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.

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.

shaft of light through
tassels, clinking cutlery,
vacuous space
varnished petrification
of wood,
monotonous whir of the fan
and the cessation of the clock
(i give it taps to test
  its life but time has
  given up on me)
the surreptitious chirp of
bird and the flirtatious advancement of a shadow.
Hugo's crucified howl
in his kennel -
the bristle of broom from
the outside, sun raking through
a mound of dead leaves
scattered across this humdrum thread of the world.
ceramic persona
being formed into something
   ephemeral: say a household,
      or little stone-men,
a sturdy house of epistles
   or just a nook for a free dove.
first to go is the sound
   of the afternoon and the next
     is i, wearing 2 day old jeans,
starting the car, revs it like
   a beast in stupendous heat,
     raves the avenue and brings
with its deceitful snarl, the weight of all trivialities, enclosed somewhere in the dark annexes of the compact subspace,
   wishing for a crash,
   a collision,
   a time for smallness,
   or of being
   nothing but
   air, or the clock that died on me, or just
    10 AM, nothing else.

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.

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.

i have no other means to see,
only through the intervening vacuities
of the word — out in the field
there seems to be no end seething
to the very beginning;
these words now
appear limbless yet still make
their way deftly, scrunching
against the wall enough to toss the
body out of sleep.
i have nothing to offer
only my despair
and in this, myself, have seen all
too pristinely without a sensible trace
of fear or a mitigated feeling

i am all words and no conversing,
addled by the thoroughness of it,
ample warmth of a makeshift fire
  thwarting the involuntary shadow there,
  hiding behind the renegade
  of thought or a portentous rearing
    of imagination's hearth:

i am all words, no other than this alone—
having achieved this noble sense of
  swift perpetuity, no other means to
    this end than the poetry of impetus.

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.

I take it that a spray of Sun occults your face,
like watching in a squalid cinema, something a slapstick would
conjure a stylistically dumb image, or the prattle of
bunkum hubbub drowning loudspeakers in plazas.
You know there is a part of you that goes missing
  every time you hear me pass carefully under the care
  of toppled light, and there is a part of me that engages
the dark in this straining mutiny. This is such a troubled time
on the hardline; a martinet on the other cheapened end
of a totaled horizon hollering at gentrified space, eyes sternly
fixed on the mattress, conspicuous in urbane manner, something
shadows bade with hands, lifts up all the ragamuffin days:
   to capture you in such moment, such oneness, of no complication,
like a clean Yamazaki on the house, or a metropolitan district
   augured with rubicund crisscrosses, streets sidereal in measures,
an aggressive ******* at the end of the curb, the spanked curve
   of the mordant asphalt, and the rise of body heat from yesterday’s swelter;
  something only I could have thought of in white thighs of little ladies
    and peering birds for collarbones: look at this, maddened, retaining
    nothing but age.

i see him straightening the
ruffle of his native clothing,
putting words of truth
inside the empty parentheses
of mendacities -

it is through his leonine eyes
that i see the pointlessness
of men. through the
TV's hoarse static i can hear
his voice occupy the space
of obligation without swerving
to paths made available for ease
without clear trudge.
    sir, you make it painless
to conceive these cutting truths -
death trembles in these taut attestations. in half-lighted periphery i can see the shadows
threatening to cast us into damnation, and it is in the bright ray of your speech that i have started to uncover the beasts
  and their diminutive language.

dark as dark these ploys could be,
  now that they are whiter than
  ever with their transparencies,
you have handed these people
  flames to torch effigies
   and use their glare to light
  the intransigent paths
    to this nation's true calling!

    spare us from the debaucher
of this once sacred land, the contortionists   of these ill fates.
and preserve our just tillage
  over these archipelagos!
save us from the vertigo of these
   mangled, twisting roads!
give our speech obdurate
   magnitude so we can hammer down
the lies thrown at us and cast them away together with their wretched demagogues!

    let us once more, be brave
    to withstand the eye of storms
    and emerge wizened like
     trees in the summer of
    our old, resplendent memories
     where everything is
   and nothing
         is speaking loosely
   of something far from our hands
     to hold, like
   prosperity,
        or effulgence - altogether!

