these winding, blind itineraries
  and their purposeful turns;
  bends on the wry pavements,

  their naming of things
awaiting the return of memory
  with an auspice, or a head with bounty,

  i am but a bamboo in
    the wind — slender gymnast
supple ground's tenement,
   or daresay honestly, a creeping into
the world with roots close to
   heartland, this poem
now, without feet and my eyes
    with surgery-precision ruptures
the softness of all things held close
   and divine like a secret,

swimmingly
   light coming in
unabashed rooms
   here now is a poem,
a homecoming.

woman – it is when your hairbreadth laughter
spreads into the world, pressed low against the breast
of grass and skirts of flowers,

     like a well-oiled lamp, you proceed with your
terse splendors, your sharp wingtips curved with gropes
of steel with what notion of a senseless blow but a smile
scrunched deep within the water?

rammed into the dry throat of the afternoon,
   a hot flesh half-bitingly rippling, fondling into my throbbing
water – from the abrupt, sweet-smelling rise of tide
    arrives what I am in pursuit as a man, smoothly writhing
the languor of tired believing the always, do you still cling

                              to me like harsh wind in Spring?

once
it
          has snowed—

  helm of pines

whiter      than
      doves,        wind-flumine,
   trapeze of
       boughs ache the

                                   lark, bowed—

  inward, curve of  Earth,
      gentle ray     of light
   lifts
        like hands     holding
    
     the sky above, birds roared

   through
               the interstices,
  strophe       by strophe
                homes thwart fires in     hearths,
                 no warmness

                   gilded the vertigo of pinecone.

man emerges from this
darksome ether.
  this: time suspended
  in the ballpark, without fetters.

i have dreamt the truth
  of my vicarious call.
is it not that my measures secure
   these constitutions
      of ineffable fruitions?

it is likened to our heartland's
     acrimonies: dreaming in the
  misty vale of sleep is the word
     and its insistent void,
  riddled by amorous intent
     of barefaced realisms.
  there is nothing here but
  subservience of fantasy's    burlesque fanfare
    on broad vaudeville.

man sinks into the bottom
  of this, rests in the
soft hands of this earth-woven
word - a poem's importunate nativity where all supremacies
     are born ceaselessly!

verily this evening, from the veranda
i smell the fragrance of their arrivals.

the tall, slender, stockinged women
swaying like bamboo in the wind.

the admirals in white commandeering
vessels — the shear of wind, a tractable beast.

the ploys of men to woo the darling,
  the hesitations of dames cloaked
in obvious handiwork of skirts.

they slalom through life's rugged streets
like blueprints of doors revealing
  benign propaganda.

it is all too real to me. i have lived
behind the shadow of words.

it is all that i am cut up for — doting on
it still, yet a nonexistent blossom.

hearing them leave the interior of walls,
soldering the notoriety of burdens.
witnesses drowned in water,
their muffled voices reinvent the quietude. there is a dailiness overmastered by them, such rampant
mendaciloquence denied by me.

i move past cataracts of crowds
and hunt for the silence: this importunate need that feeds my bloodthirsty being.
i awaken the sleeping prowess
of words and listen to them.

now, leave me with my ocean.
i was meant to ***** in the blue
and froth like the last of unburied water,
  dreaming of fish.

there are so many of them
  and there is only less
  of me —

gondola in Venice,
  H-bomb
and the knife of Bach;
a steady collision in Q. Ave
as the fizz of the afternoon mirage
settles with the ides,
the torn elephants of
  Chiang Mai
the red blood of Golden Gates
   the froth of the repeated wave
at the lip of the ocean,
  city buoys lacerating
the skyscape

and your coming in here
  ransacking all;
appeasements and
  trivialities — there are so many
of your photographs here
  and only less of me,

looking at all of you
  and weeping it
later. sounds like these sounds
hanging by the edge of the bed
reducing woes to a hair-trigger.

i look outside and there
are women, cat-called by peddlers,
stopped by cabs, inside and outside
  of cars with sometimes lovers
hot legs and all that,
simmering in the highway
glancing at them now
   lamenting them later,
what's a dull boy to do in a dull town
  with clothes dull wielding the
     dull word?

meanwhile, there's so many of you
and there is only very scant of me left.
light voyeurs through the interstices
   of the huddled masses,
panic screeches through the maddened
  streets of Vito Cruz.

   the night is all black and stark
and the heavy behemoth of existence
  prods underneath where
rats, rodents and vermin run
  plodding the highway with sleek varmint
    demeanor. a lady passes by with a
string of fragrance dangling upon
  her shoulder-blades.

what's a dull boy got to do in a dull city
  with a dull heart?

there are so many of them for my
   territorial hands cannot name
and there's only one of me:

     unheroic
        impinged
small
        half-drunk and
half-believing

  that there's something
a dull boy ought to do
   in this dull city
with dull words but it comes
   with an exorbitant outlay.

dog-leashes are expensive,
    moonless hoots through opened
windows hefty with price.
   moon-blooms again and again,
missing all hurt trying to repair
   the ravaged — i look at young
girls, old women, fine and complete
  and this thing of being me
     on the market marked: sun-stifled.

there's so many of them
there's only a sum of me
that's often small and burgeoned
bringing the question
  
what's a dull boy to do in a dull city underneath a dull moon
       within a dull crowd?

Answered, thus labeled because views a similarity. Who had this in the hand of the eye’s compact? If presence shifts to absence and believe it is safe in transit, what contract aspires to be an object used against it?

Here must be another present, moving thing for this nonattendance to take place. Its duty need not be nominal. And when it takes place, there is a guarantee for a statement: almost, to a certain extent. Had, adhered, temporary.

