in   my   side
   of  the Earth
I    was   not   tilted,
   realized      and    emptied
my   eyes    are   spigots
   my mother    left   open  to thaw
the glaciers   of
        supper

   zenith   visits   the   Summer
most   often   than  the
  wind blowing    through   the
curtain     of    my    eyes
   where   I   always   see   the dead
smidgen    flowers   all   over
   the    ricefields

             this   measure   of
tomorrow –    to  have been incarcerated
   in   the   past that   bears
no     arms    to
       this   very   Saturday    afternoon
fish   breathe  now
  in    enigmatic    means
    pulses    of   rivers
tangle     joys    with
    naked    boys   of   brindled   youth


    see   once   they   jackknife
into   a   memorized    depth
            pellucid  like   my   memory
of
      uncollected      afternoons

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.

the sonofabitch tremor
  from a tall cup of americano

i am somewhere in the heart of Libis
  feeling the libidinous snarl
  of trucks, the poignant treason
    of leaves slamming against each other,
  the bamboozle of the youth

   this is my 5th poem sliding out
    of my whetstone mouth
   sharpening the dull blade of tongue
    as the harum-scarum of the swivel
   door crafts a rising hullaballoo.

    spilling coffee on my ****** white
     this sonofabitch tremor
    terrorizes the purity of the *******
       clenched against no succor,
    eyes squinting in lachrymose fretting
      palpebral shade of tossed out gray
        caprice of clouds — no
  
   more coffee
      for me,
          these words nudging me
   keeping me awake with
      persistence.

says the neon sign gleamed,
refracted on your face
that sullen evening – I do not have

many nights to remember. If from a high
place I imagine you flailing,

what would call you back? What for?
You, coming toward the light – the subservience
of the next face

chauffeurs us. Unfazed, will me to pretend,
if not, then carry on the next meeting.
I will whisper to myself: this is how I sustain beatings

You have no use for poems.
Neither do I. You, dressed in your best,
I, submission refined by sartorial. Notice how my hand
continues to displace geographies. The thinning
  horizon of a candle, almost a faultline.

Slumped on your back as if comfort were a burden
to say: keep this time together with its fever. These often times
the last moments seal them shut out of histories.
When we came into,

I had a falling out – there is a straight line we could
run into and this instance might enervate

into a single drop of honey into your mouth. I await that
prophecy like it was the final thing before I resign
to incompleteness.   Delicate essence

the    neon sign says, glaring through the
  glib downpour outside. You laughed at our
unpreparedness, but the readiness that was obligation when
  separate had no omen of rain.

I am watching myself again. Everything was slanted
by rain as the living err me. Even when together,

       feels like emancipation. Going disparate places.
Outside it continues to rain. You asked if this rain washed
   this city whole and gave it a new name, would I still remember.

It is June from time since then, the skies still attentive.
I will not come out until it rains.

an ant fell in between the page
   of the book,

even its own silence it does not understand.
from where to climb it does not know,
all steps carve discourse;

staggering in its littleness, its fragile
  mind takes on the mystery of star
and its delicate body swells in the sheen
   of words.

as in the night, it trails the moon's slender stem that transfixes
   a constellation's ephemerality:
a soldier tumbled over, undulant,
  amazed in betweenness of light
and dark when god himself dies
   before his fall was born,

o trencherman, deep in the peril
  of a word's closing, fusion of
knowledge's breakwater and permutations of bluntness,

the unwelcoming abyss is your kingdom,
  unwillingly enduring the taut blow
    without purpose — when the book is shut, to what dark do you imagine your
  eyes? to what enigma does your senses
wake up to? and to what erudition does
   your silence keep flowering?

an ant fell into the book, and in its turning page, it rides each changing wave like
  the white in its pale, blue horse,

arriving at different shores, yet all the same, a notable fate: stilled and dizzy
washed and unmoving in the abject night.

the children with such earthen hands opened the book burning in Sanskrit: twilight of  Summer.
now to their own accord, they must persist in daylight, with the overgrowth arrives
           new verve to rising tendrils.
one by one, leaping out of the unclenched hands of faith, pelts of the world give
     them a renewed bounty of laughter; even the days ring true, a consortium of bells
in the nearby cathedral of Barasoain or wherever perhaps, in the streets where
   a different kind of ashen is imparted: I speak of the languor in sleep.
a gossamer canopy underneath the guava, whose leafing fingers signal them like motherless
   beacons to the sprite of the lissome afternoon – such bodies hemmed in inertia, stay
  there in search for light. blacker the wounds of trees yet insignia the name of memories,
      a river of stallions is the blood of fetal natures and I sing freely with them:
         we are the children of the loam!

real is the form.

here now is a colony of words,
or an empire of assault from the
many truths that smite us.

our hearts gallop altogether
past the prairie of imaginations:
this movement, this locutionary,
this waltz adagios its way
to a pace that knows no sojourn.
let us raise our clenched fists
always angelward.
we are young in this agronomy.
our hands remind us of their increasing responsibilities.
our inner light realizes the throng of our shadows - away from the dark
we go pursuant to all effulgence.
let us unpin our juvenile wings
  from the clasp of what startles
us back to our flawed origins.
a flumine of flawlessness awaits
the steep end of our possibilities.