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 will only look for which road i have
  passed, with girth of oceans startled
  to hip-curve, bow-legged darling
  hiding behind pretense of rose frailty.

when words ripen, they fall.

from vaudeville of fools to silence
in all its exactness, i take my place
amongst people in stations, machines
adorning rotundas, courtyards to a flourish of twilight-bells, the men with retinas spry behind cloaks of smoke—

        plain, **** drunkenness assaults
the billion-blooded sea, each line fraught
with inebriation: a god is borrowed with
what light fruits from a slow nature, quick
to burst and torturously maimed in stride.

fated to arrive at one morning —
being in total placeness and making merry
once again, the dreary face waiting at
the portico of days collected.

when these words start to wind-hover,
a string of birds will appear clearer,
mounting umbilicus of lines.
as in hounds shear the metastasizing dark,
going back to chagrined kens,
i make truth out of the tragedy:
trace the source of this stream and find
my trampled body, floating with
   the sandalwood. when the still, clenched hand clock-punches,
   make real the insignia of my arrival:

words start with limbs to cross
  this scalped Earth which moves suddenly naked, leaning in, gropes you
in stillness, resuscitating the moon from
the working of insolvencies we rear
in derelicts of days.

drags it closely to ends — left trundling
in woe's wearisome vessel. and if in
this newly thatched home it screams,

let this voice deftly shred
so i may once more lie straight to your
half-illuminated faces, a call i
only hear.

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?

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.

/  rivers pulse this house as if activity, predictable.
  leave this body       just like that.
  and heave the emptiness from the thrum
  of the streets         just like that
            the stars delineate an axis tilted by my means
  to live under frail coruscations.
           take this house, take the rivers
           with you, all the more my body
           anything other than my blunder.
   take even, these tiny and immediate currents
   as i hear this is how it is to be delivered from
   grace and expanse.
             you are what this truancy is trying to undo
   as you were by mine before -- this is how
   it feels to be moved and sidled again and again
                     this river that you carry me across and left with details none can supply. there
            is resolve in this, even when I am taken aback,

which certain things are left crossed and wronged,
   and how you keep the place guarded, possessed
        by light -- how it wholly hurts, this invented
       life all mine /

1
What is to break if not another word for
       impossibility, or another phrase as palliative
    for suffering each other

2
What is so sure of it to arrive
     in the densest minute, say when if already
out of sight, I implore you to
     unlearn my body

3
This and the deep and hollow end of it.
      Visage voyeurs as if the past is just next door
      sleeping with my woman, laughs and then cuts
      open to free itself from a slammed door
      and mosey on.

4
As statement to refute my coming into,
   I am already accomplished. Turn this day opaque.
   Lens to the world my found
                    imperative of what was given, a knife
    to stalk a heart so difficult as if known to me
          as a path home, or unearthed bus tickets
    from Longos to Tabang. Say when it rains,
        forgive me. I remember still.

5
To believe in touch and its memory is
    obligation. The way I see this, a palimpsest.
  I attempt to discover something, witnessing myself
  pass mirrors, body found as if rivers do drift
      me to the brink of a high noon wishing
  to swing downstream the words I have
       no use for, if not documents of haloed hours.

6
I passed by your house.
Silence annuls azure skies.
Balustrades gone. They took everything down
    evenly to the last inch of paint,
balmy this oblivion only for me, catatonic is this
      peace as my hands lift a piece of the soul
   to shred. The day burns like a forest in my hand.

Pasay's no conversationalist,
   unapologetic.
  