This was taken as an insistence of its exclusion as an avowal of its state: when a thing ceases to move, it has named a boundary all within a venue with already christened boundaries. To rise from its nomenclature, a question: what for is this mode? The unassuming and deliberate twofold of its chrome is indicative of something. There are only two possible answers to the question, but never warrants indemnity.

If amorphous then suitable to bend or assume over and over, a confrontational: to hold it against walls everywhere, its color only when dual fixing not a shadow, but the possibility of a shadow. To spill light over the malleable – notice how a body contorts.

If distinct then determined to traverse a straight line, a sanction: to furlough the idea of its controlled variable which is its many possibilities, its shape now not only a name but a force that deals with a believable architecture of compressed options. There is no need for appellation when related to dislimn as a shade is necessary for this disappearance to simulate. But the treachery is that when light surrounds no longer, form somehow a myth as if pausing all lightness to declare something: this is of two explanations merely a single.

Staccato-***. Can you feel the damnation in the
    trickling water of minutes?  This fragment considers
   revising but in the next act, I will turn you into a miracle:
        a cloud of a sigh into rarefied air, and that is all.
   The ******* of women hang in trees. Consider this statement
     a ruthless compunction. Flesh in the market, I haggle prices
         with the butcher. I’ll take one in exchange for a love
   christened with portent, I gave it no unction – fresh as a fruit’s glaze
      in spring, or the crunch of dew somewhere along Baguio in the morning,
            intestinal roads frothing with excess of fog. Consider trees
   in akimbo past your sweltering window – the panes in feverish heat,
        what are you to do but splash water? Bathe. *****. Sully.
            We have no inertia in this feetless adagio. Wind is sandpaper.
  Pain is tactile. I am a ******, paving the way, crucified on no longitude-latitude.

If then a departure demands instruction
and your body when in pace

as signal of movement – elocutionary when
asked, a sworn answer force-defined

take enough space from ocean
and anticipate a barbed wind

within the finest day.
remember: contest all, if not

then sever what is yearned for:
a love, or a misguided another

returning for but not twice-over
a field but the densest perfume only when

accounted for. Foresight is to pull
the      weight away and transliterate

judgment: it is raining and how all
piecemeal and dragged heavily

within a home without furniture
awakened by no touch but of search

enough a call – a chain operates when
it desires to launch you out of

every territory of sleep –
wordless beside every morning.

the   upcoming  word  for word
         learning    the  dissonance
         overemphasized –    the inventive   wrongness

to   settle   for   what has
   decomposed,    what has   nearly   drowned

a dream  with the  quickest  sense of   being

   obliterated   upon taking   it   to   the   shorelines

and now   to   materialize
      as   the   body   starved for,   following the   coil
of its   womb

       to   whatever place   it   has   strayed upon

in   the   world  that  is   a   cage
      where   breathing  are we of   clay.

to Dani*

remember when, you do not:
you are a ground slicing the center of
    this home.

the long divide the furniture endures.
in front of the colossal tv
bodies spilled like water.
20 minutes was all it took – your name alone,
a potent hygroscopy.

when close enough:
dissipate. You took all the green the foliage could,
    soldered to your body a forest it manifests.

   repeated, if not a newer foundling:

    the   space   you  take  for  acquisition ,
    the faultless tenancy   you   mistake   as  counsel.

every saved for, and gleaming space
   aspires for venue – translates to an arena for snapshot.

[some mundane depiction ascribes for you to be known]
years later my portrait still hangs perpetually
on a modern furniture from a contemporary skillset.
  take this declaration.

years later, leapt to this day and forward:
the surgery of galvanized steel is reminiscent of a departure.
the tedious laborer smiling through bonsai pots
  carrying out lobotomies. The afternoon more sterile than
   your    face  as if operation.  This town knows you by practice
  
  and habit: all of it sepia, if not leaden.

a    man with his
     heaviness    weighs the
masculine     waters

    be    like stone
its depth    of concentration
  
   wherefore     birds  lose
  sight of their    rapt flight
above    waters    stills a man
    whose mirror     is not of   a mirage
but       a    man   flat against    the seductive      rose
  
   to     hold  his     breath
and rain's      supreme bullet
       are    but simplistic    maze
again     the   stone cannot  reveal
the     man   in his  proud   geographies —

      such   trouble   of mortality
begins,   a wrest     of bones,   the volcano     defined    by  such earthenware
whose   metaphysics   unalphabeted
  like   fellows    going back to god's    arms
   sitting      well   with
          red    roses.

Air left to
rust when we speak

it now is the time
to postpone

gladly over a shining,
retaliatory absence

in search of a space
to shape a volatile figure

that was
a bridge

how, humming our steps
a valedictory

making staccato.
hurry before it catches

us mid-flow, profuse
with sustained harbors

but they cannot
see us here when they slit

us from our canvas, how?
all that radiates

expels us out of this
when no more; absorbed their

breaths boldly stuck inside
a body: a cage: a meeting: an encounter

a path dollies in perfect capture
frame by frame almost an ellipsis

the world tonight blackened
a gutter squalled by an unseen figure

darting across,  eviscerating
the bargain: that in-between produced vastness.

you are in the middle of things,
insisting importance – you would feel
shivering in the distant blue
of another girdled spark and there,
in the not-so-distant sky,
I reach for damp perimeters

and have your face conclusive
with whiteness, sure of its glare,
  crossing the frangipani outside
  my home; silence leapt borders
and now an incident. uninterrupted.
resolute. absolved.

although so suddenly moving away
kiting around and perhaps death
will deal its part when love’s done
with its tedious labor – and it will all be

moments of bliss, two people renaming
necessary haunts, laughing
  in the dense air, keeping an ear for
the spring of yourself.

silence is a balloon in my hand. an erratic saxophone with notes as blue as doves
            strangled in noxious space.

            android Jesus, not quite the shadow, verily the toppled light
   renaming things underneath its parasol – hundredfold of monikers
    and a solitary weight of love.

                  this is where the blood starts to make sense in its cold shrill:
   a dagger making its way towards my back. here are few routines of ablution;

a conflagration of bodies. razed sandalwood. first to go is gravity. last are the bodies
    helium-gorged, afloat – there is an immense price for solace.

