is it too much of an onomatopoeic dissonance that this is synonymous to
   regret dubbed as slouched nirvana. Across the bonfire, there’s volition
   as glare, light as judgment. Why they call her
Luningning, I know not.
      Take excess for jaunts and flesh, and pay no heed to illusions. The mirage
  on the wall is but fire-dance on the bitten lip of true company.
                    heady static pierces pinecone. Soon the moon will sink like **** to ****. Or felled star as tripled glaze of salted lip. Or the ****** of the butterfly.
     Are we here to metamorphose these tiny susurrations into a commune?
                     Dank and stale as ****-laced pavement, the whole world now
    spires in uneven strobes. The last song on the karaoke as memory. The knead
      of temperamental air on the scalp. Take pork rind for bread, intemperance
    as tribute. The night dons its silken robe and shows her pair: two moony eyes
               piercing the noise.

i listen to all these
dying cadences, these internal convocations that i,
dazed into the fullness of flesh
and realness of bones and their
fantasized congregations on
my body,
these whispers recollecting
sobriquets that in oneness,
shall unashamedly endure ---

this tough call
singular in silence and in tenderness,

that in this readiness
you will give back what is mine
to own

these sudden and indelible
thrusts, these nebulous stares
that pulse with the life of
stars, and the ineffable echoes
of your caves that summon
my foolishness - these vibrant nightingales in hiding!

— 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.

So much laughter perhaps in front
of the console

If when we hand over what was given,
we are inconsolable.

Assume this position when
reaction is demanded:

You could, a massive day.
You could, a spectral of night
daggering into the forthcoming of nakedness  that was your title,

enmeshed, and then in a moment’s brief charade,
        torn apart, contained within four bedposts and a notch
        for a shimmering body lined with a peregrine skin.

how much it cost you, putting a face in this profile
    losing the document from flinging in the last time over and over
  as if we do not die only making copies of it each day

a    page is  turned not over but crimson  with   blame,
forging a lie  about  every  gilded moment  as  if  touch could  end it so

                      this day collapsed into a breath’s span crossing rivers.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

A.


  drone this    day empirical
  from where we were once  the we
  rained from,    a high excursion
   which savvy the drop, weighing in, a fault

  trying to convince   the day when Sun
  embellished from the   ravine  of your hand,
  a catacomb   secured   by the  rolling
     of your  body like   a boulder   keeping
  a minute   sacred, christened an evinced noon

   that    was  your  repetitive finding.   onto
  
    a netted    frame   caught,  dripping out of
   a felt   space in    need   for graphs  to measure
        from,   a well unnamed  which  presence
          resembling  your body,  resounding
   the     fluency of    what  the  physical  ascribes    
        an   iamb    of    a crowd  inverted,  diminishing
                 and inflected in   a day's livid sigh

     housed        in  a  jar that   is  a mouth
        words   assemble    an  ikebana willing
    a     delayed     color  that  was   a   lack.
                  held   a  device  that   was    a  sky
        or   a  gleaming  face with   a high price
    claiming       a  solstitial  --  when    I  went
                   to your   home  it was   Saturday all
   week   inside  my   ribcage  chiming  worship.

   plastered   to   a  sheen all is  equal  underneath
           equatorial   tracing    a   sphere    when
     I    found  stroking   the   innards   of   a calendar
               it   is   November.     it  is   Saturday.

B.

   he   comes  from
   low  wattage this  night's  post
   a wonderful polyp
   to   begin  a
   blight
   apparently  so from a cut blackest gutter
         carrying an ample   water  virulent
             when  taken  in  and   again   in

    a  savingslight  of     metamorphosis
       climbs   vertical   so  the winged moon
              
              is    a  black  bird   in   the   blackest
       cage /  baltic  a different  fraternity
       of    land    with   the    same   pictorial

     this   lovely  stillness   calling   it  work
   a  flood   could  mean pernicious   is  blood
              brewed   from  this climate
          it   is   here  past Mandaue hillsides   dreaming
                 if place were  rumored  as  same-silent.