      "Way sapayan, pastilan"

Ravenous snarl of
      the carrier
     The refined grit of
        rusting fulcrum
          The terse hammer
        malingers,
  The pompous talk of
     carburetor
       and the flagrant burst
         of jetwash,

    i am never grateful for these
      subsequent cacophonies:
   a steel orchestra. i could no
   longer take the metaphysical spar of this hunted dialogue.
    darkness weds the synagogue of
      shadow and soon,
    we will all drown in the rain.

from the doctor's lightsome bed
   after being examined in the bone
to my side of the lenient road

  we are in the heat
   of assault.
  no dead lampposts
  no macabre of alleys
  harbinger dampened silence.

only this thing of us now
   deconstructed to you
  and i with no relevance
  believing nothing but the
  instantaneous rupture
   of any thrown word
  in the neighborhood of parks.

slam on the dashboard
   and the groan of the engine:
hurtling at speeds faster
   than any ******.
  across the knobby knee tawny
   slivered burgeoning words
  escape compartments ajar

  objects unkempt
    dissipating on the svelte ragamuffin
  linen, faded masquerades of feeling
    trying to destroy the riddle

  lunging with uproarious wordlessness
    like a den of lions set loose
     here speeding 110 kilometers
    in arbitrary roads finding each other
    again, this time
       making furious love.

Beneath   an expression

a       found     crevasse   that   was

    for your   body



Dear  ___,
   if by principle      you are to believe
                        the brevity of a word
   then should it be that

    there is much terror applied by your mind
    when this is being the reddest herring you can
   imagine strange and leading the body to
   traverse a line and get lost midway





and over it
    a    purpose    for    its   depth
  that is      for    my    body

When it   is past 2 A.M. we have no use for reason.

       compose the current of the body and listen to its    brunt

when  to  be X-ed for  falling,    hide within  its sallow coordinate.

         gun   the  engine.     Let the  smoke  brag   about   our
  distance   suchlike a probative   burden.

away     from  here      is  the  loveliest   day

     it’s   definitive    to   quit   a resolution:

no    more   of   waste  /    shelter    may   mean   a  contrast between

     most   days  alone      and     some  days   with

     a   dignifying   versus    ---   when  it  is  finally   done,

       see me   through   a jaundiced   eye|

  a   hand     labored  from,  exhausted  and besieged|

         no   longer   someone’s    your   conflicting   a   possible

afterlife  this  one,   and  another one  ---   else between a rock   and
   a  place   leaden
          your      heart     downed   by   its   tending   to    prove

what    object   you    have    no    use  for.

    *you   like  the   sound   of  this,  don’t  you?

[Amy Wright: Here too there are tears for things]

When asked how to be of use, clenched when the hand
yearns for consumption – nothing was happening and when
you look within the azure you will see the multitude
of sun’s tireless handkerchiefs bleating in the distance.
   Today is Saturday, and nothing else was happening.
   I used to lament over the cities you have turned over,
and within the same day, found they were susceptible
to consummate within a name – an arena for collision,
of all the crisscrosses and the winds that mark our places,
to all ships making their way, traversing into the lateral voyage,
the undertakings our sure fear: we do not know how to be involved.

From my slice of ample darkness and space,
     I look at you from all the stirrings of things,
  dancing though you cannot dance,
  leaving planetesimals all over the terrain.

I can sense out a locutionary from the heated body
beside me. Surliness so sure of its dagger in hiding,
slowly creeping up like cocoon of morning.

That was you in your off-shoulders.
Collarbones, caryatids, tilted atmosphere
summered, simmered into the air
  until it died in a hollow jar.

And from your foreground, rusting is the wind
  and it falls down on the lawn, like garlands
  spread all Autumn by a sprightly, darling child
  in a lithesome gingham dress.

My hands, past vertical, destroying limits,
   feeling the weight of mercurial form begin
  shifting into a disturbance in lotus stature,

  fraying out of phase in limited access,
this height where springs of undecipherable fogs
   lift the face of clocks, unwatched,
whose departure is this but only distance knows?