                                cyclic spectral          cyclic spectral

   there’s man in ox but never an ox in a man. can you feel the tenacious drone
      of the oncoming storm? can you feel the Sun so sick of its diurnal labor?
                            can you feel the tantric *** of dew? its sensorial fissures?
             butchered serrations of grass are like torrid piles of moist ***** ready for ******.
            
   again, here comes the quietus. on the loathsome table lies the shrapnel
     of last night’s carnal invitation. a moth not named Marieta circumnavigates a bayonet
                       of elastic fire. here comes the marauder of quiet again,

     in my hand, a round, red, silent balloon – I let it go, in such relentlessly hoodwinked
              pursuit towards a god that may or may not know how
                                to dance underneath the bludgeoned beat.

I  know  the  world    has only    space
      for    a woman   and  her  heart,   her  ******* emblazoned in  the trees,
her  depths  in voluminous   books – let only   the   saltine  water
   touch   her brindled   body   atilt   amongst  the lilies   in the  silver  dawn

         and   that her    cusped   hands  demand  a softer  hue of  love    whereas
the   salacious  wind  continues   its   grasp  championing  things   both  fragile
      and   sturdy:  the   world  slides  in the  coloured  curve of   a woman
         and  the men dare  too,  follow  the road  where they meet first  with
  death   sitting   still with  the  roses  like   a    splendid   fragrance   stilled in the mind
      leading     you   to a  garden  which   thorns   are ensconced
          in  a smoothness   that  sings    salutations    to love – as  I   remain  to be
nose-deep   sheath   after    sheath,  ****   after   ****,   stalking   the
           perfume   of   the  world  a  woman   owns.

I. You wrote no manuscripts but somehow, whenever I move to inch myself over the sofa, I can feel your soft blow indent me over the edge of this quiet. The quiet disquiets the quiet – is something you would have said over *******, over lamenting the death of a lamppost outside, over wanting to be stranded underneath the awning of a dilapidated canopy of trees outside. Over the slowdance and the turntable, over Belle and Sebastian.

II. I left the faucet running just in case you were to be awakened by a myoclonic ****. It helps to hear the sound of water gushing as it protrudes calmness. I would have intruded you, but your absence first lifted into the vacuity of rooms unspoken of. I inspected the impressions left on the bed and left the tousled sheets as they were. Questions discerned. Answers disarmed. Somewhere between inquiry and certainty, there is a body hauled right out of the alarming bedazzlement. We were both gutting each other as the light from the television spilled right onto our naked bodies, stuck in a fucklock. And then I got up to the slain body of the morning.

III. I muse you over Wittgenstein – separated by a makeshift bookshelf. I felt a revulsion for slender straps for watches. The face you wore that day was white. Now you’re as pale as a July tapestry.

IV. I bought new venetian blinds today.

V. Somewhere along the steep ***** I heard the machination of an arrival. The dogs were randy outside. It must be you, approaching. I fingered the slats to reveal a little source of Sun. It was the daily paper. I have forgotten all arrivals are the same.

VI. If I were to blueprint this house with my sentiments – we would be sleeping apart. Your bed, of cold metal. Mine, of sandalwood. Erasures last longer than revisions. I know your presence as the familiar clangor of the same instruments you use for preparations are the same ones fondled. Right after the investigation, your immaculate neglect transfers itself into a sly translation of perfume from a day’s work, winnowing my faculties.

VII. I made a blueprint of this house with my sentiments – you somewhere in the outskirts of town, I deep within the suburban. I have a question for balconies I do not want to answer. At what height should be a balcony situated? What if the scrumptious fall is but elevation?  Will the intensity of the Sun pulverize the very fixated shadow on the corner of my parched shoulder? If not, should I take the balcony down?

I wanted to revise the blueprint, but no. Erasures last longer than revision – I dream of cities expunged
when the day ends.

i yield damages—

"On a marble bench, dreaming:
    I can never hold arms of war
   but i can cradle the artillery
      of love."

some excerpts of boyhood.
some lines written so long ago as
a distant dove hovers, postpones
the herding word,

yet so near to me as a crouched dark
clenched in corner, knowing all the bends and turns of the road.

if i am braver than all — imperative
enough to toss the fear out of night,
or to wring broad daylight of birds,
why must it decree me?

remembering it rearing all the stillness
flown in the wind, the storm of my
younger self crossing Earths in all sides,

treading the tightwire something still
i am the wind and the peril knows my name, making wounds real again.

Ad infinitum*

embroiled       in another
waking            moment with
a bated            breath nothing like
this day           inclined only to obfuscate
its meaningless      joy of seeing yourself

in a pond        swimmingly doubling the inertia
of the koi       the day constricting within the verdigris
ready to          seal shut in hermetic   this vermillion eye
to wake up     into a long-held confrontation

       of   what this system closes in a document
       why bother this validation when valedictory


Ad nauseam

why bother     this   confrontation
when disappearance     this  space much like a long-held performance
   if concert is hermetic     in front   of a nonchalant audience

laudable     with  no sound,  an untranslatable music
      unhinged from the inherent risk of felling

an    inert   day   struggling   like    koi   trapped
  in a    pond    seeking  what it is   to transcend
   or   the  multiplied   joy   of seeing  yourself  meaningless

   ready   for   an  eye to   be   caught in  a  monotonously
     claustrophobic      *****   of    a   tremulous   middleground
   with   no   possible  agreement   other   than:

   this    potentially   demands   an  end
       when  beginning   you   are   lionized

  to    a   fault,   repeated,    trite:    *what for?

