I.* there is no thicker undergrowth than feeling. first to go is reason, everything
    else levitates into something graver than say, one foot deep  in the grave
     and the other somewhere off-tangent like an offbeat adagio zigzagging
      into slammed slalom.

II. the crush of oregano against mortar, and the clasping of a hand. carbon monoxide
      fades into air as youth takes on momentousness. take for instance this once soft
    hand like a breath of cotton in a precipitate noon: once whirling in claustrophobic
      space, this slight inch of feelingfulness is dazed into the span of *Maya windhovering
       somewhere unseen like paramours *******.

III. from the window you can feel the bluster of falsetto disintegrate at its slouched peak,
       and from where you hear it, a dance thwarts itself like a cigarette ember
       convulsing mid-air – that slow, repugnant twitch: that is you, when you first
        broke your silence in thick shrouds of disgust over strobe-lighted simian jaw.

IV. what else is there but to take this sour ocean in front of me and decode something
       the blue always means mellow but the froth of white something the tragic caprice
        of tropic: some nights, they remind me of bodies careening repeatedly; some days
                    they just are, like you, just are, like a riot and only sound, or sleep and only
          reticence, something short of wonder and terse with reply.

V. there is a cluster of harmonies flowering in my mind when the sensurround of din
        starts conflagrations in the ornate dark of ear. my limbs snake in the garden
        of plank, my shin bitten in sharp reiterations – my mind crossing the equinox
         looking for shade, or possible, a parasol underneath the crimson of rain.
           say this is the sky, this dense space when I motion both hands into a length
       not an inch could ever devour. suddenly a boy made out of a man, flustered
        in jangled arpeggios and unapologetic thought like a letter of debt opened,
         paying no heed the mind and only what the body dictates: a smash on the
    escritoire or vigorously scratching scalp, reopening scabs and watching
                old blood ooze dry like a lightweight webbed impression
  of       a    dreamy legato.

VI. the night deepens with the warmth of its black upholstery – we do not know
      when to stop and bid for home. last to go is will of force and first to arrive
     in the bleakness like a recalcitrant thought often straying outside with the
       strut of a yuppie, fervor of old haunt. i conjure an image over the cold chair,
    its steel framework thighs untouched, its four decrepit legs the foundation
       of something that refuses to admit its weakness. the very base of what would
   catch the anchorage of my gravity, the very heart of all, and the flattened back
      with a vandal that says “Soleil was here.” the liver shattering in the trance
                    of everything.

VII. night is stupor. i am the lilt of words from a rambunctious machine.         there seems to be an afterthought that separates
                       a concept of vastness and the tactility of narrow ether.
        a word is uttered in extremis - something heaven eschews
                with its bright, arrogant face.

a word's rearing
in light's mid-step. foams through
brine and saltwater's tedious
and redundant swarth.

an all-ending music:
silence
is
all.

it is where i punctuate you
and another syllable begins -
it is you (eros
     in
       thanatos)
others,
   slinging, meaningless.

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.

suppose words
are water and our bodies, wells—

flat on our bellies, our unsuspecting laughter supersedes their suddenness.

too late to unsay the space they occupy.
they arrive not with wind galloping
through trees.
they continually commit a nuisance
to us here in this decrepit home,
christening us with depthless sleep.

— what transpires beyond these shadowed moments unlearn the hairbreadth syntax of their perilous measures:

even the morning has no promise of May.
i say that in wide-flung hours of April when leaves begin to smoulder a cluster of red in the brindled breast of foliages, and rushed like lions to a slaughter, paring the flesh from the bone, these words unsheathe us more than the Earth shedding its skin — a dull synonym of how we are pressed against walls, our bones outstretched to breaking, ourselves displaced somewhere where the air of rescue does not wholly kiss us.

there is no image fainter than what was painted. no machinery can outlast the weight that is carried —

persisting lovelessly, a ragged meadow.
clambering ceaselessly, the warmest of bodies recoiled in melee.

suppose words
are such black-red thorns becoming petals and stems merely lovelorn, joyful to the eye
and hands are moons the bedfellows uninvited, you hiding behind shadows
    of changeless flowers:

so much the quiet way of this fate
reduced to hair-trigger.

thighed and pried lilies, dew slips frightened to a mist of trouble;
morning sleighs its brilliant face,
  such a luminous beginning to a dislimned end — far less touchingly than
a lullaby, this hot water music scaldingly
  presses on naked and whispers to them
  a new name without forgetfulness.

the weight is immense — anchored down, full of something in excess. there are doors that wish to commence oblivion, windows yearn to squint at the Earth so timidly muted in the body.

suppose your body is a home and the night subtly the wind that blows,
topples the roof-beam —

may your sleep be still and unshaken,
  your unperturbed garden slouches with a bounty of emerging flowers;
may your windows to the soul
  be always ready for birds that secretly
move in virulent strings of melody,

  something the world sings screaming
of life, something the stone of a fool
  so supple in hearing, something
the heavens hold together with the
  purest hand, something we precisely
    dream, such that we

        suppose you angels
  and us, the witnesses.

hear    me now as i say
  pilgrimed is the image
  unloosen
   yourself   into the wind
  as i *****
      for some
  sense of
     placeness in this
 vaudeville

      no more are
 the birds that
     sing and way past us
 already seconds
     in waning
    is the same permeable blue
tracking    up
   our curved  spines
and when      weakened
    falling at
     last

as multiple
    cities do -
i see   a line
      for  a stream uncollected,
 as      rain
     over     genuflected
  hills      will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my timid tournefortia,
whose peripatetic scent matadors
the mad men.
whose laughter veers away the impossible,
of whose flame will gander
like flotsam in a sea of aloneness,
you are a danseuse in the
misty moonlight.

     perpetual in the night illume,
    perched in the deepness of
      sad walls calling out the
   azure. my little tournefortia,
      it was such joy to have lived
   when you have blossomed.