let us not neglect this.
let us, hand in hand, straightforwardly, break from our nascent states and unfurl in a craze of the so many things that capture our potentials.
outside my home, the streets are vacuous, famished from the twirling laughter of children.
once, the grass is giddy from the lightsome meanderings of our superfluous feet! where did all the days crawl to? these limbless serpents that pillage the fruits of our sageness.

i look outside and the mellow moon
enters with its lithe figure
through the hollow spaces of doors
to lairs where the youth are sleeping, unmindful of what dreams log onto the papers of their souls.
heed the call and do not let
it go, running off into another hapless length of waiting.

real is the form.
there is no lie in our rawness.
the voice inside us is tender
with message, purging our poisons
into detox and preparing with
new energies, our
flesh for our consigned ventures.

the voluminous pages are still
white and new, words besmirched still yearn to be written - there is no getting realer than the realization of our clarion call:

real is the form
and in the blank veranda of green
we sift through wordlessness,
gaping our mouths now,
contributing a verse,
     or a song!

June is dead-still
trees converse with other
language mocking the trilling
of birds. North of here
there is a visitation. Virgins
are being transferred
all Monday housed in foreign
homes. Oregano
perennial, ingrained on
roof beam the rise and fall of,
a languid mirage outside
much less than an inveterate superstition.
Past the bridge where I once laughed
as a child when my father
surged past ploughed fields.
this almost overtakeless summer
minting its blazing core
and now rivers cut this town.
The derelict nectar of youth,
how lovely it was the first time
to pierce through age, an arcade
  rising from the carrion that was
our birthright under the throbbing heat.
Who touched what
to turn room into bedlam – slowly, these
evincing hours paint me the
grandiloquent picture of all
when the moon a foolish assumption
under a rain-soaked grassland
moist enough for crickets, venue for
frog hidden somewhere, outlined by a cadenza,
us, humming along in our
cast-off night clothes, meagerly this
climate tumescent in this town.

Picture me this: not the arched brow
  but the body when night, curves like a moon
  accruing more weight.

Develop me this: not the body when curved like a moon
    but the white stucco of it,
    assuming its form.

Fold me like this: not the white stucco of it,
   but the space it takes for need,
   the occupancy it wastes for want.
     In this manner is how you will

And lay me flat against the river:
   not your memory of walls with fleur-de-lis,
   but with lilies. If this day were leaf when turned
   from the night when I took this collapse,
        let your hands be pedicle. My inflorescence you have
   mistaken as displacement yet not drown – meet this canopy

  at the end of this river that is your river – your static grace that
  is the music of your passing.

When met, disintegrate: not the lilies – they are anchors you have forgotten,
     not this day if it were a leaf, but the day dried from a washline
   of clouds. Let my inflorescence be a blunder of your recall.
         When you meet this canopy, pack all of its mileage,
               exact it in this distance. Take photographs of. Do not keep.

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.

sangkutsa— sana'y kartada nuwebe


      stove -- so much inner blue
            in this gruesomeness,
          still soft is the orifice, maiming
         the speech whirling in warm press;

     hand -- to just blindingly toss out
      in wording it so that then this is true:
       we once had each other in the
        simmer of feelings, leaving
         our shadows crazy-eyed in
     elegiac silence.

      rawness -- boiled to a broth:
        thawing largeness, tipping away in
           and of feeling.

    final stages --- half-done in waiting,
      half-undone in wanting. darkness
       condoles with the aperture of
        clouds twitching to rain tritely
   against the tiled floor. islands of
       wet footmarks make the traverse
           viciously slippery on my way
    to your side of breathing.

     all of it -- hand's gentle breeze,
      salt of lake-eyes, melee of tactical pressures sizing down spots gleamed
       and honeyed with ires. a hiss
  on landscaped neck where a peregrinating perfume sits, feverish with
       desire and nothing else,
    blood boiling, whistling through the pores are the saltine sweat
     poised, almost
                               for the mouth's readiness
          in consummation.

— bard of night,
         keeper of metal.
furious light flaunts no avatar.

            shadows chant a sequence
              of deathly ire. loam, dearth and girdled to
         silver mane of canal.

     Dos has died.

   father took him into an unfamiliar curve
wandered off into a reverberating
      disquiet.

                  i have buried him
      together with all loyalties — concealed
him in thin space,  decreed him
     all dogdom with     unction,

   swimmingly now, still you go, leaving
     us. it has been six years and all eternity's motors gnash
        
                 afloat is the bird
     and in the nearby ken is another dog
     panting in death-daring heat,
          
      Dos has died.

are we all but strangeness clad
in this feigning of wisdom? our whims
exeunt our graces and just pretend?
are we not all this caliginosity underneath furious light? are we not all
    that spurious talk and no inimitable
quiescence?
  are we all just nothing framed
to pithless flesh? before
there were shadows fitting figures
  not their own — discomfitures rehearsed, contritions tell-tale.
      
we are something the moon or
if not so, then moonless
yet never the aureole truant — always searching.