here, there is not much to look
at. in this 3 AM tapestry,
the moon cloaking itself
in profound dark, stark and unseen,
stars borrowing their coruscations
from their white mother
in choreographed intermissions.

only a swan-song undelivered
an a dwarf carved in noiseless stone. the bougainvillea casts
its webbed shadow on the concreted canvas. soon, the night will turn
rattling in its black bed, and then clamber back to its resignation
and the identical day of yesterday's inception will revisit
us through interstices of leaves,
forking these illuminations
without allegories nor travails,
just light and its lenient pedagogy.

there is not much to gaze at,
let alone speak to, in this
deepening spectacle. only
this swan-song that remains a secret between i and this indomitable figurine.
the moon stilled in its lulled repose, stars minding their own
saturations, as the day is in close transit, nearly opening the door of this pale fixture, entering with affable demeanor greeting me
through a hundredfold of anonymous eyes heavy with discernments.

I can only summon feelingfulness like the passing of a dove,
postponing its arrival mid-air, somewhere along the tucked
bramble across Poblacion, starting with metaphorical sensibility
or an insensibly bland space to procure wanted meaning.
Girls prefer roses and their bright foreheads diademed with more
flowers, and boys, their chiaroscuro or lack of a color thereof, seems
to be fitting in this maladroit contrast, and so I begin, as always,
with your very vague and caged memory. Your face, the whiteness
of snowcapped alps. Your strut, my slalom in a treacherous course
of words reduced to whisperings, to flutings. Your voice, though nuanced,
flitters with an overtone of arrogance: if sound was clothed, yours would
be flamboyant ermine. And the line in front of you before I, my arbitrary turn,
assimilates into a picturesque form of waiting somewhere in Cubao.
I wanted to smash myself with train-speed towards the metallic turnstile,
which, would then famish me even so, just as much as I wish to be a car crash
somewhere within the outskirts of your town, heavily vandalized by the swill
of squalor hefting itself like the rest of the world conscious of its viscera.
  This is how I start you – like waiting for the sun to emerge by Borobudur,
or the clandestine *** of mildew and grass, a hundredfold of images appear
before me and I cannot choose upon my whims and caprices. Are you a dove?
A spear of Sun? A thunderous crackle of an impending rain? A harlequin?
A moseying cirrus? Or just another by-stander in the crowds where I ultimately
seek your being?
      This answerlessness measures my knowledge of star, and my breath snuffed
out of me while I sigh from exhausted penchants, outweigh dissimilarities and symmetries.
A progeny from all superseding conundrums arises: are you a retrogression of a wave
back to its saltine wound, flailing in brine? Or are you just the vast sea and nothing else
on a fine and lucid day where children skip stones and chant name-callings?
                   I sense the peril in this undertaking, and much to my chagrin, I still
   do not know how to end you.

i remember
(a pluchritudinal memory)
when almost so effortlessly
our lives lied to us most indefinitely
in the hours that return with
lashes and chains—

as in clothes heavy soldered
to washlines, the waft in the air is as familiar as the rain cooling
the blades of grass you speak of,
something the dark only conjures
waiting at the brink of my unclosed retina.
i know all of these well-placed memories
like furniture you have arranged
under the hollow hands of the home.
yet barely even so, a fond memory of—
the daedalus outside or the cut
gladiolus, plucked out of the moseying hour's vicious wingtip.

we do not always die like this.
when all our dying whispers are thrusted
underneath mouths of stone,
when all of our wishes hold a flame
paler than a vague rekindling of the dead.

sometimes promised something an ellipsis would half-ponder and postpone
in word's mid-birth.

the raging moon had waned.
all the windows shunned — hermetic,
air outside potent, leaving all books
half-read yet fully opened.
the children hide behind thin shades
of roses,
i can hear the steely grit of the flesh
pared from the bone as my mother
guillotines with kitchenware

we do not always die instantaneously.
most of our ways to go leave
demarcations on soul — something so easily displaced, doubled array of its arrival into half-wakefulness.

something only a last prayer thumbed
down to the last bead
and we cannot cry anymore.

night's flumine seeks to rebuild the wound undone delicately
leaving my breath and betraying my body.

we somehow always die like this.

in   a    world  filled
                    with    pain
our      arid     inland    whelms  over
  the   swollen   sheen   of  the    borrowed   moon;

      faces     in    transit,
the       immense  rivulet     to   home     rogue without
      source
        people      undulating  like
the  weight of  a   subdued   beast
      regaining     consciousness,
                           these    shoals  rimmed  with  such  whiteness
    give     way.

                           unheeded        are   dislimned
slaughters    voices   muffled    to   fatal  nuances
             fast  days  in
the    rails     spirals      and  cascades of   both
   twined     rain and     tendril
         in   our   eyes   see   the gravid
weight   of   the   world    accompanied  by such    grave  silence
            arranging   a  rendezvous
                                          at   the  next   unmindful   station,
   trains       are       sad   rivers
   belonging                 to    no    one
                                              a  long   conversing   line
    of     kinder  tides   passing   quietly
               think    of   the    time   the   bones   are colder
than      alloys    returning   with  such
      intact   heat   or   melancholy,    was    it
   when    turning   away    was  no     troubling  task
        
                        machine    or    flesh
   forethought       or     afterthought
          outlast     and  outwrestle   the   circling   moon
   surly    from   above  and   swift  with
        flayed     light,   these   things   that    welcome
us   home    
                             piercing   the   solace
       dredging    the    traces    leaving   us   bare
with    intone       the     day’s commute  
                                     sings            tenderly –

air pours alive in stringencies,
fall of tor and expanse.