--- as all flowers go, you too, have gone - flagrant grows regard, like a prancing flame
    of blue my eyes are frantic and
    anew --- i seek new flowers.

still swollen:
      moon in eye
    lips murdered red
      with the crimson of
    maddeningly furious bites
       the crunch of bone
    turning in bed - air and moment
     stopped and in between
       the hounds spread
    darkening rumors,
        dropping once again are
   eyelids from too much
           heaviness of unuttered
     words, unperformed verbs
        seething in between teeth,
   cheek pressed onto crumpled
     ******* from groping in
the dark knowing only its
       frail rescue

    these tiny fingers still
   ache from touching anthropomorphic fires,
        the ears still swollen
  from distinct susurrations like
      o's and h's and their
     sweet campaigns
   my heart's well engorged
     with a whelm of promises

       in the morning there
      will be i and you,
    our love still throbbing
     in the loom of it,
   as we go on leaving -

a word from thy mouth
is the spectral arrow
from nimble bow.

risen are the caryatids,
unsheathed are the swords,
molested are the gladiola
by the night's harsh *****;

the proscenium dislimns
as the iron curtain sea drowns
their blasphemous orations!
the thespians alerted
by a wordless hunt

   as i rise like the dew
  lambasting the autumnal grass
   bedecked by glistening wheals
    of ripe luminosities;

  this damp hour, the mercurial
     assault of declarations,
  fastens every word underneath
    tongues of river-deep stone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

these moments
and their stark absences.

it is not the tier of enmeshed leaves
nor the zither of green. none is their duty
to discover the lunar hook of moon.
   — the old bamboo is the mistral
danseuse tonight.

whatever the etcetera
of it, whatever the birds demand from it.
a sling of breath is far-flung into the sky
announcing merriment before the child
beheads the tulip,
      before the creature chokes the pistil,
        before the light enters slow-churn
           of synthesis.
  
  hearing the giggling of bush in
  the mire of wind, heaving in all kinds
  of sleep, the children, the weather,
    together; synapses drunk in translation
  and we feel no longer the secret
    of a guerrilla behind the foliage.

  it is only the heraldry of the world
  when the morning unclips its wing,
  as monsoons continue their bushwhack
  amongst petty citations.
          past oceans gleaming and
    away from hills dreaming —  by the
river, dead of heart, riveting silence
    of land, past the battered bridge in Marilao tracing deathlier waters,
  
         all gone in recall, something
i scour to find only pining away from
scarcity of remember. it is never their
    duty to bring back its image
  to dance with me again.

blood for blood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

even the dullest of knives
can **** —

a smile has fallen deep into
the silence.

wincing on and off
like terrible vertigo.

it is you lashing across
dispersing images

seeping like ruthless mileage
underneath the bone.

you come in the room
full of these hours splintered

an outpour with a foreboding,
like spindrift you wet my lips

sealed shut and silence
is all the language i understand.

what good is there that this hungry
cavalcade gapes its mouth

and metastasizes like an opulent
laugh as maniacal as drum-taps?

your are river with feet or pond
sprawling mad, enigmatical.

is this the clearing motes depart,
unhinging the crepuscular

and fade out, as a cat shrieks tumbling writhing fornication of metal and rust?

even sleep cannot manage such realness,
and the doubleness of its comatose

or say, a war in spite of its radical
artillery. between two cities lost,

its indefatigable exertion pullulates
to a hand, laying garlands

over the same blue lament of sky
and the unawakened orioles.

swift inset of love's Sanskrit,
a thorn of contestations.

make cadence this sensorial music.
centrifugally waiting bodies
to cross Earths.

a plethora of annulments.
lion-telling Sun singes through intersections of infinities:

we cannot wait to quash
the morning, the scent of guava leaves
and the cerement of flour on chicken.
earth-hewn mounds of meat pressed
against beholden kitchen clangor.

declension of memory past wood
and pillars of home. lattices of light
forerunning fingers, let down the curtain.
wind swings with maddened turbine,
afternoons high with deadlock.

of all that is not here, the force
reawakens a long-stumped ******,
beating us back to edges ruthless
with angels entirely curved, singled-out,
wings clipped, dancing at the tip
   of the candleflame.

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

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

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

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

milbrightlions of December —
you come announced in multiplicity.
even the night-herald blooms through
the beams of astounded simulations.

buoyantly uttering a word
of light, stilling itself in the sky,
unasked for.

surmounting the Narra and the mangrove,
sieged to a halt in its exactitude
like the uncomplicated machination
of what makes fire simmer in a wick.

all of its brazenness hearten
in easily toppled altitudes — even our
battlements scar our unexplained
liminality we grieve at first glance.

airless are the spaces we lean on,
testing their capacities. shrills bloom
clearer. our mouths plump and glazed.
our flesh hurtle all incarnadine, all true
unlike the twining of roads lit like
faces in the marketplace —
       a dynasty of brokenness.

