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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

preserving the imprint including you.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

     nominal,   going   into   without  purpose

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

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

/  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.

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.

desultory moon
over Chrysanthemums tells
solitudinem.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

shine of light through the heavily draped mist

|naked|

i kneel to pick up the crimson and drain
  the thorns of your aches

|naked|

you screamed in your cornerless voice,
    the blue of the ocean peels through
     the foam and then

|naked|

like fish struggling in
      a flush of current, swaying with
  the drowned **** and the derelict
     of ships revealing old shadows

|naked|

as we took a dive in each
    other's depths clad with bravery, now

  |naked|

     to the bone, in fear of our clutched hearts, breaking in the silence,
     looking through the window
     of each other's deliquescent being
      sieving through the world,

|naked|

wherever you go,
i go — wind tracing the child,
warm, outlined laughter;

the twilight-telling
bird of mid-flutter's lightness
erasing the night

and here is now, you
trilling amongst the ether,
moon shimmering bright.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

look what happens     in a speed like this
    85 on no freeway stalwart edifice of dark only trees like round tacks on square holes a dog on the road like a dead log
  
  look what happens   In a speed like this
   words or no words noise or silence
   sink or swim veracity or mendaciloquence
    little by little minced choices to
      marrow in bone without remains

  look what happens in a speed like this
    100 on no freeway pavement folding
   origamied shadow in a corner drenched
   in the pit of this dark dog on the road

   i ran him over

  look what happens in a speed like this
  so impeccably timed faster
  than a butterfly
  or a switchblade
  a shot of morphine
  a drugged-out drummer
  pummeling staccato beats
     or the unread word of the beatnik
  the dreamy dilettante

i ran him over
     dead, peabody in the cumbersome dark so small so small in a speed like this.

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.

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;

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

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

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.

the heat of an approaching story
(they have their own way of trickling
  your hands are hourglasses on the wooden table,
  the sands of whose sea you have shattered immensely
  with a single stroke of    recklessness)

it will be punctuated by the silence taken to the limit
   of a moment’s finite order
  (I dip my hands into the palms of useless glance
    waving heavily against the concrete lip of this dark
   intervening, standing in between as fury on the other side
   of the city is taken to the streets – barricades and men
        bawl into the fullest weight of the world,
     you said you   see all of it.)

and  will reach the lilt of   embrace,
  in all forms plundered of sentiments,
  all of it taken into the  air where

  I    see the final bird of dawn, flying
   and I cannot.

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.

morose thing now,
this thing under umbrage
  of a maddened machine;
who is reluctant to give way,
an ecliptic passing of
an even madder woman.
this thing now,
under the pretense of shadow,
this form,
falling out, whiplashed, broken,
whose name of music is soliloquy,
this amorphous figure
   that gives so much    cadence
  to    things
     that    hold onto   long and monotonous
    enunciations like a bad hangover from
       a slackened night’s slug.

like the S on swooned
   or still the S on the double-grinned,
    parasol-intoned, punch-to-the-gut spoon;

or S in  seldom
     saved,   structured such  selfishness
saluting   sordid stories   soldering
       smashmouth  Suns   surrendering
   smoothly-sailing    stars,   supposing defeats
     similar to   sanguinaries such sweetness
         sings   surreptitiously.

slipshod toboggan feeling
before nakedness reeling
past dried vandals on walls
  colorway harum-scarum

entrails of blinded sides
  open to eyes and their
possible misconceptions

such that
baring all is showing less
and showcasing more
   is no other than pretension

going guillotine
sick or sane in one
asylum afloat
like flotsam there
  and jetsam here

   hoarded onomatopoeic
cacophony: street beat
  back to basic superstition—
no continuations or ellipses
   tell-tale that gamblers all
and losers swell, the jazz needed
   to synchronize in tune,
an off-beat gyration in split-screen
   flat affect. exeunt.

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.

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.

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!