mazy-eyed,
casts a syncopated hook
amongst tulips beheaded

by the toppling of a leaf
bracing for departures,
something else holds back,

furrow—
the thatched morning's serious mien,
the arrow, whirling in trajectories

one with the dive into red cauldron
of infinite scar of water,
Śiva, sighted footfall of the condor's

verdigris, this simple rustle
of your scourge-gowns
insists cadence of flutings;

i am one with beginnings.
swarming poultice of the inflamed grass,
obscene lines of shore in twilight

unfazed virulence spreads
like an epidemic of kisses against the
pulsing loam, cries like breakwater

lorn the fault of men, death at one's
trembling hand — sound the tribulation
of slender bells to a gather of pallors.

it is a stopping in-placeness
like crests of *******, a beautiful woman,
shiftless weight of light on glazed    collarbone, Śiva, the enigmatical paradox

beleaguers a concatenation of
unloose chandeliers of appurtenances,
the unblinking aperture, widening in sky.

this unruly night
is macadamized on the wall,

whit its bare-knuckled steel mangled
to a ferruginous glaze of rust.

the dismal kiss of
      cold on the unclenching fist of the dark
is irretrievable in the grass,

soon, glass-faces will break as my simian jaw
was once shattered by a scuffle in the twilight-bells
      of recess.

  it is like the night dances and in awe,
struck by some rude awakening, we sit forever
  emptied of beauties.

even the flesh rouses to startle the reared relation
   of calla – its hot-flush widespread of petals
  thought I am given always, an intone of forgetfulness.

   such pure lunges and gyrations – we all have
spaces to cross latching us in total placeness like
    black hooks impinging voices to a shriek,

  yet surely they go off wandering in sunsets
waning in the formless crepuscular, waiting the night
  to pour stringencies,
  
    small-breathed furies futile
        like arsenic.

all that is the sea
  
         in
               one
         full
                    wave:


      the fritter of each line
      reaching for shores,
      the multitude of eyes
      in in phosphorescenr sand:
      memory etched
      in flumine! erased by
      the arrival of blue hands
      rinsing all, leaving foam
      of passing tides already
      full with derelicts.
      sibilance of breath speaking
      its origin and now
      i swim past all ruins,
      moss, seaweed, crush of
      light and opaque contest,
      lifting with the voyage
      of a ripple, and back to
      your breast,
      i dream of fish!

i bathe myself with
the music that i alone, hear.

i heed the flinch
of my heart's centrifuge -
gyrates purely without
a hand holding it,
in a lonesome,
contrapuntal waltz.

i lie naked yet untouched,
this aloneness.

even my words prosper in
the tumescence of speechlessness.

hurrying back to
dimming light
is my body ready to feed
the wick of this dark.
traipsing the
bareness of this pantheon
is my soul,
and no one else's.
solemnity scales the stars
and transforms them
into margins to fence my own universe:

  i am the only celestial here,
   spinning in a thousand days
     of restlessness.

it dawned
     from the half-bitten fruit,
    this boorish serpent,
      this inner foreboding
          of flesh tingling tempted
    out of frame.

     sin takes to blood, the nail
    sifting the flesh, birthing
         the bells of the word

      fracturing our silences
     displacing the void into radiant senselessness -

       this heart of Pilate
     where once in front of
    this purloined innocence
   the temples crumbled to ash
     of all beginnings

    telling us all of our
     preordained peccadillo,

   unannounced wraith pouncing
   on each to lurid each,
       biting more from the world
    and its land that remembers
     the till of feet welcomed
      by diadems of flagella,

    love have we not, eternally?
      no singing seraphs wept
        as the afternoon erupts,
      a fragmented word: love.

words   what   more  than  silence,    criminal
    shaded    meanings   plump like   the  mien  of   a night-strewn    beast.

words   what    more   than   sounding for   it
  the   night   hemming   into,   less  than   a fugitive   by definition

   words   do   I   deny   the   static  of   soul    when   quiet then
          places      the    cholera   in    our  abdomens ?

to   say   when   the   nature  of   the tangent   is   a   voyage
     of   the   story   you’re  telling,    masked   behind  a non-sequitur


  that     does   not   intersect   elsewhere   issued   by
     a   lack.     where    else   are   we   only   slightly   connected

                       when    we    move     to   break   a   point,   or  to   distract

a   face     once   again   foreign, your   name   emerging   as   whimper.
       coming    out   denied.

   words   what   more   than    revenge,    your   sound   less   than an alternative
            bandwidth    confusing      its     meaning

coming     out    undisguised.

1
What do mornings regard but
  the night refusing to budge?

The Sun a progeny
there must be room for days in
   this revenge

2
I   fold   I
in this exquisite manner

I  dream of  my  fortune
    as  rash   before  this I  slid

underneath the cleft
like  an  epistle

   unopened,  stamped  by the dearth
of another

secured   in this  absence
  black like a cummerbund

3
The   bed shook.
     enough  to  toss me out of

but not  inherit me  into  a dull succession.

our  places  nominal.
we have   a sum  if  syndicate
  but  still  impotent

they   have  made  this a reportage
of  a miracle  read  from a  gauche script:

This is
the morning that
was becoming no
less than a champion
over you |  vacate your  body
      while you  are still  able  |

the body confesses
I am constantly awakened
  by  this  futility.

i hunt for a sign
of you in the vernal sky—
all summer and breeze.

1.
I am optimistic enough this day clings to the highest mast,
is now born out of prophecy.
                           I pass by the old mirror: see myself: blear myself:
is blot to canvas, slit from the wrist of this home:
   I witness how it is to sustain beatings.