Remember when we
cannot remember anymore,
the Sun shining through
windows sealed shut,
when we talk about it
we do not talk about it, we call
it with a different name: aberration.
I cannot remember you anymore
so small and languid in this
life. Everything pales in comparison --
offered by chance, filled with hesitancy
as if obligation, emptied by coming
into the fullness of it, saying it as a plump word
with the same accuracy of knives
tucked within the soft recess of the kitchen
counter that same day, you were different
as any other when we cycled through
Alexandrite Street, the world new again
like we were born in the similar moment
splintered by much less of a force waiting
outside the black gate of the home, and so
much more of a name slipping away
from the cliff of my chafed lip onto your
body's sustained pit, the drop barely an
indent, only as if of limited exertion but
possibly a weight for us to solder
through and through. I told you I could never
indulge into the fray and hold armaments
of it, but twice-told this battle I can
fit in: you, my accoutrement for war,
hallowed you are in excess of flow and march
through rain and light smiling through
opened windows with a blank circle of lightness
that is your face held close and memorized
before taking the commute home, force-equipped
with time's persistent pleading and our
untoward compliance like a reciprocal of stiffness:
you are the wall of your home and I,
a suspended pendulum with a dumb clockhand
     in a stalemate.

2002
Dearest Klara,
  hope you enjoy
the poems as you dream to write
      one poem
happy birthday*


There are still many books as though
   parliament. A miscalculation based on coordinates
in a wry scene.

Two bookshelves creating a labyrinth, enough that you
are alike. Juxtaposed to scent are many words
and the day is almost done. Ignore fragments once,
but never overdo. I can outlast moonlight’s procession
into a dark cathedral by the window.

On this side – reason; the other, hesitance.
This is no heist. This is what belongingness refutes.
What willingness bandages. The absence of sentries
  made for easy rapture. You slid your hand into the dusty
fort and in between them, the paperbacks ached.
  “I will do it.” and after that, cursed at the farce.

Slid into your bag – you, surrounded by the tense air
of silence. A dilettante at being a fugitive. What is it that
you stole?
   Your body, elsewhere. Flailing. Failing. There are still
many marvels in the scene, but says precision is key.
Cuts as if contravention. This was as calm as painting a child
  in his early years, the hue of anomaly.

Quiet in amplitudes doles out a mystified sense of completion.
I can hear an ajar mouth unwind a soft humming.
   It was time to go – tomorrow when we rise with no memory,
  it will be all but one and the same fault together with many others,
     as if your face that day and your image now
          compels me the cold of a foreign city. Riddance.

It seemed so much as no new and uncommon thing
   that what passes on as only a disappearance,
   is but a temporary postponement of something
   long withheld in feelingfulness, in treason of one’s
  desire or simply, a hand which is there, or kept in a pocket
   scouring for loose change, a hand which, somewhere,
    is known in accurate proprioception: refusing to be held;

  I swim against the current not
     for the water behind your river
     that dreams of fish

   I wake not underneath the bowl
      of moon slated by sensorial howl,
     whose wounds are white like
      a face once held in between palms

  and sleep almost endlessly, together
    with everything that twitches, slewing
  to avoid collision, alliterates to blur meaning,
     sways fervently to addle meeting

until we let loose a sigh, and unfasten ourselves,
   dropping pace and both our eyes meet.

Is this emptiness
or cosmic space

a love for dark or consummate
absence?

You lay there
and I, here
in the same
tangential uniformity.

we are but together
splintered, then separate,
making no difference.

you, in your place
and I, in mine

like some unattended baggage
dragged mechanically
by a tireless conveyor,

a hound in pursuit
of its own tail in intense circles,

left to my own silence brought
to the brink of all the noise.

*

The morning with its peripatetic
crush of garlic and spry birds.

In an unassuming distance
strip to void, teased to rogue,
the light does not arrive with
its usual taciturn warmth;

your mother gives you a pear
to pare and ******,

my mother, the same in giving,
yet another thing worth grazing

say, the old skeleton of an empty
wine bottle,

a cold stride past womb-tender
bungalows and sleep-shaped mailboxes.
the feel of its bone , gutted out of flesh.

a compelling strike of silence
permeates more silence – like a prayer thumbed
down to its last throng.

there will be no dialogue.
this is the same quietude
in miles that assume our places.

maybe once you knew this domicile
like the curve of your bow-leg,
or the glint of your inner thigh.

the word “love” falls flat on the surface,
taking its station amongst the masses,
flying with the birds soon dead in their tracks.
the word “love” slits,
cuts open, unloosening a wound,

your mother in the kitchen paring
the flesh from the bone,

and you hear it,

as we look out of separate windows,
the hush churning sound,
spreading on all fours once in this room.

the morning lays out its hairbreadth
wire of memory

in some place unknown to us,
to size the measure our own,
still yet not ours, you in your home,

and I, somewhere outside the world
fathoming shadows their own things not ours.

words fail me as rivers do this town,
the sound of everything breaking   with a sudden onset: bones crushed
   like twigs, the churchyard a mirror of this hollow

   the   resounding of   a bell a category of  prayer
filling a mouth   with    filament – the   inglorious  morning
tired    of   its     felicitation:  chorus   vacating  the  body

paying   homage   to  a  nearby grave:   sound  the  body   outlast   everything

      take        sweat    for   wine   turn    this   variable  into  a    satellite
    let     it    exult     without    a   name


and   I,   for  once,    without a  poem   even – let me,    this   death

     almost   a   blooming   someone    to   remember.