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.

try to antagonize the not-so-distant
and remember the tonal bent of a father's
rampant voice causing a cataclysm.

in front of the hospital, the moon a blue nun,
parked are the scraps elsewhere but home
under permeable dark. i look into the eyes

of whose visions i own - whose perspectives
borrowed a causation, as in when he clenched
his fist i thought of cigarette stains on my

button-down shirt as we both stumble to
the ground that was our dearth grave. i remember
you in his anger as countenance collective

and my own rebellion. his limping strides to the
automobile approximate the sizable crenelation
of your fingers. now i am brought back to Pasay

where your light is bendable mercy.
this is the face of silence, incited by a meeting
alone, a variegated road unmapped, unnamed.

inadequacy contends what intent commends.
this night demands emesis: the moon no longer
flumine, but xanthous as autumn, or a bell in

leaden cathedrals. the longest journey back
to origin is the first step taken towards a foreign
home punctured by diffident apology.

we were all in waiting for unction, congregated
in the plenary room i have made white with
blunder. our faces pale as backs of moths,

our elegies able to forecast the future,
the climate of the home burdened by tropic,
our keen eye for movement terminal with disgust,

a hand scarred by the Earth we rested upon,
asking heavens, "Why?" Response: rain dividing
cities. i think of then, this film where a man

continuously passes arrondisments, where his
days are measured by softened landmarks pulsing
with blurred faces. it was his case of aberrations.

when it was over, perturbation of vast space
automatic. a relief over the clinch. beatings
sustained over dinner the next evening.

in any other bed, the infantile stance of sleep
a wry mark of confusion. i notice the clock's
stoppage, its arms angular as if death's geometry.

otherwise it was unfeeling of feeling. my mother
forgot the laundry today, now fetid, pressed against
wall torrid upon the afternoon,

left outside to dry together with mutiny of trees.
outside when yourself happens, a conjured image
of bluntness. immutable, fixated, reminiscent

of small statue bought from a surplus in Malolos,
tamed wildeness is sound of a slurred machine
sent to repose as in, gnashing phonemes the

guttural, and the distinguished identity of the
next word draws a line connecting a caricature of
your face, terminally instilled

preserving the imprint including you.

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.

Ad astra

1
From the city I know you were from,
building up the perimeter in summer – it was plenty searing.
Must when I found the town already, triggered and almost accomplished,
searchable signs for searching parties involved like grass on the lawn,
scraps on an empty lot – when in summer it got very hot
and your salt smelt of the sea crushed in between my territories, start the word.
Flesh deems it so in frame, walking with us this very evening crafted
   by a waking remoteness.

2
When it rains, build this city from here on – relieve it of its terrors.
The memory of an old cathedral being burned down to the last cross,
the volume of prayer genuflected within pews, or anything that was hieratic. Rain in the
afternoon was what your entire ocean meant to me, crossing its span of promise,
   sure of its weather. Rasp the skin tight like gears fine-tuned. Borrow its heat when
   it drizzles. Do you remember my face when you pass by familiar pavements, stalls,
   hospitals drenched in prognosis? The even flutter of a bird? What does this question seek
     but your truth – like an elastic map stretched to infinite directions.

3
Here is where you were named darling. Taut your name had it belonged to someone else.
Sharp were your features. Your definitions smooth. Your textures visible with difficulty.
                       When you wore denims rising from the cuff of your knees you showed
  me a blotch and other fraternizations. Moles as variables. Your body as graph. My senselessness,
     somewhat a trying delineation. Thousand fingers mesh altogether to formulate rescue,
   mind a garden of salvage enough for two. Or underneath the sphere of a body,
         neither rain nor sun could stop to flourish me completely. Yourself full of
  symmetries – the universe cut inside and out, trimmed to lasting – ubiquity, inhabiting the temporary.
         I transact with this darkness yourself containing light, like a window to your home
when you’ve moved on to a different continent, I myself staring right into as if the whole space,
    in search for a singular glint I could make up for a cluster
                            to make an elusive thing such as you walk backwards, from the entry, just before the guardhouse, to meet me.

We have now become this bleached wall exposed
to graffiti; you and I, lost in a vector dwindling somewhere
between flight and ground-woven footing.
Like only such delicate secret opens to tongued up
and thighed upon space – only nightscapes the air dares elope with,
but isn’t that what absence hands over, a roughed up winding
moonlight suspended in crunched ether, or something else
that bade sibilance of speech rammed in preterit?
A blossoming descends in Maytime, besmirched with dreams
collapsing on obelisks. The moment in which I thought you
to be devouring space, nurturing a whelm of heat squalled and
intent, fanning a spleen of intimation, riveting a conflagration.
Else it was before, sulking in the finagling quiet: truths hauled
out and carved to foists,
      much room it was to differ a voice and fragment message,
      staring at this world the first time and the last – all at once
      in that rampaging instance, the rest of the world pinned down
                                                        befo­re me.

how did you ever come to this—
is never the question,
she clinks her glass on the russet tablework and crinkles her nose
onto some cold draft.

some answers i keep to myself:

it is not a very honorable question.
a noble man might ask,
where shall this bring you?
now that you are... this state of being?

the answer i said:
after a while, i have been having
dreams of white parasols
cerements being whacked
into aching scabs on the skin
of an old tendril - that laburnum
where a pebble of raindrop
slides freely!
and i uttered shyly of my place,
i once fell in that speed
and came to no crash.
and now here are words - just words,
pure loneliness, or say, a preordained vacuity waiting to be filled— no,
wait, it isn't! a feral with diurnal eyes
never asleep, always awake!
no, still not very apt.