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.

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 /

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 –

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.

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.

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.

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   |

For days, waited on to complete a task that was a call from surrender. Waited for it to bloom and when
ready,           beheaded.

1 To be cut from and origamied into
2 Severed then placed on a tomb
3 Until left for days unanswered
4 Lasted the strict climate held in the air
5 Unafraid between the firmament and arid ground
6 Grew roots into what was held, what was spoken, what was asked from
7 Answered by the body, the severance, the fruition

When no sounded rescue,      perished,  held   like a statue.

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.

treading masterfully this  autumn-long  road  where
    at the  end of  first light so begins  your fragile  darkness.


i know  not where you  wait for  me as  birds in  all geographies
      land without further   recall; as though   by  saying  that the  Summer
  has   dealt   its   cards   and the serrated  grass   folds  when it thinks
   the  rain   to be everywhere   descending,  falling  as lithely   as a lover
     whose cockeyed    miracle  first has meted out   a singular  trapping  fate
         of hands that interlock    to    no   retreat.

i   know  not  the silence of  the Earth  when all is caliginously
    intact    without knowing. but  then should you  return, your  eyes
will   light all  the   lamps awaiting   your   shuddering step  and fruition
       us  both the  ineffable   rendering  me  forever  the life  of roses.

( i  do not  know which  gravitates me back  to   where we
      first   saw each other; only  something   in me  does not   think
   but is constantly   supremed   by   feelingfulness   when it   is not
    the wind   but your   breath not   in the garden   of   joys but  in the exuberance
     of    all that    is made  immense in me by  your    eyes,
         when    it is     not the   taut   clamp    of   the   sea    at   bay
but    the   island of your   hands   clutching   the penumbra  of my heart,
   shattering     the shadow   and letting   loose   a  sprightly   dove
        here     and   a  hummingbird    there)

eros: to sting the flesh, o ****** shrieks
sweetness steals from: this buoyant word
sinking in the gnash of moon on loam: awaken me quicker than cherry trees
at dawn: don me against lisps of leaves:
rushing the dogs underneath tightwires:
and sing me something heavy the litheness of verdure: make me cling to wind-hours a tournefortia: place me a placeness in untruths reveal: ****** the languor of pillars: sensual the cruise of caryatids: enigmatic the dark of heron:
    crisp the wind of your arrival.

for you, dearest, ever so shyly
i, (almost always) silently, sloshing (pertinently), will be like water
falling and falling repeatedly,
(like falls from felled rocks,
  this foreverness of the dive)
rinsing and rinsing multipliedly,
(like rain tainting the already
  stained glass in Barasoain)
freely, wanly, (like my hand
  seeping through the aqueduct
   of your body or
  traversing the source of this stream)

but there is a brightness unmoving,
   high rise of heat,
  like water
     i have dried out.

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.

gOd

must have
   been somewhere else
      for he had forgotten there
  is a planet called Earth


squall of the morning harboring at bay
the howl of the wind rampaging
  through the tired streets,
  i take no sorry hints from the bends
and turns, nor did i hear the gutter weep.
  only the baritone snarl of the swathe
    of brute air through the entire vein
      of the city.

here now is the voluble thwart,
crumbling in the heart of it
   are mere species, the slavered hounds
    of being chained to verily existing here, even the infinitesimal
    were not spared in the glib downpour.
  
windows shut deep into stillness,
the automaton shadow submerged
in delirious light, as winds once again
   with unannounced perditions

   uplifting the nails, tossing the
  alloys like birds swift in the catapult
of breezy flights, lives sojourning,
     some left only a scarring story,
    or just prodigal and nothing else.
carcass stench carves its reek
      in the onlooker, the rat **** foams
altogether with the brine, a cesspool
    of unheard screams dwarfed by
      the circular roar of the grey behemoth
  showing only its unblinking eye

running, searching for a place
    to go less terrifying
         than this, a bearable departure,
   or a hopeless sling at rescue,
luckless imperative,
       today's vibrant children,
ashen tomorrow,
      gone.