Take cover underneath your derelict day
  inside the cage of this home

and thrive in canned laughter, delay my
  coming, commanding like youth that was

your ever place. The city stranded into a thick
   swell of rain, gush was stone flushed in corners,

distending a shore. It was your extension with
   what was given -- this climate. This weather

within the azure's finest crosshair. Take this salt
   and ***** fish in brine. Brightest day

a myth under your penance that was I, supine
   on the surface unmoving like hue or else

dumb like refusal -- the amount of what for,
   patented here a blink couldn't waste in:

a season so squalid you waged inside yourself
    contained in a terminal brow of a humdrum day

that was yours solely manufactured from
    stalling a refrain, which tide of song

rinsed the corners whole betrayed by access
    of us here emptied like a concave

this loss tallied  by  the  gravity effaced
     with a high price, take this to your disquiet

and be caught against a registered tragedy
      when parted, dearly remembered to a feigned

retrieval -- further your stasis, then after this
      a halt lesser than force when found who we

are when   we  find how things are done.

each time the wind turns the pages
of the tree, the sun ripens in itself,
a fruit transfixing the day—

we take it in our hands,
lowly in the grass we lay in slender
fascination, a fresh fruit's glaze
signaling the hour.

this is when my love heightens
as rain falls inanimately on unquiet stones, revealing their naked splendor.
their silences transmuted into undressed
woes of women toiling shorelines and men striding subterranean worlds —

whereas when brightness then quells
itself and tosses you out into the deepest
chasm of chores, your locomotives unction you my sweet lovingly arms
where i bring you close to rescue,

herein darkness prevails and overthrows
water: my hands divest their fates and begin to scour for the nacre of your heart—
and i will take it, and i will own it,
  for there is nothing the blue yields in depth but the lesson it shares,

leaving me a place, flat on my belly,
  with a bounty of flowers in my mouth
your lips have planted like your hand
     on my chest.

farewell and farewell—
so this persists, the night
unraveling
its exigent face
as delicate as daybreak.

each window shunned, each door
left open for the wind of your red feet
to enter a plenitude of vagabonds,

goodbye and goodbye
and nothing has ever changed.
to remove yourself from me
and retain, a dagger:
to seize with your hands, my blood
and to bathe your body, with
new darkness.

to move away from me
resounds a bell, a prayer's end,
the birds are in their clandestine,
the felines are in their rendezvous
and your body assumes
liquid measure, surpassing matter.

let us not converse grief when it is
fancy to speak of embrace — you
are a rusting machinery left in the
ferruginous dark.

so we have never returned
and i no longer grieve you:

you are as untenable as a fixture or
a sepulcher.

your furlough, even
across the world

so beautifully ****
made immense by the primeval crush
of light.

there are places in the world
filled with soundless bones,

women in their lifeless braids
and swell sheen of moon

this bane of such swollen river
aching back to its source.

it is that your departure has the
scent of olives crushed against
the squalid home,

    and that your presence never
lights an incense,

   like death wafting searching
for flesh, or a lone animal
left cut in the wild pursuing rescue
with a hue of damp mauves.

(everything happened while
    unloading laundry from the car,
  a speck of light flaunts.)

daylight penetrates—
saturnal globule.
exeunt: flicker of firefly.

the line between dreams
  and wakefulness is          thin,

in Ghanam North.
before me, the landscape rogue without
heat lays naked, ash-lorn-true all around;

cold pure, and air distilled
night keen with its eyes strobe around
  revealing drowned pine.

the wall between the living
   and the dead is              frail.

the diaspora trace through names
  what is retained: vestigial, frightful;
   a stone’s throw at the nearby mosque
  crying in prayer, bellowing through the ashen
     quadrangle, a dazed interlocutor.

moving past things unmoving.
the astragalus feels the slow tumult,
   silence as remnant, trilling,
                                     free, carrying a message,
         *Ta’ala.

underneath the throbbing roof-beam,
where no words
bend
sliver
fall
in the
subtly put
dark -
beyond **** light, i,
a falling leaf soldering to Earth
or a ****** of wind crossed
by brambly foliage and crisp sun remembers flesh in our arms and now, flailing to dance in fledgling
beat
  
      endlessly as a secret,
      a cajole of a finger
      into the heart of storms,
      or the rain's secret upon
      pried flowers about
       to set loose in the
      teeth of the cold wanting
       to make pale fire.