electric — conflated with
the doldrum of once ignited feeling
on the russet table work
and the stringing aroma of flyblown
coffee painting the morning something
earthenware;

i imagine
  
     women lounging
and displaying their flamboyant dresses
confessing a dull promenade
parading their attenuated *****. reveling
a queendom on recall and this bane,
  merely resolute, gives itself a new
meaning as a hand of forgive

   men resigning their bags on the corner,
grunts, heaves deathly serious disallowing tomorrow's arrival into
  a throb of being in place, folding newspapers to a club and smiting fervently along with the endless waiting,
  
   verses lying cold on the froth of the tile
and the wind ripening the brew of
     contestations — punctuations in their
cupboards still and reserved in hermetic
   space curating silence, giving dins
     their polished ends,

   open for all: churlish boys,
   naked girls, faith-used women, strife-torn men, usual suspects,
     rebels and the overwrought –
  never closes like a hand in cold
      or a rose, its face occulted by
identification sideways torn, inside and out struggling,
      scrunched to squint on some pale light through chinks on the battered
     wall, sipping coffee,
   mmmm, that
   morning ripple transcending the
         heaviness of the city before me.

light scrunched, a crouched shadow.
eyes discern heaviness of
ordinary places into various flows
   of gutted fish.

this world gives away a weathered image:
its wraith comes unannounced

lovelessly drags the stooping gait
of walls, obscenely expires
   a small clearing

this mundane home gives way
to a restless flow of other dimensions.

bird of the afternoon
reaches far beyond extensions.
discombobulated tendril of light
   flashes its fullness
to a bedrock of reality.

the kitchenwares start to falter
but all for the way, where once
gray hair graced this table,
her vividly tremulous hand steadies
  a fixed touch on bedspread —

on the wet back of freshly bathed fruits,
  a metonymy that continues to bruise.

morning's watery hands part to meet
the mist of departures;

quietly as we all are, seldom imposed
an overhung dark, and as quiet as you,

                                                do not go.

a room full of grandmothers,

night-gold —

espials of eyes
syncopated.

take this thread and fissure
me love-struck.

tenderly the walls are white,
the mood: all malaise of trees in autumn.

Christ's redness in hymns
**-hum angelward as rain

brings a discalced memory
close to sand by shores of repeated waves, where the gull tirelessly
          punctuates
the water with its centric beak.

all youngness and beautiful
rising like cunning equinox,
slow auburn of eternities commits
  to angels denied.

sharing something a memory would
espouse in lips dry like tropics,
  looking down on familiar abandon,
reaching out with their hands and making
   no sound, felt yet always, in tender
     hours of night.

the edge of green,
   egress — conscious permission
of some inundation or cataract

  and the raucous facelessness
  of passing figures. army melancholia
in situ — past greens of dread
    and red, some blue of course (in
    dapple of sunlight bordering
      sublimities)

  i submit to its silence and no longer
     ponder its requisites. draped
by fog, helm of pines. the zigzag of
      deliverance swindling the disposable
line of fast-paced time-hover.

       there's no god here. only the
wind, the trellis surmising a component
    of nothing and happening,
  and all ephemera cycling across
   seasons forever changing and their
obsolescence of ways to retain their
    positions until air frizzles
  no
     longer
   than a bated  breath.

transcendent it was the first time
when it was of faint memory to touch

but voluminously told, exacting itself
like the pretense of the heaviest pages

the curve of your face the entry of light
through momentary indulgence

nerves their city buoys and the pedestrians
salt of skin in intense heat begging for details,

ways to sewerage of mind and previous blunders
and the purest landscapes of feeling,

the underpasses of eyelids where glances hit
first, stalk swiftly – to wait underneath their

shade in the fleeting Maytime sun
coming back with renewed fervor, remembering

that from there, waiting in that margin,
there are things that may only strike a potential

but never learned, memorized, collapsed into
the absolute, and that lostness is imperative

to the finding –
the river of eyes where pilgrims are in transit,

well-constructed like the mausoleum that
keeps its secret of hills and cathedrals

kept unmarred in the silence of your refusal,
pulled out to be nailed taut into origin

the blankness of your face taken as mechanism
of marvel – to whoever god drew lines on your face

and to whoever foolish wanderer would dare traverse
your collapsible bridges, the sonorous depth

of your being when back against the dash
of beating back to senseless origins,

your name similar to the prepared countenance
of Manila, passers-by in awe of your slow Moon

unraveling behind curtains for showerheads,
humming behind, a conversant tune

where not one being ignored and it was true
to the form of first whispers

this whole new world mapped out
made naked to the twisted augur of shadow

reared by light through innocence,
a whole city I know but cannot touch.