2.
In the empty lot, age 9, we wrung frangipanis and ruined
   the pedicle somehow a map of a history where this ground
  shook that was once an old cathedral. We blew

               bubbles out in the haziest of days, pallid and droopy
    the clouds identify in their short collisions – the stream that was
   the sky
       the  face of  my mother when found news of my would-be death
    1996, Kawasaki my mother's clutch on the soiled linen
                 beginning an autopsy

3.
I conjure a frayed upon image of death in its colloquial.
       a fractal of mistakes taken as righting out. I sense prognostication
when potential for a satisfied framed encounter or out of luck that was
       a night making all of this less than total.

I     remember the discoloration of the many lights – the sky beginning an
  erratum: this could have been your last – what is exacted here
        like a tarot, the culprit a newfangled man in the rearview mirror.

4.
How can I forget you – all of you? You wear light like karsunsilyo.
You are all flowers I arrive at a contusion of gardens.
  Rinse me with light – abandon me after.

5.
  Made air staler. Dew my maiden when lit
  from the matutinal – in tow, a bedraggled kite soaring in the heat
  one distinct summer,
      wish it pure that was I, almost touching the vermillion,
my faintest image of freedom was a bird trapped in between
   the venetian.

6.
  In a dream, I am pursued by a train in an alley – in the next scene,
I am being forced to take a plunge
       into a chasm: the fall did not scare me – but my acquiescence
made me flinch: standing before space, anesthetizing
       the skin so it made me more than metal, the clangor

   suggests a tragedy. Awakened by violent nudges
from       my mother: it was the New Year. Pyrotechnics paint the sky
over and over an ephemera in the bleak behemoth of this:
       a makeshift home ruined by untranslatable music

the sound of rain at 11 in the afternoon and a nearby funeral.

my poised mother stances
to behead the onion—
begins a murderous sound brigade
of simmer in the home.
the fizz starts to assault the restive
pulse of woodwork,
the red plush of air in the heart of cauldron — little child you are no longer
  a boy; the furniture is arranged and
the nail is hammered to its deep oceania.

the feeling of stillness,
  a saboteur.

a stasis of dark flounders a steady lark.
headiness of scent peregrinating
toughness, the countenance of walls.
i am always the egg smashed opened,
cracked, bleeding clear, yolk gallops,
  slides like thigh upon fault of pond.
i begin to understand the curious case
  of feral, the benign death of rodent;
the cupboard infested with species
  running around China plates.

  the quietude starts
to confront the little house
   of moon — the silvery mane of water
trapped in the Earth, listen to its bell;
the shiftless rotund of its footfall,
    these are the hooves of it, rummaging
   past the minutes like a horse.

In here everything attempts
to be infinite – that when utterances
free themselves from mouth’s dungeon

it may all be but locutionary.
This is your leitmotif. To have your darkness
breed flaxen hair,

and in a split-second your eyes in their
deep epistaxis of blackness
follow me with the drone of such machine.

This unmethodical severance; something
drastic by necessity, but does not strike
with the same accuracy of necessary haunts.

Back when I was young, I had no picture
of ravens. You, screaming all across the yard
of your rawness, fracturing the morning.

The trees with their shadows strode
in stilts – the span of such winged vestige,
I thought, on the sterile concrete

was the virginal image of ravens.
Even the rain is able in that awning fount.
The sound of tranquil is the water pipe left pouring,

draining itself of its entirety. Fire hydrants
inflamed, grow jealous of such catharsis.
The bus, running over a pile of garbage, is never off-tangent.

I do not know if you have still the memory
of this place – if you look back too near, wide-eyed,
and surgery-precise, or if you are to trail back too far,

the settings will only pulse with a life you used to know,
and adjustments we are not inured to: if you are to take
this dream of fish out of sleep’s water, it will fade into a cathode.

It had in its forgetfulness, something still the moon is a raven
in a knell of silence. If you are to come back here, everyone
is stranger than they were when you left,

and that what used to pass on as answers are now
mauled into fustian of enigmas. The din of such
demeanor, electric and tense – so swell you can feel it close in

like some pain masquerading itself into
a close encounter with the sheen of pristine moment;
but pain is in media res and to look at you merely, a disappearance

      or a terminal finish .

like men in parks

let us

greet the oriole-filled
morning with an ineluctable smile
and go merrily with argenteous waters and their rustling freedom,

be as flowers are, thirsty
for life, quenched by sweet ambrosia from the Earth's
hermetic vessels,

sojourn and watch slender fulminations of dawn ******
against the oleanders, the cypresses, the children tawny
with laughter, and the sparrow swift in wind's deepening hush

sing with the string of birds
and wait for women for us to
gaze at in their lush pelisses
as the heavens gather a mound
to graying, reckoning rain through
sills imperatively shut
as rain slowly announces its arrival

like men in parks
treading gently are
the passing flight of herons,
    their unnamable wings
truncating their
       journey as the day closes
its wide eyes and sleeps!

the lament of fixity
gazes on stone, its death-fires  encircle
the slender body of the doting Sun.

this is our time spent again
when our days obdurately say
that our inimitable skies smell of
wet willow—

our time has come to sleep.
the soggy horizon closes its eyes
and darkness enters like a thief.
aureoles criss-cross into
touchable delineations.
i am closer to the Earth than I was once
before you, bared to profile
like a fruit pared by your teeth.

what awaits in the gleam of one's
waking is the fruitage of nondescript music flowering in my ear:
the curved entry of your breath,
receiving it, my ear's bell,
shaking the cathedrals and by the pews
of my somnolence,  a trespassing whirlwind, a dewdrop, trickles of flame.

are there lips, with there power enough
left to clench in their growing?
this den of such tender love,
when i roar ardently dressed as
  an admiral in sleep's sea,

i, mounting the waves of your body,
  dream of lions.