my derelict third year in the drone:
a way to assuage what it feels to

function. to breathe mechanical air.
the rambunctious scent of morning appears

ill, confabulated, lysergic at most.
ladies in lithe dresses pose for pressing scenes.

taken photographs held up in loose light.
pelvises unloosening, ****** on the thoroughfares

fishing for trout as men, men as flowers,
lackadaisical graffiti dropping like simian jaw

upon visions of thigh. everything signatures a suture
so precise like a repair of the lip,

or the rapture of birds in impossibly blue skies.
news was that a fortune was coming in,

and I slept within the masses; dreams deliberately
vandalized and fragged.

they said it would be
marvelous. they said it would not ****.

i see a woman
in her 20s. falling subtly, a gingham dress

sexed if not pullulated by flower-heads,
she said it would be darling

my third year in the machine.

i desire for your
  inner light to awaken:
itself, a budding flower—

growing roots in my silence,
  foregoing the panache of air.
your petals assist my peril
into a curtain's closing.

what transparency does my hand hold
clearer than any day when you
look at yourself within my eyes,
dizzy with the image i give back,
  a startled child?

the Earth's jar topples, waters breaking free, loosening its girth wily against stone, rinsing us both with purity.

with what you had in your hands was simply

an ellipsis to emptiness. Hands can only carry
                very little weight.

and to have been caught in a virulent string
   of your Decembering noontime air – was it,

just birds spry and singing or was it
a wreathe of girls surrounding the *****

back to how it was to create light out
   of primitive engines?

once it capitalizes, we are caught in this
small circle. often retained, the detritus of

such duel: once ripples are May and
  initialed the reprise of springtime,

yet here we are only tropics, and cancer,
   and the heat is too much as to bear

charge, your tired, sleuthing dog Django.
   rasp for the lift, was it before the collapse

when both a yawn and a dance trembled
into   /stillness/

we are each to ourselves, selected amongst the few –
yet you cannot help but
be mortal.

you, mortised to sleep.
I sick behind white walls that will never
bring your laughter
back to that small frame in front of picture windows.

I look at the world around me
reduced to a grey-faced elbow room,
as the flickering lamp lays out
all the sorrows we forget in our sleep.

who are you?
I pucker up and pull this bottle
snuggled in my clenched fist
and I cannot help but think of any other
thighed upon the cold brink of this bed,
I cannot unthank the existence of flowers
that refuse to bloom in the Sun,
all the more the birds so clearly far better fate
than this enigmatical.

we are each to ourselves and selected amongst the few –
I am the same bar-drunk soul
you met years ago, and will perhaps be
that in all the hours that lay before your callow eyes.
when it is time to draw
the knife,
blinded by the glint of your bones,
wired to the same mind that has once
had me tippling over furniture.

you are this very distant portrait in the
mausoleum that I told many people about,
wanting to go there but my feet can’t – there is a slender
thread eyeing in itself a margin between
the two of us.

and now you turn in your great wave of motion,
next to me, pressed against the sheets
far from being tossed out of sleep.

and along with you, the wind drags a cold, lunar tail:
they are marvelous in their slowness,
and the dark grows more immense than the probability
of you sinking and I, emerging,

turning, turning,
breathing,
so much the turning
and never staying still – there is inimitable life
in this dreariness,

half an elbow,
knees pared to moons,
collarbones and all that music
hung on some frail home,
sovereign of nose
and that whiteness to a paling mood,

almost at the verge of leaving
but cannot because there is conscience tossed out of sight
like a living work of guillotine

immortalized in this sleeplessness that begs
for more waking hours,

continuing in darkness, your eyes close and close and
close like the many doors
that have disappeared
    before me,

     and the frailest thing that
we have
       almost, if not always
loved.