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

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

if yearns
  to be  kept as  is
  a thing holding   itself  together
  traversing a straight  line.

  pause as if insistence,
  breeds space, pretends   as  if one
  if not   halved,
  severed,

  stills itself  to  a  portrait
  facing  the   mouth
  of a  door   that shuts   itself
  to   the   future,

   reopened  like a  wound
   foretold,  dragging with  it
   the  lassitude  of a  detritus.

   memory
       has    a    force
    compel  me  to    compress
        my    voice   to    silence,
    memory of  a   face
    by   sundown,   the   moon   in   its
       throne   subdued,   kept   afloat   by   a net
    of      stars.

   memory      it    is
      a  force it  cannot   name,

   forcing   open    this    held    peace
      does   not know   how   to
   break
   
     a   fall
   but   only
      break.

this tired militia of existence.
the burlesque jeepney stallions
   its metal anatomy. its belch-***,
its slur of alloy clanging like hundreds
  of men for tacks buried deep
    by a cornucopia of strikes –

thus is the heart, a boy in his seventh year
  dragging along a kite;
the soul is a bus ticket torn by the conductor,
  thrown away into Novaliches.

to wish it true, its gliding silk
  of air – it was only beginning

when people meant we are finished,
  we were only just starting

tonight as the night wills it, a boy

   fishes for brine in the shallows of dream
padding the small of his back
with a hunt of green: his equal self.

   the day, loose in the wind, perfect as perfect
   can be,
   yet still not quite, like when mother said
   the light dies, its low wattage in the hour,
   the prize of the candid moment: dimmed. darkled.

beneath   her   feet
   her   most  daring
   feet
   that  traversed
   the murky waters
   of    dawn, past  mountainsides
  of  prayers,   stallions  the blackest mare
   love combined,  daresay   silence   annuls
   the    noise   of heart   and the  shadow
   casts its  darkest immaterial   stone

beneath    her   feet
    her  most  daring
    feet
    the    dead    continue
 ­   to   bury the   living
   and the    living    excites
    the    demanded hue   of another   blue
     to hold close   into the   sky
     whose    also    darling   feet   dangle
     much    like     water’s    fervent  collapse
    mantling   the   rivers,    miles you have
   walked   without     images    of I

beneath her    feet
   her most   beautiful    feet
    we   go   wind  by   wind in   excess
    of    days
    in   the night’s   blackest   dress    soiled
  by     light    is inmost    dance   instep,
     curated   from   machineries
   beneath her feet
    your     feet    I    adore
  which   bony prominences    hurdle
   me     weak,    ruined,
where    I    lay  
is   always  the   cradle    of   Earth
   your    feet and   I beneath
  them,   emerging   from   the  possible   life
    of    leaves   in   birdflight,

beneath    your    feet
    your     cold    feet,   unrelenting
on    the    unkind    tomb   of   my body
      your   swift   drop    of    feet,  their
superfluous   coming-and-going
   love    landing    on my  body – trampled,   weighed down
  beneath   your    feet,
    your    most darling    feet.

o, good lord of the streets
where a phantasmagoric sensurround

banishes the scream of youth –

a carburetor snarl taken
   as unction of name. was it

your name that you whispered to my ear,
   him dearth in the quietus.

first to go is grace,
  what soon follows is bravery. a makeshift moon
of course, hanging by the earlobe of

her; I’ve been wanting to bite to break skin
   her truly frightened symmetry
of a  storm which is an  onus of  pain -

o, good lord
     help me weave way later
     when I’m down on my contrabass.
Scout Albano tonight’s a dark
   expanse of    regret

resonating a deep and hollow throb.
    women on flay, cigars in mouths chucked
like busy streets on a noontime sun, the soot clambers
   the billboards and their frozen, extant smiles

      wring out the poison and drain:
    we have no imposed god, an announcement to ear
  shot into the flay of the bone that persistently
      aches - like some unreal drumming of squalors.
            
         we are ruined with echoes of many names that haunt us
  with their gaping mouths
              in   frightful  angles,    but

when we’re drunk, Marc,
   this will all be over.

the car outside. you in your plain clothes;
I solemnize over this slow hill of flesh
when you lay down after the dredge.

it was your old automobile. somewhere in the
console, piping in the shell of night, your once
swift-footed self.

it was for Mico, you said.

this thing of time that was once early.
you in your white shirt with blotches of
yellow, like some aureole-bitten lip of bougainvillea.

some cold smitten flitter peering out
of the window of your gray head, your sage,
prattling about its conscious footing, this automobile.

are we but disputes and all that sense,
eluding us? somewhere in Malolos, the fatigued
machinery with its lilting rotor

modulates a once wild memory:
you, still in your white shirt. two bodies
drained of inertia – otherwise occupying song and silence,

our volition nothing but jarring (unmindful of its scathing dialect),
our terms to ourselves fabulated, the savannah drunk
in dappled light that evening – in front of the hospital,
mum as a nurse.

you pass on the keys to him,
learning new language. by the thousand strophes
of this lurching sea with its plodding delay,

your once bright bone, quickening in slow delight
now, as his face obscures yours with wonderment,
this evening – both of you in your denims,
   all three of us in a huddle stamped
  with heavy understanding.

affixed there, its insignia of silence,
   the river-memory of bleak stone
   in waters raging

all at the vandal of the afternoon.
  running dog's the swelter, a salvage
   of iron in heat. the revolution's an image
  of the child in all of dogdom

when anger breaks loose a fettered dove
   here, or the crisp agony of bannerets
   shoving a name worthy of forget:
   bawling enigma from here to there

all the tension of wires, umbrella-heads
   are people, drowned in lambanog.
 our mirage drunk somewhere in intestinal
   roads flushed with the swill of bile --
 moon's the face of ******, stars
    their ****** patrons. squall of wind's
  the pernicious call of morning starting
   washlines, groping dry,

   an unpossessing pale ******. somewhere
 in Quiapo, someone's a Jesus-monger, ****
         of the Magdalena, or
    an inverted crucifix treading its way
   past hills without geometric memory.

  mine's the next station, yours too,
  thumbed by a tired machine: this etcetera
      of coffins squinting at their faces.