How in that timed instant all was brown: I look at my hand, the world outside the lens, the river, town when after April then crossing May, how everything went brindled, cut, and broken – housed in that fragmentation are so many lives: I, awash in the many a breaking and passing of things. You remember her weight to doubt and begin she was not there, for whose security she was being filmed but my own sake, from all the appearances the distance switched to fog as I remain in immense debt to time from the then and now which made no difference, and how I associate all the hollow to a hue I fear not black, but brown in this setting – how to straighten when found in the orientation bent already to begin with and is deadened by a refusal, how once again, in the hollow of, are unexpected blurs of your own skin color echoing outside then in, in which all the trembling made you sure-footed, changed nothing in you, insult I took when I see your laughter or in lotus positions there is something you ought to give me, but didn’t.

the heron
of your arrival
lands squarely
its talons set
on fields of
awakened grass
as the slender bell
of the morning
shouts into clear void.
its unequivocal voice
shatters the windows
of this home's numb silence
where mouths play back and forth,
the jocose allusion
of a blank audience
where the laughter sledges
an amalgam
of fire ferrying proudly
over a flight of moon-stream
that stretches its white bones
in a quotidian gyration,
fanning out these
  words almost as if infinite.

let startle inlight, if not so lifted
in peregrination, a lavish seeing.

two eyes are worlds in
tippling axis.

taking deaths,  a wreath would a candle,
a prayer would a body thumbed down
to wisdom our backbones break.

to see    death    like a rush of flowers.
great the sight of such illumination.

swiftly going to god's dark behemoth,
  metaphysics of bone clenched—
   darkling like obsidian

a complexing fault of road
     as the same vein of Earth aspirates
       the wind — whose exigent fire
  cleaned her bones back to
     pulchritude: her face a diamond
     in the rough — never to speak
  yet to clamber with summarization,
    realness and revelations of roses.

the world utters few,
light treading its way
through scrunched up space of tension.

inimitable
as all images
burst a flounder in colour.

spectacles of past
pullulating retrograde,
moving past our photographs.

Falling as recalcitrance of movement – seeks completion – yet the ground
   ballasts.
            There is no path that leads forward as I live backwards.
    There is poetry in the way
              a woman carrying a bilao moves away from the vicinity.
       Sound departs.
I took a deep drag and fell into a thick web
    of smoke, recoiled to fetal nature, into the womb of my unbecoming.

       What seems to contain endlessness: dark.
What punctuates this claim: moonlight.
      In a house that continuously aches,
I am grateful for windows.
                             Night-erased repeatedly, the dance of blades of grass.
       There is more stasis when words flay
                 themselves to pass as something more resolute than there is
     the kinesis of life’s steady abbreviations. We shorten like this,
                             when we curse the destinations upon movement’s mindless
                approval.

We collect ongoing afternoons
                         and cohere to trees. Say falling like you mean it,
     the way we commit to breaking though unwanted, feared.
                 Feel the hands accumulate warmth when propped
  into the sun’s permanent daze – face becomes glare,
                            a day becomes a scar.

This    is  where   I do  not know   what moves   to become fully   stationary.
     Days crumble like this.
   In a poem that is not a poem.
   In a sound that is only sound and not music.
     In a dance that is not life, but stillbirth.
   In notes that are purely rambling, not reportage.
     A voice that champions a fiasco.
                             This is where the   throbbing  afternoon becomes   a part
       of me    that falls   into   a chasm of   a fateful night,
                lassitude    of   debris in  tow,

                                       starting     measures  everywhere  we   left and   returned –

its stillness presses

    urgent,
      such heavy ardour
   and svelte

  a mouthful of birds crossing
   bodies spangled with wetness.

   again, i gather a roundness
    of rose —

      i echo with the bell of
         thorns:

  with such quivering announcement lay
      slither sprucely
          the drizzle — i have always
    anointed her with grace none
      the fumbling of emergency
         cannot mouth.

To watch with intent but not desire, his life passed
     him on as he tries to explain which one he
     would take to the afterlife if there is such,
like a convergence at the tip of the horizon or a
     humid evening in Pasay as pyrotechnics scrape
     sky fashioned like acrobats. The breeze he needs
     no longer. And then begins to disquiet the quiet
    with the heavy burden of which he will then forget
    when he starts to move all of a sudden in space,
       capitulating afterlife again if there is such,

 and if everything takes a sojourn into the bleakness, must I remind you that you are all
     variations of the same absence. Remember when
you had your name carved on wood as attendance
    but not for long. You have escaped, locked in the
       arms of a life that you thought was yours but
     still isn't, leashed under the Sun. Bodies pulse
  then fluctuate but not a sign of life. Words function
     more in stillbirth. Never forget, as a dandelion
     hovers and puts a smile on your dreary face,

and a question in search for all available and naked
    answers. Principles undermine caprice. Do not
 adhere. Must I remind you that you are
       someone else apart from who you think you are.
  You have yourself straightened, tucked safely
       like intent, not desire in all its voluminous and
     vehement speeches annotating something unknown
           to the behest of ourselves. If I were a house,
  I am gratified by windows -- your mirage there
       transfixed in a secluded spot, looking out
   brimming with life as curtains oscillate as the
      Earth breathes with you. If I were a house,
   you would ransack everything with a sly mouth
        packed with powerful narrative. How you
   have done over, leaving everything undone,
        moved off-tangent, under impossibly gray skies,
    brindled in prayer. If I were a house,
    
       doors slammed, speculative fabrications sleep
  through evenings and mornings until no difference
   is met -- you meant a word as if it had a lock
       and the key, somewhere cold in the air of
             sleuthing pains making me so, less than
     this and more of a fractured house.

the droning image before me,
a wetted silhouette hushed in loincloth.

all are tiny currents with their immediacy;
confound careless grace for warmbound sweat
of the swollen world in the heat of an uncollected moment.

dartle I may in delight of frenzy, cold air nibbling
at my feet. river runs pale in the narrow grey-faced street.
knee-deep into the water of no rain, simply a dream

of wide hours. mind you in the **** of minutes
and fine-tune this machine infected with body english;
basking in the flood of midnight – this swirling fish

in the permeable navy: a nautical breath tender in its rasp;
a trifle on the things and their undulations. remember you
in that stolen night, face to face with walls their blackened meanings

faces pining away in transit – if the plenitude of voices
in the station would merge and form a whole new world,
are we to drown in the sound and emerge mute with wonder?