sly as intruder air
        piercing the helm of noon

when i remember you
        worlds come out of my beat

when i forget you
      these worlds puncture themselves in a slow unison of dying, reverting back to its
   state of unearthing

the dark holds itself back
   to wash me with light
    squinting through ajar windows.
  and now this,
     thrill-seeking hapless thralls
    of distant embrace
   and now this,
      the span of a wing's flight
    fans itself through elevation
   until nothing is within reach
  but trails of an elusive visage.

words breaking free
   from the cloud of the mind.
   the clout of the imperative telling:

  this is the wind blowing from all
  directions hoping to touch you
  where you sleep,
   rests its bone somewhere where
     no cold shivers the ground,
   somewhere familiar
   somewhere where both you
   and i have found each other
   two separate birds joining
    in the morning

     Magdalene wears these words
     melancholically
       hand in glove and earth
        in the mouth plump and tender
       like bosoms of full women
         eyes of men having their fill
       of imagined sensations in the flesh
       tingling forever throbbing
      underneath the white moon --

     until then the many loves
     will read this hoping for a deliverance
      the bow of my breath aims true
        but the precision is falsely taken
    a sidewinding serpent,
      a riotous guerrilla in the bush,
    hinging the heartland
        a poem washed away in the river
   as women rinse the clothes of men
     singing songs of despair;

I take this mangled body of iron,
  its acoustic of all malleability.

the flattened world outside
sings something so slender, a structure
    of a rose.

as long as there is the fierceness of these words,
   they will leap forth, a defenseless vault,
and cry a breakwater of rivers.

these words like caged birds peering out
   into the ferruginous world consummated
by the oldest of thrills crumpled anew – fledgling beats
  of dance, this hysterical morning that slinks to a clasp
    of slipshod music.

when it is time for all of Earth to slumber,
   I am the drapery and all unknowing eyes,
         my children.

this deep devotion in abstract tends to break loose
  reclining in air.
it may be even that the face is water
  and the eyes, basins. should the heart endure dank
seasons, there will be new skin thereafter.
the favorable light sways outside the house,
  stilled settings of rife adjustments, the objects are in
study: the fluent is stone. the trees automaton.
     demand for sought after thrills, the plenary hall
of moon. wider than any light, drunkenly, frothing by
  the gutter of this body.

sometimes when solemnity incises
   there is image of death in mirrors. yours is diffident
surrender over the haze of hastily contending moments
  and such truth is that the escape is yearned for
by a body – stiffening to become so rigorously false.

listening to the infinitesimal sound of body
   take this music to the trees, their lignified arms akimbo
yellowing, grandiloquent from the seizure of old fevers,

    the maddened, thorough tune mistakes your
    anatomy as cartography. if your deepening, secret parts
   are known, we will assume all conditions
and give variables for metaphors.    Sometimes escape is coveted
by    the   body, its indistinct signs neglected as beacons,
   there are   other  things happening, say, a hand meeting a face,
or the feet converging in trembling altitudes. A limit is set here.

exhaust of night's guttural snarl
  sleep, with its fixated eyes
  break the silence's dagguerotype.

edges of the moon fringe
  until its fingers sort out

      plenitudes of configuration:
  ignition upon contact,
      consummation upon acquiescence,
 pilgrimages within unmoving juxtapositions;
    suspended on intimation,
  void's hands swirl in depth
        lithe like a leaf, falling intimately on
    the ground:   my body's collapse
       to surrendering machination.
   it begins swollen to the full
         and ends, aching,
  yet unfazed by the untenable quicksilver
      of mind's pompous meander to a field
 where it so subtly blows,
              the wind in all spaces.

smoke ascends
into a thin streak
hauled by wind's crane.
tacit coruscations peer through
the cityscape without lasso.

revealing
light's snickersnee
and then guts the silence
with it,
pares it back
to an ember's nascent form.
in the womb of death
is i,
lips puckering to blow
a nebula of a new world,
ingesting all its hell
and expires
a circumambulating heaven,
sealing all fates,
a sepulchral nativity.