i have fallen like this, and it was
also i, waiting for myself
at the end of each
line, shattering at word's break.

in adroit flight are these words.

drunk with the proper   tremendousness of rampant trifles.

they will soar like rigid flame
as the tacit air agonizes in its
  grave failure -

i am saluted by moths
weighted by the dusts of sleep,
peregrinating around
my mortal fire - wings unclipped,
they pine away from the heat
of this wonder they try
to unwind like tough scabs
to erstwhile wounds.

prescient science
nor foolish aeons cannot
shave this wreathed land baring
the enigma of its history -

the thrall of poetry's pulchritude!
the way it makes its way
like a conference of beasts
  roaring innocuously,
  or simply a lamppost
brought to life in the night,
  imploding in itself,
  a burst of primal colours!

who shall then dare
        dream  the    Sun  to be   a flower
or    a   new, keen city     higher than  steeples   and umbilicus of   wires
     disavowed  streets  and    herds of   proletariats?

      and   if so   then it   shall be   a flower
who   picks   itself   from the    unmoving   Earth  then what   steady light
   will     it   bring?  who  will   join it   in its   revelry  and who  shall be
    brave   with trembling  hands  to hold   it in  hand  taut   like loves
divined  and  forever   is spring   and  forever    is winter   endless with ephemeral whiteness
    and   bells    are a-ringing    and  clouds are  twitching so as to sail where
      nobody   has   ever    visited

     always    it   is   Spring
    and    in my   hand is  the  Sun   or the   florid  aureole
       burning    in my   palm   and  the moon   is my   love
            whose night   is carefully a  fraction
   of   flower placing   an inch   of sleep    in   my body,
       always   it   is  lovely

Sometimes I am in the center of all things intentional and accidental.
My conquest lies somewhere in between its execution. When this happens,
I am ready: I will wear a white shirt. Keep mum like a leaden chapel.
                              My eyes will be red like surgery. My precision of stasis,
                               impeccable – like mother gutting fish in the kitchen,
                               or a door unhinged by my father. Each exploit

drawn   out of the mundane. Hearing the sinking dreaded music of shovel excavating
   the Earth,
   taking the image blurred. Clarified like clearing of a throat is my reckoning
   of a dull Wednesday. Rain descending like a flower. Bathes the world like soiled
   linen where we are cut from uniformly. Sometimes I am two abysses in one place:
  the gap of the ground and the horizon, sometimes cut-rate like pothole.
                   I know a day exists and can neither be decent nor loutish. In this frame,
  I can be sepia. Whitewashed like wall, hewed like linoleum on floors.

   In this center   I can be the forever grass
    when all things expire by morning

  washing me with dew.

This old and twisted thing,
arranged in awry futility
like most lives circumspectly:
 a pair of denims
washed in the Sun,
 a slow laburnum glowering.

face-ovals perfumed with
  the camphor of such departure.
 the hand waving the weight
  of the night's obsidian
    is the love i take in - dull or sharp -
  as it arrives, tired as a crankshaft
      or a waned piston

 this junked engine, wheeled off,
  looming a light-clenched house
 with its exhaust of excess. declension.
   rife as a numeral being. repetitive like the drivel of radio talk.  heavy like the sudden drop
     of Sunday on the plod of chapels,

  once more into this.

here is something they do not teach
in school, that is why
    Juaniyo put a bandana around his head
in red and like a sturdy kalasag, he raised
    his hand high, championing all —
nobody shall strike this country with
    impunity.

Juaniyo was an anarchist — a decibel in the  voice of this nation, standing strong
   for the deprived, the voiceless,
    the pithless. this was inscrutable force
       awakened — they did not teach this
  in school. they taught us that we'd
    be winners, hotshots,
millionaires, tycoons, dogs and slaves to
    capitalists — this total equation
  they didn't tell us together with the
   suicides and the extra-judicial killings,
the limp democracy of the state,
     summary executions, the displaced
groups, shelterless mothers with children
   suckling their ******* while seeking
alms, the downfall of all economies

for Juaniyo, a hurled rock is the imperative as a thick wall of alloy
   and fiber glass drive him to the edge
of the street where somewhere in the periphery, a bombardier of water is waiting with a steady aim;

      they did not want their powers
challenged, they did not find it appealing that their oppressive authoritarian stance
    is put to the test and is at the verge
of being dismantled to be replaced by
   freer, egalitarian structures.

   Juaniyo leaves the class in total pursuit,
  heeds the call of heartland.

I.

On the surface easily gliding,
  are my hands. I keep on the table
  an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
  becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
  a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
  ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
   whose face I can almost touch.
  When let go of closure, air thins and I move
  secretly with fluency. This is how objects
  escape my grip.

II.

  In front of the eatery, a transit.
  I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
  a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
  The face next to me, disquieting the music
   of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
   like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
   another throng of absence. As a substitute
   for beings shackled to duty,
   the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
   borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
   the wind through opened windows.

III.

    Define space as a venue for collision.
    Say when a red-haired woman straddling
    a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
    She ascribes her presence to my footing
    and from where she left off, I take form
    of her expired movement.
                     Found strangeness is that space
    is what happens when remembered. But hold no
    bearing and rear contrivance,
     trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
     the in-betweenness and then transmutes
     an occurence,
             say the volatile shape of a hand when
    clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
    feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
    reticence of a troubling question.