It is June. Plaridel is in sepia, or leaden – whichever,
  this is the leitmotif.

Soon clouds with jettison a plodding swathe of
  water. You will wear the petrichor,

While a ramshackle of a passing tricycle
  whelms a throbbing orchestra of junk.

Here is the hearth that rears no fire:
   a mother, children in tow – a troika,
   on a cart not even close to ease of
   a hurtling thing.     Trees naked in vulnerable
   green – the verdigris carried by a
   miniscule Maya.

Here comes again, the neighbor peering through
   the nuisance, is alarmed, eyes like a fugitive,
   curses my mother – I grab the nearest, sharpest
   object available that was my own hand.

Ingrained deep within, a root – or a stone, among many
  other stones in me, this salt-well, a savingslight of turning wave
   that is almost an approximate oceanview in me.

Gnarled over the longest time. In here we soothe by
    gin, passing out in front of our gated homes,
    singing whatever was available, close to our pitch.

Somewhere, Windsor has lost the poem / critiqued by
  a mirror fecundating a smeared image, a blot.
   A Rorschach was it, or just a day dazed they did.
Somewhere, this is scattered. Uncollected. To make remnants
  of as evidence, not to investigate if true.

The 6th body of this is what I am speaking of in glossolalia.
   A requiem leaves it stark and cold in this consummate weather.

Another piercing salvage of metal cuts the humdrum town
and unlike the sturdy mango tree, this is a collective of secret
  encrypted lasting more than a life.

It is June. Plaridel has ripened from the expired summer.
   Perchance the exquisite promise is sweet, holding all the bitterness together,
    ready to fall, at last.

taut the barb which my heart
flung away and adorned – such language is black while
many others have their places that silence
   had fractured.

the punctual shadow of the night,

                                   I converse in them
   through the pulse of the roots and their
   consistent counter-beats.

the many others, whose centers encircle
    heavy in their viscera:
enisled as a conference of birds
    in plenitudes of brindled mouths – the augury
that sees itself, my full being – this nocturne
     of stone-flight. the cosmic working of the sky
that hands me, a necklace of stars which implausible pearls
   simmer in fond gleaming: these foundlings that are
         dreamt away, and named innumerably across
   many other anonymities we recall with a throng of sound.

   in my hands the night folds like an origami
   conscious of its florid ikebana,
       as there could be another splendid thing
          like the calm: glimpsed, coveted like the light
   of all things grave in darkness.

i see graves in centrifugally waiting
faces
     of vain.

    mortised to sleep, somnambulist
   of this prickly road,

   i kneel to pick flowers
   and throw them
  onto the face i long for
  understanding my eyes
     my mouth
        my body
          steelwork of soul,

   tossing as if a toast
     to our end-fate afloat
  in a raven's wingtip:

      we are all deaths
         wa
     iti
         ng.

trees sunk in dolor as i teach
what i could to the flowers and what they
might say to me in seismic lunges
of dark upon quivering fig
   will tremble the environs.

the boughs mimic the serious mien
of sundials — men have forgotten
the primitive yet go rushing murderous
waving bayonets claiming the silence,
  the ruin rising above the phalanx.

my glyptic words rise above the foliage
telling all macabre presses against
choked light. the heron,
  the  nightingale, o'er there yonder
hills tryingly enunciating something
   in the hollow: they have traded
us for mere soil.

There is an inch of sleight in this house – this cold chair,
a burst of cologne clogging a 20 minute stride. The stringent
air tonight blusters deeper than gashing sheens.

The little dryad of dew outside and the cadenza of frogs
after lambaste of rain. Whenever you sing, your voice
communes an immense pain, something unconscious of its
gravity, something that levitates back to momentary ululations

swelling in the grime of times and heady chances. A long stretch
of a day submerged in silence resembling a howl underwater.

There will be many sorrows and they will take form of doves,
assume the skin of the populace. They will come in a volume of
names pressing the linoleumed musk the way the body turns
maneuvering over the saltine, the mattress, juxtaposed to a lover,

a brusque aroma of coffee brushing away the calm demeanor
of the morning, dragging along the weight of its lassitude
towards the sprays of fern opening a dense ornate of forget,

you, in all places that pulse without recall – an obtuse
fish feeling its life in a surge of blue, overtime, finally knowing
    what it means *to sing and drone only words.

such-a-deep-and-comely-thing
so-fleshless-moments-are-going
shari­ng-something-the-silence
and-the-quick-quiverings-of-flutings
whe­n-nothing-becomes-the-heart
like-a-jungle-stripping-the-panache
o­f-the-viridian-softer-it-is-the-truth

of-the-navel’s-blue-pursui­t
in-the-caterwaul-of-bodies-to-a-spry
plaything-summon-a-laughte­r-blacker
than-ravens-in-the-thrall-of-the-beset-moon
and-the-hom­es-fat-always-with-such-tender-beatings
it-is-the-time-of-the-her­on
it-is-the-end-of-the-susurration
when-the-unswift-hands-of-all­oys
sojourn-and-still-something-a-dagger-in-the-mire
of-the-cloud­-that-egregiously-whispers
a-long-possiblity-of-dreams-and-their-­palpable-weight
(say-it-will-perhaps-contention-of-pulseless-awak­enings
   when-it-was-such-truthfulness-that-when-the-heart-sings
    the-mind-stirs-and-the-hands-dance-to-roundtables-of-mirth
     twitching-such-belittled-locomotions-when-it-was-fashionable
     to-have-adorned-you-the-love-and-not-firm-obstreperous-meandering­s)

you take the fall’s seriousness
         like you were a leaf from the bough
of this tree called love –

     as you were nearer to me than any other
light with its hands clasped, starting rivers in me;

   you, whose mouth benignly twitch to utter
such glibness that even the stinging fragrance
of newness sings in me

the darkness swallowed slovenly as if all of the world
swims past the squalor of my blood – new to old wholeness
bones to a gleam of washlines,

       wherefore there is nothing left to guess
in such hypothetical kisses when you looked at me
with two strutting cities for eyes that
churn to fade out such articulation of sibilance –

     it is like this is never a better fate than plunging,
the moon between the hill and my body
    within your body.