Impugn* shall if not your eyes are meager coruscations. Self-refuting, explanatory of its given berth.
              This is the unsolicited onus of addressing it: heart rears static splayed, intercepted by
                                    this question.

Stigmatize this if performance of, merely a concert. There is rigor stiffening the veins when ensanguined
                   from much gnawing of the uncontrolled sharpness of impressions. I think of ways to mend,
                           and when unable, means to bend.

Settle this once and for all and here is how. If perhaps an admission of something, let me see clearer
                      than this makeshift fog. Pave me a railroad somewhere, or house a station.
                        All of this waiting, all of this silence chastising what noise needs to be freed.

Pretend to be carrying a statue. Curse in a different language. Show what it means to be wronged
                           when the incompleteness of evidence merits a conjecture – this is your punishment,
                        to see me in false light and dislimn our quite fate:

                     it will be long  before there is the clearest answer, the apparatus to straighten,
                         to muffle the sound, and put light into this beating.

she says
i should neither touch her
light-plastered fringes
nor the sibilance
of eyes.

it would be unwise
while i am amidst
the storm of laughing
if you say
that my heart
does not shatter
in our despondence.

trilling in light
is the colloid of breath
foaming in the silence
shrapnels of this mellifluous
separation - we, flawed,
dawdling is this punctuation
of you and i
are no more

because you do not
gape with the voice
of sweetness like a cigarette
receiving the shadow
of my once dark being,
yet, someone within me
whose hands still carve
the figure reminds me
of
you.

I imagine        you naked
I imagine        you dead in faint recall
I imagine        your hands the gun metal
I imagine        your teeth the fence guarding flesh
I imagine        your perfume, your mother’s wake
I imagine        your strut a dance to J. Alfred Prufrock

I imagine       you singing from each to each
he puts    it like that,   and you have become overwhelmed
      by passivity
             as   in    a salutary
as capitulation
                      as the Earth surrendering to rain.

I imagine        you clothed
I imagine        you alive in the demise of day
I imagine        your hands studded to the hilt with lacquered sorrow
I imagine       your teeth gnawing my skin to suture
I imagine         your tears, the sea in front of your mother’s grave
I imagine        you
          ******* in the silver  head of morning

it is in dove's ways how i love you

and it is no common sight
to take glory out of what this
life ever so defiles with its
uncouth hands.

in the way that i soar with my
unnameable wings over your
territories finding shade,
clinging with the wind, my mothered world in the eclipse of a day's turning - where together with the fleshly rivulets i am unafraid
to trample the night with lithe sound: a wing's flutter echoes
through the caves of your mouth deepening in primeval silence. stones woven earthly, intricate as a bed of mendaciloquence where truth lies stripped to the bone of the very voice of it. oh and what solace waits for me yonder hills that recognize my stretch - even the shadows rejoice in their fill of my passing elegies yet, no love
shall die! night arrives drowsily over these planes that seek me, and i cascade as gentle as a pond girdling your ample fish that i viscerally own, thriving inside me, whirling in graceful fire.

the morning takes me with you,
its duty speaks where i was once
sterile without path - you take mine flight and hover past everything, spreading garlands that would name all of them, ours!

Where else to begin

but from a repetitive scene where
light smothering the fractured windshield
is the face of a mother

and the brute agony
of a totalled vehicle, the countenance
of a father?

But which ruin takes its station
amongst all moveless damages?
What narrative to assuage than appall
    which has not been drawn before,
 say a line to daze the day into genre?

In transit we have no words for it,
  nearly giving meaning to a god and
  fray itself drunk with a lesson.
What space here remains vacant and is
  an invitation to a marred face,
 pressing against the upholstery but makes
 final its formlessness?