IV.

            A man carries a take away and is now
     amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
     housing a familiar language. Home.
    
      But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
    trying to transact a being angled towards home.
    They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches  the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
             Air once stale, is now succulent with the
      resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
      and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
      home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
         of times the vehicle trundles within
     the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
        with rest. He is home,
     unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
          freed from a vitrine.

mind's collective.
a primary congregation
in chiaroscuro,

white axis
tilting black worlds
as stars lean
towards their gaseous disappearances.

mind's prison.
blood surging in staccato,
thumping like wild animals,
trundling underneath the womb
of genuflecting hills.

a cityscape is innervated
by electric wires and their
secretive jolts: this plunging light laying leschenaultia diadem
on my head naming me king
of shadows thriving inside
bells telling all buoys
with their rotund calisthenics.

all words elope stagnant rivers,
vexing truths out of horizons
painting them without color,
like the image of a dove trapped
in mirror's water, reaching
forth kingdom come.

To reach for the longest day was to drive next to
dithering the light of: is telling of a certain person
whose features memorized for performance in this
weather, this the climate again for some reason as if

would spin away – you for example, whom to me
meant half a tongue tied to some distinct secret
I cannot word it so for your own sake – in most days

I curse your fate done to me in another’s; to be touched
not by your reluctance to speak, but you in your plaintive
that was my domain you took from me – hesitant to tangle

or untangle the lapped-up shore that was our natal home
you take photographs of serious with its violent gasp, the
blue its own agenda – built from the lines of this hurried
translation: shape one's work now I have no use for you.

to reach for the longest day was to give rise to reason
a want that must be tried, must be let loose, sent back
to you that is its origin followed each day until you lost

your will to shape and start the end that could not be
that was nothing of your kind to be brought to acceptance:
as if fists clench to outsilence you whose face turned to clay
the next minute I held nothing more and wanted nothing out of,

almost prompted by saying who it was
I have no use for but I, freshly turned into you –

Today you were

anguished, with what ordered sentence to fray
  into organization. Shimmering splendid thigh

of noon numbered, overtakeless I peering
   through a gray eye of storm. Ambulatory motors

whir double ballasting ground / AC Cortez was nothing like any other held captive loosely frolicking

the summer gone through a bat of an eye
   reimagined, engraved into / what for is this

inheritance but a dangling stucco of a home. Else
   the newfangled man will have skin ripe to borrow

denying  the  statement. I could no longer raise
   tomorrow and fall for, a form broken in

by a crossing of the river I smell turpentine
    bearing the casualty of paint because color when

seen as absence of something, a thing worth
    mooring to where we were and kept

for the next docile minute, mourning what but
    a closed preserve drowned by a hand

deep between what was once just once and
    a continuing strangeness, one's own rearview

but insatiable affront. Today you were
    spoken of, not to, once again this weather

is here heavy with debris, less than ash fit for
    return curious as perfume clinging to

soiled collar learning every breath a crevice the
   body seeks to fullness feeding on some sense

of abandon -- today's news gasp for clearing
    which you weighed in today as you were

        again and again and again just as sound is
   but a remainder of a tremendous leftover.

This is today’s calm headline: when the clout of a hammer
sings a would-be house the same way a dog’s howl fractures
an all-too-sudden image of a stranger. All of this having
to do with your body, that is when trying to insinuate a day

like a beast cautious behind a brushfire. Take your hand
and cross your body – paint a gesture, with your timid signatures

   a showcase of a blind transaction for something and take it
to the nearby cathedral. Fasten you would, a murmur veiled
and hidden in one of the pews and kowtow / this is your

   finest headline today / before them, make do your obeisance
   to / to fall like a downed tree after a surge / drift on a river /
             / repeats as if you do not forget /

And then it was your necessary contradiction:
note your taxidermied narrative pale everything against,

not from – from the hip of your stature,
drawn to.  You will happen – the quick hands

and the quicker gestures the frailest meaning
exposed to warmth that was your becoming, now effloresce

and gain an optimum: your day you say it was
        in front of a sweating bottle, fondling your clothes
|   clawing  it  inside,  complaining of your salt.

   Here too are spaces for things you rule over
   the precision of a film shot from the horizon
  by  which I mean you persist   |

twelve and raw i was
when vaudeville came to town
over the grasslands lay the trapeze,
the fire-monger, the carnival clause,
the whir of metal.

it was the twilight of the Earth
and its men chortling
in single splendid dome
of temporal gleam;

yet now,
banderitas and the lowly
   signs gone, wavering are their
     beacons — rivers amply dead,
and no summer fruition —

this town's lack of circus
   brings night farther to day.
the river makes bride, the muck
  of clay. street vendors pulse with
different tongues. spit and spatter
   spar cleverly downhill
and still no dancing of olden days.

nights i lay, hearing the steady phoenix
of imagination. was it this town's proud
  call? the festive moving?
    sun meets moon and underneath,
the roulette spins in my mind like
   an elusive daydream
   mounting the carousel and steely
     tetanus beams,
        beating  around   an empty home.