I squint at the city across the balustrade, its sibilant air
of disgust – I recognize mooned tapestries and see myself
as one of the lights, the appropriate tension of hands that

have    their own silences held to themselves
like how I ***** you in light.

anything    that       is,
must   bear light —

transitory, translucent: perhaps, winged
  and conscious of space, mindful of turn,
sizing down height. vertigo of all that,
   shining no ambivalence.

this   is the way my world will end:

the room still reeks of sour mash —
   Pablo the dog, oblivious, marble-eyed,
yet some pitch-black hound's awakening
   from steely sleep.   the pages will
fall flat on the doorstep unannounced—

   it is difficult to   imagine angels.
  it is difficult to    deal God's infinities.
    they are each to their own
           faults.
  heaven is    meant to scar. still drunk
     in fearfully fretting butterflies
     tilted in slaughterhouses   screaming
       ****** against the crowd.

    there will be no falsetto claim to
  sovereign —    a drop D, e minor chord
      on the guitar, strumming, swimmingly
  discolored    and only resounding.

it is not that we are far away
but there is   this stilled candor  that
   there    are   spaces,  gaps,  turns  and swerves   that we   cannot   close.

   as in  a star in  its throne will remain
to be  lit in  diadem of white, cannot be touched    or you   in your silence
   with the drone  of such  tired machine:
  moon's all  round and  all i saw, yet not
    always   the visible,  encircled in flesh and
without  so much question, the  mind's a
     quicksilver marauding to  motion all
things  except   your own   parasols bending
    to such   airlessness,  and  to make tractable, this  unstable   mirage

  
      of you,    fulminating in such bright auroras  persisting within the day when you
    arrive  not with   hands but with chains,
   machineries  and not   bones,  no such lissomeness of skin love-hewn but  walls,
    not   the earthen  night  but only brindled   silence like the world whispering ssmething
     close  to the   ear not   love but   pain.

I want to hurt a known face: this imperative,
drab like old habits refusing to sway. The countenance is obscured:

   no longer does the face tell me to withdraw. All the more, the static of it,
from the outset, diminishes to movement and from there, swings by,

   an alternate setting: in all of this, faces were just as a swell sheen from
the borrowed. This is normal, you take it as    sound takes, assumes form or music

   of likened endings.  I want to hurt a known face.

I want to mount it from the nape and stab it sharp with this

     imperative. I want the hollow to echo the urgency of it,     I want the blood to ripple
and then wave-like, undulate to – as we have been caught, addled by

      the sea we call as:   for the finite yet deemed lasting.

             Or   when I see you as   drawn from a line – a truth
halved that  was your  finest set,  a reality   settled     in   its   terminal

    letting out the  longest breath  /  a   detritus   /  a quiet  fate we  call

      away   /   trying    to   locate

    else you     were just    a   flutter.   A thinning   gesture.

Unless you are here for a reason, your presence
  thrusting and thrusting, what for?
  This thing has no name it does not understand -
   its incompleteness, its sleuth for finality. Maybe
   when a hand is buried with a manifold of many
   others in the fall -- to initiate a conflagration
   is to remember it for the first time.
   All versions of the same absence. If you are here
   for no reason, then what for, what use does the
   body subscribe to?

  What about, say, the abundance of Balete had you
   consciously wearing your shirt inside out so as
   to feel placeness? What now that your hand
   fastens my entrails? There is no multiplying
    feeling into truth. We do not know that the Sun
    through the interstices of leaves is a small child,
    or a swift woman. No other answer but rue
    and rage, across our slanted shadows in the
     dank perimeter. Your eyes finagle to annotate
    the bow of my leg. Or the curvature of moon.
    Anything it has in their own, vicious sights
     grappling the flesh now inflamed; anything they
     will ravish completely and leave drained. A wrinkled body of a log, or a forgotten manuscript.

    These are all answers I have to invent. Intuitive,
    unwise, unsolicited. Somewhere, I had to point
     out the differentiating margin between
      speaking too much and conveying so little,
     and the finite amplitude of silence sensing out
     something in you, about you, and arriving here.
     Why are you here? What are you doing? What must I be when you are not?

That was when          my body reached for, sensed its limit
then drowned    in careful trivia             of   you   who always sat

next to      him    in   your    denim jacket       |      just  before


this     is   a   poem    or   an   admission    of:

I now


understand


the           common     day

               shelved and      collected,    is  like   furniture,      organized


to      pattern    your       life    I   have     no    place      in



months    of    this    order
still     never    reaching    for.

has the land covered with banner;
I am not dead yet. Who, despite his exhaustion,

caught up with chance, was able to do so,
  an amend to frame a surrender.

Reimagining a spider gut whatever was available,
in the cornered stucco: obliteration was there, sexed

a hole. Clings to a ruined childhood taken
  as deification – finalizing a document.

Search the database: he is still alive. Put together
all the ruthless and the stalking and piece out

a material impossible to be cunning.

the evening collapsing on his shoulder, shrugged
an hour of betrayal. An hour, made up little seconds,

fathered by an assembly of minutes – an hour difficult
  to wake up from, with a dream of an infinite future

nothing else was known from but if and an end
unerringly spared by this night

reachable out of scarcity that was the limpid past,
cuts through, is like a knife, dividing disaster

to share within habit – a harbinger, an announcement.