 What space is here that sits
     with in an acoustic? This silence again and again,
  a sign of a spectral dawn again and
      again released from what they spit at me

   those who are but vigils in pried open yesterdays
         decomposing from where I lay with them.

somnambular sinister of night
through the flayed clockwork
unhinged from deleterious labor

i cannot begin to fathom
with my hands somewhere
i have not yet gone
but to trespass like light
in ambrosial air
through the eye of the needle—
such impossible task,
a lover caught in the clearing water
seeing the moon
fondling the heavy current of a fall's
equivalent - oh, in love, tonguing
my way fallaciously

unpinning us both.

All bleached. Sweating a spindrift. Senses dumb like a blunt arrowhead.
It is time again when liquor cuts like paper. I have weak means,
weaker skin. Wanting to strip home of stucco. Fails to, is white like clinic.

My measures to fret an end: books unopened, left yellowed. Some old cigarettes
my mother keeps a keen eye on, does not hurl in the trash, permits me
accepted death, the body taking a toll in this house. An empty wine bottle
corked to contain the drone of this animal. Pills I do not understand, only
touch the symmetry like a wife. My own shattered histories throbbing,
operating in the hollow dome of this

   some words when fated, do not reach their fathers. I have
many sons by this. My laugh bends like metal. Celan bellows trust the tearstain.
Body curled to a note impinged by conductions of this electric music. Listening
to myself confess as walls watch my back.

It is     dawn again in the periphery.
   Slowly beings a rehearsal.

A furious want only brought
the tint of the sky down to its last trinket.
Glides over air – resigns under dissonant skies.
First angle: tiptoe. I admire your machines.
   Second: a song for no one to hear but your presence
          my adulation sings with.
   You are a farewell for no one.

The cotillion undone under pirouette of Suns.
Music still for the mouth to bloom,
awakened at the edge of the world
that tastes nothing like metal.

Housed in reliquary assumed by the hands,
   committed to duty:
  contain the coryphée – body revolving, breath held to count,
  how many days expire to bring

back    the  black of   night.

Pale, divine light clothing
a hundred people laying like carcass –

a thick fist of people
   punching into the system of failure,

unrelieved, dismayed. Faced with
  downfall, tracing point A to B without

any other in tow but luggage,
  they annulled the flight so we pull

an escape when it rained – it taught us
where to hide, where to run,
what to do when we are soaked in sound
of rain pummeling the rooftop,
what warmth to share

on a bed meant for two with
  only one     dent.

Amorphous, dove-form, on rink;
I was once as free as the wind,

and I consider the day’s unremitting reminder:
bent light – falling flat on my dull skin.

Wryly enough, the mornings are pried open,
remorselessly, like a note discovered obsolete in secret

gaps: why would such unopened unraveling
be secret? A persistent memory?

I gaze by the barricade, children fluttering
almost in flight at the city center’s space,

possibly conjuring themselves up as birds
or words freed – such scene requires several audiences,

whereas adjacently crooked, I stare inanimately,
which requires no spectator, possibly dreaming

a shadow, an old man wiping his reading glass clean,
or the squalor of the heart decanted in the heat of transitories;

acute on the night-watch, I will rejoin them
like old haunts finding new-fangled skin to scar.

our old appendages are our contemplation of our peripheries.

these minor playthings we do not touch
anymore. rusting alphabets moored
to the toppling refrigerator door. we have always been the curious kind;

before the sun sets, stills itself in unperturbed solace, we the lonely hunters of ourselves sift the word
and the ordeal: the last aureole perishes
  and here flowers the nightly pulchritude.
our age are servitudes circling around
  with elliptical utterances. we have no crutch but our brittle bones slowly chiming in the music of something we
avoid: only too well a mercy we cannot
  bequeath nor receive.

  so breakable and false, this what we
do, these that occur permitting desires
  to speak blandly of themselves.
the hazards of the existing numerals
   and their foreboding syntaxes:
how we burn bright and fade out,
   all of this briefly shattering
after a colossal fall – its trenchant elegy
   repudiates with contrapuntal music.
eyes, the contraband of visions and
   stifled breaths reared in capitulations
like tailgating a beast on the tractable road
     to snare it to its death, yet untold.