Take wanting for, abandon – and then one will begin.
Who is approaching close enough to devise an entrapment
will not see image clearly: him, as he will offer you a face
and a hand to desolate – put a lacking so you can flinch,
and a hand to brace you from it. Prophesying that a body
and another body cannot be singular. To hypothesize
an effort as a sharp encounter. To be given the world
to know its limits when a border has been reached,
to slowly unravel a form and a shape from the scope
of its representative and bend a spoken dismissal precisely
to generate content. To take wanting for, abandon then,
so you can begin to reserve a function for the body to elope
with and thin into an arbitrary.
     So when you begin from an instruction, reshape a simulation
so your actual body could hold you in for your yearning –
to begin again, so you can abandon a want to remember how
slivering a house is when two cannot be one and does not admit
it so to be true – facing each morning delighted the walls
each moment when together  to untangle, meeting, surprised
that we have still become remainders.

it is something that has
made me once laugh.
and now that it is something
that is done to perpetuate
a divinity of its savoir faire,
or unfurl the evocativeness of
  sartorial workmanship,
it is something that inhabits
me like an imagined pit
that a body should plummet into
and crash, having fallen off
from the boughs of a bottomless dream.

like snow or silence, drops onto its vastness and fastens in it such felicitous rigor greeting it
   like an old companion, reminding
   me of these unimpeachable occurrences: as a wrinkled log is petrified, where mosses pullulate to archipelagic green, where wild ivies sprawl like children in the high-afternoon, or clandestine Paraneoptera ensconced somewhere within the triviality
    of demarcated stones in
the dark's cunning edge,

  my body knows its peace,
   all borderless without flounce
  flourishing in its still life.

At noontime, it is severed,
just like in any other time. The walls no longer flounder but
                        crucify the ground or vice versa. Sunlight floods
   bodies of rocks. At the height of illumination, there is no process
   adequate to describe. The bramble of illusions swerves to allure.
   Drunk in the surprise of the founding: the rusting roof from the nearby
   school still there. Solid as entity, fluid as trance. Deep with the phantom
   pain of it, I feel its drone marauding with even-inflicted sharpness of memory.

This is how far you’ve already gone, towards the invisible charm of falling apart.
   There is an opening that is left behind. I found it here,
   in the chasms suspended in an open field drawn together
   in the alternative. This is all that you’ve ever lost.
  Reclamation is a sure defeat. Retreat, you said but didn’t.
   Straining towards this ruined object.

    This will not wait you out. It casts its weight over my hands
   struggling to take picture of, imperiled as if these unsolicited quakes contain
        the image within a broken frame. Strife deep within a sense of responsibility
  is to show you what was left – everything but wasted origin, demeaned by
                             the disintegration of, to suffer the penalty of decision.

To face the wall than each other, revealed in some place known.
                                      All the junk of this requiem reused as deficiency.
   Elsewhere it could be another thing, but to me nothing but a net
   to falling, limbless creature, or a basin to the water of surrender.
  It aspires to be something, to be another story of, to be a room of disappearance
    is what it is to me – across the kitchen sink mapped out near the cupboard,
     or the tiny, mincing steps to your room, the posters scattered everywhere like
   avatars. The partitions still exist dividing real from illusory, far from near,
     a luminescence or opacity – still dragging along the detritus, strophe by strophe,
                     rearing the intensity of artifacts but none found.

How does this breathe with no life? How do these ghosts ambulate
      in the bare and naked space when horrors wish to be unseen? How this wishes to be
  unperturbed in media res, and how it dissolves to be now, infinite, is substantial
                to tragedy. To be consoled by nothing but the pure sight of a once dwelling.

Hang a picture of you in the wall. The wall the bears no foundation. This recall.

[Brecht: ice | water | steam]

I. To Thaw

     an uncompromising war against emotion
    and its content         is of  total

            concession

closer   to   the   body   in   fervid   heat

you are a patron of this commerce

       after  you a water-lasting event:

your fluidity that deflects an accepted mass  as if sacrificial
    on a  venue  or a passage  fitting  the body

II. To Consume

and when you cut through with infinite fatigue
you    are proximal      to an agape     jar    housed

  the  question   how   vast   and  accurate  the  detainment and  the   quench  thereafter

             how when   a   flood   renames

a   corner    and  turns    number   to   record   of  wreckage

     making a memory  innumerable

III. To Dissipate

   is initiative    when anterior and disparate

cannot be held and accounted   for   in

   an   erroneous         register          whelms  in   hems right shut

passing   through    an   interstice   your   affinity   to    console

         and  when   in   a flash   of  a  scene


   unfound

you are slow like daggers or
        cancer.

this is what it feels like to travel
on a discourse:

something about you metastasizes
in my mind whenever the silences
are no longer beautiful;

and just like that, I thumb a prayer
to the fallen obsidian,
this harbinger of marvelous calm.

sometimes all the rooms are white
and I am immersed deep into pallor –
when both our eyes do not meet,
I wring out a cockeyed miracle:

dragging the blood of the trees with me,
these bushy polyps,
   these benign volcanoes skin,
ashen and dull like a heart – these agonized
appurtenances, I gleam like light
   cut from the mirror and fade out
as my visibilities hide.

something in me smiles when you
are flattened out – cross-legged, interconnected
  unloose a star fettered somewhere deep where
hands cannot reach for the inside of a tomb.
  
  this suchness that when I feel your sensations
press their threats against my skin,
      you are a salutary squelch
in this pure-iron condition, or a heavy-earth machinery
   moving inside my marrow, that deep

  into death like a morning waist-high
with tears, walled in by requiems.

