need for want under a terminal day fully etched like unwanted visage making you remember something that was your flagrant disregard when asked about how
your day went, about a miscarriage of justifications, at work when facing absurd hours wishing to break away from that was our common bond – the long and dreaded silence because it made us always question what are we doing? Who are you? What for? Knowing for sure when to being but to end, indeterminate.

4. Familiar curve underneath a vandalized lamppost

In the console you pressing, discarding gravity at some point, managing to draw your way into and submitting to not knowing how to get out of, sealing an immediate sepulcher. We borrowed minutes, ran like fugitives when asked. An external shadow an intrusion so we had to cease for a moment but in the depth of our silence, somehow continued.

5. Entry to your home

Perfumed your garage was with autumn, or vegetation you said was your aunt’s prized possession. That it was my fault I did not turn you off as a switch is meant to be killed from the moment of discovery to dislimn the image and leave everything to study as specimen is meant to be dissected.

6. To go backwards*

         The only way home to where you were and I, scattered

falling into subterranean sleep, I notice such blackness
   bypasses a pinprick of light; dreams are avenues
   to enigmas presenting themselves as someone forgotten.
sleep laves labyrinths with incandescent sequins.
    everybody is strange here, interlocutor commune,
still yet nothing I can understand – better be braille, or
    contrapuntal dance, but still you uttered nothing;
your locutionary silence seeks no contentment.

                                           i have never heard such riot
of laughter toss me out of sleep. perhaps it was our undoing,
   our deepest, secretive entrails unloosen us in such fashion
   worth depicting as obscenely courageous, the width
of arm-span the size of outstretched islands, and stepping into
   that particular wideness, are my small feet traipsing
   swiftly throbbing in the heat of choosing:
to go      or     to stay – cyclic spectacle that eschews
            dailiness that I know I may have forgotten you in faces
of lampposts, the pared skin of onion, the gleaming washlines,
     the white feral on the rooftops, a blank piece of paper,
            a munificent Bulacan sky, or any sky at that since
they are all bleached and they arrive not with wind but
    with lashes: the color of white that flagellates, that blinds,
        that oscillates in space which is then reduced to the
     back of my hand: I know this. I know all of this.

                                                we were not naked, yet something
         buried in the skin reveals itself disarmed, mumbling
             an earnest palaver of questions I have no answers for.
                     what happened? where are we? should we just – die?
                                   an echoing reverb, or simply a song – a metronomic
          carousal of swan-song I have heard before persists
                            and maybe all this time,
                                                       we have been awake, in separate cities.

is the world real?

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

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

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

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

still as cold chair,
the sound and the unsound.
the clearing
wanes.

i think of nameless streets
and pry their memories.
when a steady hand reaches
for air, it is an effort to rename things
  their shabby selves. their yearnings
  crumble underneath awnings of a new,
  wounded moon.

   the   light   through
the    room, and the   shadows it pours.
  its working, a quiet punctuation
in  mere sentences   our own  silence,
  shattering at flight's first   thought.
 gravitations   may   be  heavy.
the   height   verily   not   its measure.


transitions   piled  like  old records;
  trailing the monsoon on  our backs,
 the persistence of daylight  and   coffee,
    plodding  in  heat, its vertical crawl -
   this metastatic fall.

i dream of old structures. dreaming
is the product of stasis. a consequence
of movement.

    dreams can only be too real. there is word
 that it thrives where it is assailed.
     an act of the body, conversing the limit.

if kisses are green and bodies verdantly exact in sameness
   let my hands be two birds glorifying the waters in the slopes
of fingers,  
  
if song is but undeath and the rise and fall the unalphabeted siren
      of the morning,

       such loose wind swaying over her silently as loincloths
   over blackred roses,  easily it breaks like a finger of a shadow
     whirling gently through opened windows in candid moonlight

but  if surely does your going signal the dawn but no birds
   wreathing the trees and no gardens inherit garlands,

  what shall then be two birds over waters but a single stride
      of sorrow and whose temporal flights disdain centrifugal faces
of waiting; measured, coveted, photographed, love everywhere fading
    where silence maims sound and music topples over the moon
       the stars  the sleepless nights and  the stellified dust of the world
             that must be opened again

waxing, planetary
odd moonlight—

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

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

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

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

Light unloosens itself. Space slackens.
A figure of a shadow I have conjured before
anonymous eyes. Lapping up the waiflike bleakness
of their elliptical faces.

                               I must teach the trees to let go
of autumn, and relegate spryness to the hearth
of cold without merit, this slow, claiming mutiny
with its face-oval peering through windows multiplying
lovelessly, a crunch of a leaf, suchlike, flourishing
in peerless company. Before me, the sound of footfall
preparing to make sense, a rotunda of bell – that movement
of somebody done for, so ****** the scald welt of ******,
the belch of the world like a pore clearing its squalor.
Or the toppled verdigris of gull.

    Autumn’s greater extension, the abeyance, smilingly
a facsimile of crowds – its roads adorned with laburnum
singeing through the morning’s cauldron, a waft of bald terrain
inflamed, drawing with absence
      a crippled drip of rain back into the world’s dim address.

this thespian ardor.
aokigahara-
jukai, suicide of morning trills.

through  the mirror a light-forsaken  world

     in a used    leather jacket, the  packed  scent of   cigarette
exacts   itself   in  the  calendar,

     hung     on  the  wall  it  discloses  a shadow compressing

an  answer    as   in  

   where     once  to  feel  gliding  into the  air  a figure on the ground
       is   song        of   color – that  it is the   truest  manuscript
   whenever   I    yield    into

             the inseparable  gesture   of   foolishness  as    entering

a  scene     and  coming

     back   only  to  be  an   uninterrupted   furniture   fixed  in the  finest  day.