my little hummingbird
moving towards a stasis of light,
holding a simple secret, a bell's machinery!

       trilling on wiry breath
      or my mouth's plumule,
        my chromatic bird,
       unmoving as a bud translated
        in reticence, plucked from
     the mire of ground's vastness,
       speaks only so timid of my
       hand's agronomies,
    glazed by a moment's fresh glare: your unending eyes that see
     yet do not hear!

      take my hummingbird and fly
    with it! take it away from the peripatetic and plant it soft
      to your mouth's jar!

we are both naked. you
     know what happened to me
     the night my mother kept
     on bellowing sad songs in
     the morose of 3 AM.
     you have all inscriptions
     sculpted into the shearing
     of the wind and my bones
     riveted in places now
     tremble as the slow oblivion
     of falling asleep scare me.
     as i collapse onto your mauve
     chest like a bookmark pressed
     in between the leaves of a
     book, there are lines that we
     recite in total silence:
     you did to me as i did to you
     what needs to be done in the
     time of our bold awakening.
     we dressed each other with
     the velvet truth of love.

Bones need not to be ashamed when under
florid light’s strict surveillance.

Take this as advantage. This means invitation.
Dragged you into a terrible work of a labyrinth,

anesthetizing your execution, your critical art
you had secretly loved and loathed –

Sensing out a pattern, your vision as tour:
we see nothing but wreckage, heed nothing but lassitude,

and when their faultless gravities fall
upon, let them interrupt us. When we are broken,

repair with beauty all who elude us everywhere:
introduce them kintsugi – all these years

of specious encounters: I have marks to prove,
telling like an alphabet, scattered like punctuation.

Bones need not their love for understanding.
When spread on a territory, virulent like a makeshift

field effect: necessary when transcribed what the utterer
resembles an intone of a blatant present: you too mirror

my figure. Shatter it when you are done with.

I do not know what it feels like to live in someone else’s dream.
Outside the house, the moon, like a mistress, slits its throat
and bleeds white. The nature of all things around me has its way
of heaving out the wrongness, as if a drunkard staggering for words,
floundering in a curt reply after being asked where’s the nearest station
towards nowhere. I remember in 4th grade, they asked me what I
wanted to do with my life. All I ever wanted was the same clichéd response,
without knowing the appropriate punishment the desire coming with it.
I am not culpable. I wanted to be a bird stirring in a plainsong: free.
Whatever that meant. In a room where cross-sections of you tender me
margins I cannot cross. When I was young, whenever my mother would
leave me for the marketplace, she told me to always lock the doors
and never let anybody inside. The sound of the gears resembled your hand
in mine when we held hands, securing each finger into place the way
the night tucked us to sleep. It is still something the unforgettable, with
its feigned urgency, its ersatz summer days indoors spent on nothing but
gibberish and luxuriously lounging at nothing, looking at blank spaces
as though they were naked women the first time and the last. In a place like
this that selfishly spires with thoughtless hum, it’s conversations with the smallest
details that cover such distance, revealing weight I cannot solder.
Freedom to me is as bizarre as any other feeling that pushes one person
over to the next one. I have its wobbling sense scattered all around like a crushed
scent of bougainvillea. What we have to give in exchange for it, and what we
are to acquire after trying to weave out denotations that would make us swill
over like muck over the city that we selfishly breathe in, and our almost
ridiculous misunderstanding of the word riddled with unsparing details.
  I had myself mull over it, passing your decrepit house. Freedom,
the wind, or a bird, or anything unloosened like a waning volume from a stereo,
a readying tip of fire awakened ready to catch the corners of your fingers,
a basket of fruits in the morning from a remote bazaar, the peeled off and pared skin
  of an orange, some November night that burnt auburn, anything that may take place
     anytime in our hands – something that does not break in it, but holds still, waiting
to take place, forming names, sliding away from fingers. Freedom, to have a shadow
engraved on an architrave and a cornice, and to have your name in my heart
  like a frieze ornamenting some entablature, or that long dream of striding past
the Metropolitan, knowing how erroneous it was to feel so immense at that cosmic moment
of sizable smallness: the perpetual dialogue between a host and a barfly,
  mellifluously woven striking in sense, a farce raiding meaning all afternoon, like the close
eye of the Sun inspecting furniture, or your nosy neighbor taking time to stop watering the
  plants and watch you dance from your window, to a music that he has no knowledge of,
               but I do. I do. If it wasn’t plainsong, then I was wrong, writhing and alive
still, leaning in the air of a dream – free, wandering,
                      *wind,   passing of figures, clenched fingers, nothing.