1996

When news of his would-be death arrived,
his body sterile in white cloth,
serene his was, his finest stupor – clinging on to a drip
  of life, his tongue a strawberry his mother recounted,

forcing him into, his senses dulled,
  it was 1996: else there was understanding,
  there was a hand in a hand that is a latticed rose
  of beauty – or unbeauty, the high prayer of it,

they sat in front of the room facing a mute wall
  for days weeping or laughing. The rustling of the
  daily paper broke silence not news – his dearth was sure.

no more almost was when he went sharply
in a field of grass, his shredded amusement
received by an unfolding – it was his years sideswiping
  him later on, his indices of age revealing an undulant postscript

to which there were imaginary sky-portfolios and
  a particular representation of a smoothened end of a smoking gun
  he held now, years after, years later on

a portion of it his mouth pressed on a lover’s,
and a footnote hidden
    deep within his pelvis:     come back here when laden

if    you sing a moment   of  transaction
   or  the sudden  influx  of  a face   conjured
    to so many an  enterprise offered  for

    protest.   A hand's  insisting  tremor
   an   emptying  from  over  and  over  an  indication
   of  askance.

   A  counterfeit  I  cannot   grieve over   and  over.
   Its   renown   a  nearest   position /
               a   silhouette   from a  smokestack
      about  to be   sensed    out from a   customary
                strangeness.

         stranded in    a   lilt   of  a  becoming  word
    or   question   subtitling  a  frantic    enemy

      you --  panicking  all   across, a retailed
          fugitive   thing. You can   become   a plaza

     if   not   sing  but   exist  in the   district
  from    a humdrum  projection   fated,  tagged
       with  a  purebred  amount.  You  can
 
   will   it   so  /unbecoming of/ a   plaza   minused from     and  adhered   to   as  cacophonic
           only   in   newsprint here is  your performance
    of    a numbered  caution. Permit  you  to  be

     nominal,   going   into   without  purpose

            you   can   become   a   plaza
     if        I     pose    need  from     (y)earning

life the grandest stage.
     life, gelid waters – I, the pompous admiral.
life, thorns withholding enigmas,
     clenching the true blood of flowers.
  life, the flimsiest avant-garde.

  our measures
  conceal all our knowledge,
    our fondness of exactitudes
bludgeons us to back to our smallness.

  the heart, like a riot,
  will always scream blood.
  the soul, like a jailbird,
will always carve a song.
  the mind, like a grave,
will turn soundless filled with bones.

  some will beat back to the same old music,
  assaulting the others with a concealed knife
gutting all of us as we lay still – the rest shaking around us.

  when I was young, I was unsure of myself
  and now that I have aged, it is all but the same:

I am a horde of drunkards.
I am the incessant pendulum.
I am the night-watch
and sometimes I am being watched by the night itself.
I am the loutish vandal on the wall.
I am hot, steaming music I am an earful of ***
I am a handful of hollow I am the dandelion whittling away
in the garden of full women seething with woes
I am the catapult of air from the sling of trees I am a somber god
I am an ungodly god I walk over toppled waters past genuflected hills
like maddened horses screaming victory
I am a limbless beast crawling back home
I am young I am old
my blood ravages the sinews of my body – I am a binaural cinematheque
   of slow minutes I am a mausoleum of chiaroscuros
I am all pleasure pleasure pleasure
I am just as ****** as everyone I am sour mash stirred in a wide-mouthed
      glass clinking together with this heavy slither of attendance around me
  somewhere in Pasay
I am love I love I am hate and I hate
I am forever the lion that roars at what life has done to us
    and they will cage me soon when the roses shy away from the deliberate daylight
and when all of this is through
               I have only just     begun.

i can hear a fraternization
  of doors that loutishly slam repeatedly:
just another instance leaping out of reason
   and lunging in on impulse;
wrapped in the heat of leaving, all your words
     scatter on the floor like white, mangled asphodels.

one hairbreadth heave and a cutting glance
  at space and it seemed to have bled carnations
  pried open, dissected, obscured, mutilated by birds.
bags drop like H-bomb. displaced equanimity somewhere
   between blame    and        accurate   silence:
in an instant   i believed   that   I am that sudden   word
       of  reprisal.

    there’s no   getting   even,   still   halves are separately
       wholes   to   themselves,   intact,   further apart,
         breathing and gashing    the   air.

how when I have arrived at a distant place |
sleep beheads an animal when dreaming

           is in search for its body somewhere
        and lies over barbed coverts – I am that
        animal  again in, over and over, lost within

its hubris a dream forecasts with separate proof
near the end of this investigation.

what will they tell me when they see me
after all these years when it rained almost
every day? of what continued trace must I bear,
and may not be mistrusted yet? what evidence

is inflated, with nothing to report?
this long stumbling night
contorts its own version                 of being lost and again in,
                                      the same covetous body snared.

how   when   a selfishness manifests   itself   in complete   peace
    is when a dream, a piecemeal apparatus

you can feel even the resting tremor of it learn my structure
and are these now infinitely throbbing highlights  a  part

of  me  starting  small  convulsions   anywhere it goes

You are at it again, pretty sure, this time, challenging a wave, or a tension in space when from a vertical, trying to reach ground safe. You always were.