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.

the wind of this love
is clambering the spine
    of want -

the gentleness of it
  sings to me, an oncoming ratio
  of love's reign:

   all of it is to less of me.
   love on its knees,
   weeping to be discovered
   and hurled into the readiness
   of bodies, the intractability
   of hearts ravaged with   instinctive roars of need,
   the flight of words
   soaring with flame,
   forests shaken loose,
   wringing them out of birds!

  what question to bare it
  when i am already tenderly
  hurt with love's assault?

   and then memories scavenge
   through the ruin of all:

  who is behind these
     wounds?

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.

i remember going back to the now bleared moment, where it burgeons in
its ruinous hands. they demolished the hearth long ago and the dearth only fills
the air together with the splinters of what
was once yours — the wind is much tenser there, and there too is the bleak behemoth-shadow cast by the towering bell of the cathedral juxtaposed to the many a pompous mango tree enshrouding it like parasols to young, tender loam.
we were akin  to those moments of death,
lauded by the assuage of its avid fondness — when it has died, we can hardly tell that it were stripped out of life
and when it continued to live, we denied it
inside us that it was no more than an ephemera enjoyed. rain obscured the
dry land seeking till, and sooner than we
knew,
        the leaves have abandoned the trees
and we were underneath a shade of
       our own.

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!

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

1

held  against   the mouth
  sentenced cleaved to silence, what is around me
 is all this is: wire. quartet of birds. aqueduct
 as arrest and close range tap of rain on face
 rippling in the eye foreclosed and reasoned is
 this image's return -- what is it like to live
 far away from home and not hear me say
 regret as study of attitude? News carried
 bombardment of inner cities. We were hesitant
 to leave place and borrowed skin instead,
    if not borrowed then grasped for, what is the answer? if coordinates lie, what are
                   we trying to discover.

2

held  against  the  temple
   not a barrel of a gun, but similarly, a chamber if not
  a mouth breathing in sulfur. the day has spun
  out of, and in between clipped reminders of
    the calendar:
   today's broken notes on the tablatures are
 the daily. Do groceries. Pick the freshest fruit,
   take the sour out of the scale. Gut the fish
 and not word it so over the kitchen counter, I will
 watch behind a clutter of earthenware and furniture. Might topple the glass
     once and catch your attention. I do not deny your
  effect     on   my  soul.

3

  today's forecast of rain   is body staying in.
  the children are seized by terror as scattered displays    of  lightning   paint their faces
       petrified with a lack of hue -- listen to the
 intermittent, coarse static of the television
     when it happens, your face ripe for arrest.
  there   is   nothing to do in  a home
     holding  its  breath  when  you walk,
   do not   leave just yet. the water   is  rising.
      it tells   you   to   stay  in. triple your  presence
  across the  dining,  rain as if out of the  shower
      barely  drying   yourself,   leave  water
    i will    not   drink,  only    test  swimmingly 
      a  dream  out   of   sleep and   so real
       a   twitch of  fish    out   of   ocean.

4

  outside  you are  no longer  than  the   transit
  of   birds   seeking   canopies. Wind   disrupts
  the steady  arm  of   cables. Slosh of water
     from an   oncoming  vehicle  as if  beside  the
   sea crashing into   me   are   waves,

   What need   is   there  when  your   mouth houses
      water, your   *******, warmth?  Contrast as
   habit   of  alternatives. In verbatim, this is how it
    sounded from you, "We  are   very   young.
          Remember me   this   way."

  Now i  wish  voices   could  be bodies. The next irreconcilable   face   as    hearth.
              Fingers   as   assuage,   distance  as  dearth,
      grasp   if  not  borrow,  translatable  to
   signal,  my  body   heeding,   fraught by taciturnity through the   caught  wind
      through the  furniture, once your   body being   groped for like any
     other   sundrenched day.

[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

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

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.