Whose dreary face now becomes warmth – an ash turning
  into a single drop of water

I love and I have – and I know that when she looks
  she does not. Nothing moves the bird of her dawn but

her. Proletariats sing of steel in the night and I deaden
   within their homes. Whose dreary face now becomes

the steady light on the porch – a thigh, or a river, turning
   into a single gasp of song.

I love and I have – and I know that when she sings
   she does not. Her silence moves the moon deep within

its womb and annuls. Each moment in her shoes, she is absent,
   and I taste the pale death of her precise waist,

her sharp tongue having me curved when enough was said
  when empty was sure. I know whose face I am talking to,

but knows not what day has escaped me. The possible:
to bring her so small in my hand, and invent her this fate,

to be unclenching like water and virile like stone. I know
  the singular act of her likeness is born out of my lack:

there is a spring-clean image traipsing the water. I must chase
  where it streams, and its origins not my own.

The city borders us two as we are demanded by the daily:
  the smell of a home shoals me a satiny sob. Still the marvelous

sky, a knife, if not referring to me, the cut lily that is the Sun.
  Whose dreary face now becomes a store,

commerce, becomes the silver of hills, becomes the gray assault
  of an old cathedral, becomes the surety of a transaction

and then becomes wind chiming through cities. Becomes inquiry
  between I love and I have – becomes dearth and is proud.

   Nothing will stop the train arriving: when thirsty for a glimpse
  like mine a fountain or a singular wave from an opened window,

she passes – and does not look for me.

synagogue bells jar and outside is the
  color of green, mist enshrouds moss
  macadamized in young wall;

beating back to lips, a paler hue of scorched red,
     a moment twists, hurries back to
the shell of a modest hour,

  rearing in its tender arms, tantric ***
of rain and tendril. tenuous wind swiftly
purloins sound
      submerging the world in picker-patter,

the moon fronts and the sun
     behind — this is my world and within
its breast, the riverrun stride in between
   stone packs its smell of mud

clotheslines full with heavy fabric
weighed down to intent and inertia,
  dragged down to sleep and dream
as the hourly siren tolls somewhere that
    does not have a beacon, a name
  even, blaming only the shadow frittering
  back to its console, pinning us
    down to the calm weather we sing
about in the afternoon —  reaping
   in the twilight,
        a cold-mouthed Hefeweizen!

there are worlds underneath words
swathed inward, swirling from
rondure of moon.

of all that i have loved,
you are the only one living

here within the lining of my skin,
or thinning dermis of turpentined walls,
same as the ponds have their
   curved silences, i have nothing -
a river bled of its source, living in wet verses.

what the turning of days might
bequeath you, as cunning as the mayday
of evening with its susurrus, is what
brims over diminutively, a glint of star.

i believe in the empire your love
spurned from all that is ruined,
drained of their excess. how i have loved
to trail you, across the crisscrossed roads
and receive such fullness no purer than mine:

all your sweetness that is for me,
the implacable honeysuckle and the dew
of mild beginning, i believe them
   all
breaking loose around me, perduring
   still, lorn and born only of visions
all yellow and filling up trees so as the assault
   of light spreading maps through the  sky,
      looking for its home.

I, whose sleep gloats
searching for answers, steering for a dream

I take my place amongst men
in parks, in alleys, in trains,

and the Sun unmasks itself
like timeworn skies of linoleum.

trees their bulwarks realize such oneness
and birds start to rain

where time wounds all feelings
and lovers innumerably lay flat on their bellies.

mountains ***** as tall as truths,
and the sleuth more than my body’s engine

turns less than a seraphim – dizzy with the
night’s utmost haranguing.

I, whose soul returns not with garlands
but with chains as my phantoms go with them

swimmingly across the blue Earth
and a man brindled, tussled against

space that so distant the star becomes so near
and all sleep lose names of dreams.

Doring — not much has changed since
you last spoke.
the children are still deep in the mud.
the bellhouse at Poblacion still rings
when it is 5 PM and the ubiquitous bazaar
   sit on the cornerstones.
however, when the white angels began
     latticing you to contraptions,
the furling scent of your homely perfume
      has gone dithering. grandpa Mario's
revolver is somewhere hidden wreathed
    under a wrestle of things we do not
use anymore — lottery tickets ( 4 AM, grandpa would fall asleep reeking of
    ale as the lady announces frail luck
over the somnolence. kitchenware longs
for the ****** of your tremulous hands. the Lazy Susan is attended by only a bundle of rotten bananas, Mario's old
nauticals: whiskey bottles, scotch, goblets, unrest of glasses. we still
buy pandesal near Beng's piano maestro.)

nothing much has changed since you
last spoke. mother held your hands longer than imagined trill of Maya outside tightwire. it didn't flood in the swelter of
the cataclysm — years ago it was deathly silent when you were sitting on the rocking chair waiting for the flood to subside, your grandchildren laying cold on the aged floorboard, rescued by
zigzag of newspapers. it was the lightest
of darknesses. nothing much has changed
    since you last spoke and in your
silence we heard the most immense of
voices. the streets remain pockmarked.
ocher pots festooned by wily flowers,
stems of hope. your hands tryingly gripping whatever
     was brought to their splendidness
looked like forever smiles.

Doring — the nights are fuller,
my sweet old etcetera of chores.

we all lay quietly in the mud for now.

mutilated
   as the light obtrudes;

like a fly trapped
   in a spider's lair, waiting to be
     devoured—

my hungover soul, dead,
drunk
    from drinking all
the sadness
    in the world.