In deep collision of structures, the agent here is something that stops you from stoppage. You go, lessening the trauma, impelled by a similar origin to overwhelm and afterwards leave famished. As long as there is enough moving ground for you in a subtle field effect, it is very sure you will last longer than any rain in this moderate climate. I can imagine all the broken twigs you stepped on, making a dull orchestra out of. Your day-tired wander-wearied jacket after, and all the dust that remained within the sole of your boot when the Earth trembled – kept you still within the splintering of finite objects.

You are at it again, heeding the call of the world, assuming a shape of a moment you said you had in your hands, small enough to fit a chamber of a gun, and when fired, cuts through, is deep, meeting an attempt to touch secret parts but didn’t, only scored, and when realized,

taken as document within conversations.

it seems to me that the child is beheaded –
there is not much to look at in this paling weather.
moderate climates douse their bleak, blank face-ovals,

their frigidity has no relation to stone,
their silence, loveless as a fabric is torn wild
by a rabid dog, dragging it senselessly against the furniture.

outside, the whiteness bears no reputation of laundry
impaled to clotheslines: frilling at the collarbones,
fringing at the high afternoon, distinct flutings
of iridescent night-gowns,

they want the life of some lovelorn progeny.
the scald of water is his trademark – it seems innately natural,
those who, someone else lauds the **** verdigris
  of trees, able to tell how immense the stasis
  of the darkness is, outside when all homes bellow
a concatenation of absences:

  it seems to me the child is guillotined at this
moment, verily, in moderate climates.

When your dance a bounty, yet sing
they fail – I have learned to love,
worrisome mother and adorn you:

such a kiss is planted
a rose on the plump cheek of children.
your girth measures unflinchingly,
the laughter of the world around you
so small, kept in a dark, blinkered box.
your parasol smothers the light
cast unswervingly on stone.
who has long kept you in the caliginous womb,
with all the light that spangles through?
who has snuffed your little arms
and dressed you for everyone to see?
when you are quite flamboyant for
everyone to feast on,
what word passes on as salutation?
when you are festive enough to revel in,
what pagoda tries itself to the life
allowed to gleam proudly?

women, men, children, and all -
frolicsome around the darkled bough
smitten by the frayed sight of believing,
sifting from the way our hands
craft things the dispensable glee
of glasswork: the world is Murano.
and my eyes have seen all flourish
in a darling ebb of curbed felicities – the diaphanous
clangour of steel and shadow.
the slain orchestra of frogs in the crush of rain.
the detriment of the Earth curled like an infant
in the womb of the dark.

     - oh trees and their wondrous life of green,
begin to question the wind and its tourniquet;
shadows drunk on turpentine, the spry wilt of hours:
what is their final duty?
   if our laughter is slain in the perils of night,
how are we to become them?

what use is there,
  my nimble hand?
  what journey is there
  for my superfluous feet
  searching for the dead
  in the tropic dearth of heart's
  liminal forgetting?

  like famished vultures
  traipsing in the membranous
  sky and the illimitable earth,
  hunting for the defiantly
  ephemeral prey in the autumnal
  tang of the mild afternoon,
  my heart, my poor heart,
  no flame aroused.

petty and pathetic,
insofar as when a wreathed breath
    brings the being to the brim
of each death-defying word,

    a woman. lying naked,
nailed to the Earth, burning
   auburn-bright from windows
a wraith unannounced without a diadem
    even, consoling the heavy lark
of the doused dark with something
    weightless swinging against
the boughs — shuddering after a great
   fall from presence to heart's pompous
   flare. flat is the world
and light, the bendable one:

   laugh, laugh, brave the hill
  and behind the bramble, the dimly lit
   foliage you are there
   from the tumble: an aureole
     simmering in the unbeknownst.

Help me shatter this day. Our bodies make
transitions unbearable. All of us here hiding secrets. By design,
we are silent. It takes me days to fully sing.
                 We think walls are our doing, bridges our undeniable shame.
  There are things following me: the bird soaring, another one flat on
   the roof, and the other atrill on umbilicus of powerlines.
  This day is composition – let this day atonal. From where I sit,
  daily pursuits key in difficulties – eyes closed deep but not aslumber,
  are purblind: gauge me in this order: feel the world scabrous like Braille. In a world of continuing
  breakage, what is there to hold together.
                If not, a debris pattern. A held rigor in suffering – there is that
  crisp, sweet taste in the air again like some air winding out of ***.
  Look at me through dappled windows as reflection of an oncoming storm.
    Help me splinter this day. Placate my tremor of, and fasten me dearly
set beyond the grooves of this day. I teach myself a coruscating example – to reach for
  and break. To stop you climbing, plodding your way to a conclusion,
   waylaid you in your place and summoned your fiddling of chance – the duration is
lined by obeisance towards an endorsed situation issued, not accrued.
                  We are somewhat conveying this burden to equal our weight. Must we
  be afloat, what hoists our rebellion? What must we be
       to endure,    to witness these wondrous beatings ballast our gravities,
          no warning of, and against reliance. Is our being here what we determine.