Imagine   hot
water           music
            traipsing  down  my  throat
when you   had  your  sharp   tongue
      shoved    down   my  throat
with   contestations    simmering   in  my   sinews,
  a  few   of    them   scandalous
some    true    like   the   sudden fleeting   of your   crepuscular brow
   to   two moons   paler   than   the love –
or   the    long    traverse   to the   treacherous
    roads    of   your   skin   mapped   out   in excess
your   lecherous   debris   sprawling  everywhere   like   words
   to   a   book   or   silence  to   an   early  morning    commute,
your     undulant  bursts   outmatch   the weight  of   my
     steady  anchors,  imagine   this   cold   wind  sinking  deep
into   the    bone    at  4 o’clock   in   the   afternoon
   drunk    in  front   of    faceless  crowds
hunting     for   purpose,  discombobulated   erudition
      in    sodden   corners   and cheap  thrills,

imagine      the     scrumptious   twinge   of
     the  Sun that  mangles   its   arms   to paint   a new
moon   for   us  both   and    think of  this   as   a  consignment  to
  oblivion    when  the twists   and  turns   of  the road
     remember  only    measures   of   steps that have no  names
       and   not   the passengers, where   one   wrong   forceful
  shot   at   fate   could   mean   the   end  of  all things down
   below  an ocean  of muck   or   just  stale blackness and  ravines
      of    voices   bellowing   to call  out departed   ones

where   you   are just   as trivial    as
    driving  in  Kennon Rd.   at night   without  maps
and   beacons,  only   far-fetched   city buoys,
    the  frigid     wind,  the collapsing   bannister   of the night
cloying   the   turns   sharper than  how  it was to   first  see you   leave
    in   the morning,      bringing   in  the  fog  for the first
        light   of  reality    to   burn.

I fear    of becoming an animal to pin within the
       forest of your silence yet a manifest

   If I said once your accidental burden

       was my presence, which cage shall I occupy?
             To accept that  being   is   sure custody.,
To the inundated moon to a full that was only light
    when everything shook within the height of absence,
To have you a rumple on the thousand-fleeting foliage
     and have me wronged as the green is cut from the

throat of dew-soaked grass

                           a    mistake.  Now the fear of

you almost peering through the shaded hall like a fugitive
waiting for  an open space interfuses

                 with my burden. The geometry of our
   setting   has become the    shape of ruin:
      a descent. A path that arrows
                 to a consistent departure. A trajectory
    lost midway,     murdering        the forest.

dissonant is what it was.

that foreverness of din.
criminal—
  aloft, eluding some captive way
    of emphasis.

  scraps of papers fold
and truth is rarefied. hammered
for its malleability is its common trait.

truth and always its never ever.
the men mumble words as if
  oceans whirl in their palates.
the women hide their thighs
  and think of fornications.
the children learn to pilfer
      stray coins in the keep.

dissonance is what it still is.

there's a slow moon over the aubade
     over the culled garden.
     over the cloverleaf curve
    in Balintawak. over no trove of truce.
  caterwauling noises flailing
      belch of automaton metal. mendaciloquent glower of lampposts
    to die early, abandoning EDSA—
we cannot name figures any longer
    of the same axiom, equation,
    salt, crossovers.

quite drunk in this evening tender with rue – there is a gentle hand
that whirls against the bougainvillea.

things remain to be constantly in the tranquil as I am not
yet shaken in my fragile frame –

the leaves rustle in the 19 degree cold moon,
the beer bottles emptied, stacked beside the receptacles.
she and I could be dead, and it took me 3 years to know this:

there is a photograph of her thrown somewhere
behind scraps of metal, caged there, like a jailbird
in a jailhouse, screaming blue against redness.

I had love, and love died.
you neither flinch nor move at the very slight of me,
passing over the porch of your reading.
the thing that once moved now festers
with stillness, and so many vibrant explosions begin in the sky
and there is nothing discernible in her abject eyes.

I remember driving past your home in front of
a little, quaint house and I swore that the even your voice
speaks to me in evenings full with the thought
of never knowing you again.

you are so real like the horse that grazes the field
underneath umbilicus of power-lines,
yet so fake and feigned like the truth that tries
to assess itself , crawling mazy back into my drunken arms
like a child startled speaking a thousand things
I have already no use for.


sometimes the sun is like a house on fire.
sometimes the simmer of onion smells like ******.
most of the time, the look on my face, half-drunk and half-believing,
looks like a night distilled and fractured by voices.

I will never ask for your hands to touch,
I will never ask for you body to make heat,
I will never ask for your footsteps to chime in grave music:

I have my own defeats to keep me
that way: toppled and scrounging for light.

let me be.
I have seen many warfares and not a single shot of a rifle
has broken me into the man that I once was.

I drive back to you and it is never the same:
it is banal to say that you have yourself
and I have my own, deep in study.

let us drive back to roads whetted with kisses
and from there, start to disentangle
like leaves from boughs
deep in December.