What space allows, presence threshes.
Devotions mean nothing but prattle of the neighbor.
We inveigle them to sleuth us, and now we have their
   word pressed against their neck, like a dagger.

In this weather, I have no excuse for blood.
If words were bodies, then colonies here quench before
vanishing in air, with an exasperated apparatus.

What light swallows, darkness heaves.
Devotion is the hearsay of intuit. Sensing out the farcical writ
as though embossed in flesh, here where lines split
across a sure-footed paper. The **** delimits
a famished movement. Nothing like this abstract,
if not collage.
     I know a hand’s intimate framework. Space knows not
a trifle, and presence quick with finitude.
   Here we expose margins and squint at presumed limits.
   In the deepest midnight before we sleep, we crumble at the
portent of the borrowed heat we are to suffer,

seeking underneath moderate climates, this home.
as in any other home, our feet dragged along corridors.
   wander-wearied, our place within ourselves
    we savor with denial.

difficulties ascertain the tremor
of the displaced stone in the corner:

stones have truth, and life so much the not, like the lilt of mendaciloquence
dispersing in a dearth home—

everything else is rinsed,
assuaging the dermis that continually aches forever the thorn of a rose ripened,
  just as jazz is as always the music listened to by fellows hungry for Earth.
the wind blows spindrift past
our opened window when we slept next
to the churning sea. shadows renaming space: elegies of old metal rusting
seeking more than what silence provides.
roads confused to a kink. furniture kites along with it, a toppled light like sinking the fruit deep into the hands of a river.

  our flights become only so heavy
  when we become wary of the love we
  drag along. when we the small of our
  back and the bony protrusions of arched
  bodies become
            aware of the detritus. when blades
  of grass rear weight of the air bracing
  for the fall.
    
  our flights become only so heavy
   when we look back at our point
  of departures. our spanked curve
   of trajectories, permutations of
   open doors trying to do away
   syncopated tapestries anchoring
  our dripping bodies wet with what
  the snow has lent our
       numeral summers—

           forget.

rinsing my flask, this late afternoon
and scouring to steal anything from my father's humble tavern: Chilean.

bought on stolen wine, this daze,
pacing itself carefully, as masterful as
a leering puma poised to strike

with a dull blade duller than stab-wound,
nobody heard this primal man cry in the
woods and i'm no dangerous man.

just a shadow that fits the sizable hands
of the world cupped, the afternoon is slain and the hue is its blood:

something the brush of the wind
sensuously brings a roulette of red
  blue, lavender, viridian,
plucked out of the vermilion
wading out as a debris forgotten waltzes
with the river underneath the kamagong— an answerless enigma amid all
    perplexities,

are we but nothing whilst we live?

Jakarta, 2016*

some say the city is stippled with warnings
but nobody took the time to stop and sojourn deep
  into the augur – there was no price to pay
and no song to be sung. only strange silence trying
to renounce the inscrutable weight of peril;

but a while ago, the tabloids and the papers are
dizzy with tribulations – each word assumed not sound
  but force. the once Decembering wind transmogrified into
a penitent squall of smoke until the city was of a veiled mother
    weeping behind the pretense of a shadow.

not much was said, or perhaps we were speaking
  for such a long time, or we did not mean many things
but wounds and cuts and some lostness to which we all have
  gone blind and deaf: coming in daylight’s whisper.
   we cannot hear. all of which may not be revealed, like
a new phrasing that has not been conceived yet, and so we lay
   in the silence for now, hushed by surrounding scenes,
               in pursuit  of heart.

the sun is a gentle hand whirling
  softly past the opened windows

and I am a lonely furniture
sitting still beside restless shadows.

shall I give you my silence and
  come back with fledgling beat?

or be fastened with the riot of the masses
  pummeling the iron and striking blindly

like a palaver hurled in the middle
  of the midnight riddled by stars and

   nothing else? stones enisled conspicuously
like the hands of a mother have well-placed

   pavilions into their order, the careful crunch
of trees in Summer, filling the brim of ornate eyes

  with such redness hazily festooning the avenues
with the lissomeness of the Earth

little girls dressed  quaintly on Sundays
   the fragrance of mildew everywhere

     you against all the surrounding scenes
that break vases, pound the halls and leave doors

                      opened, yourself crawling away
dragging along the weight of your own shadow.

lighting with my eyes,
this inward sanctum

hair, her black river; my terrors
congregate. strobe of aurora
strokes auburn conflagration; my
secrets aloud

her eyes now are birds floundering
in vast oceans of tawny bodies;
onerously present like the
gladiola

where warm-blooded stallions
gallop the sinews of this
straightforward physiognomy.
******* are islands thick
with fleshly origin,
  
navel's cave oozes foam
of brine, sweating in the heat
of this frail moment where
my tongue conquistadors
exploring varying perfumes,

caught in the latticing shrub,
this gossamer pearl, furious
with godly ecstasies no heaven
could tell within the bat
of an eye or the heave of seascape

relics of soul hidden in all,
mine to quarry in my hands so
little with uninterrupted thrill,

  i love thee, all darkness.

i was thinking of a love divined—

or an amaranth held close to the Earth.
i tossed it into the graveyard of names
and when i start to cut
a dozen more of flesh,
it will then begin to rise
yet i bequeath it no unction.

it is never a clock nor a pendulum-sea,
spindrift sloshing forth creases
of fabric, spinning a cataclysm
leaving all solemn in a torpor like a
tractable animal wounded behind
   the bush.

i was thinking of eyes unfastening
the lovelorn, arriving with an image
i have long feared—

i walk with no clothes seething
with a bulge of life.
it's a cold room, this peregrine of silence.
i see mouths reduced to creases
on the wall. hands unscrewed to
loose hinges drifting apart.
teeth biting the lip of days in disquiet
as surf takes on multipliedly by the shore,
a hoard of wave-rustle.

i was thinking of something pure
when all yesterday's tumultuous memory
tumbled down like a reared on avalanche,
tossed to a basket, folded,

poised to be sullied once more.

1
Fails to realize the momentousness of the ordeal. Syntax means nothing. Delineations weak. It is all obsolescence, this one. This thing that has no name. This agreed-upon assault of objects. Its loose fizz into the air. Buildings without balconies, or balconies without height – a plunge will mean that there is only little ache left to wring out of some futurity. Arrange the furniture, you said. Take pictures of the sullen victory right after. There is no place in there but only spacious silence. Like meat before it goes into the melting ***. Like light before it reaches its tippling point. Hence, let us both agree to this once again. An end. A limit has been reached. In most days you say nothing. I wait – concealed, overwrought with time’s unloosenings. I do no waiting at all. I do wait at all – this made moment is your new retreat.

2
This is an old woe with a new name. I ask you things, you answer me endless. Endless as in quiet is infinite. There are so many places in this world fat with stillness. Feelings flatten and fall at last, here, its exoskeleton. Keep it in your drawer with your DMs. To make a metaphor out of you means I acknowledge your disappearance. To keep mum about it means I take it inside me, deeper and deeper. Do you dream of fish now? Or waves? Or the undertow you take with you, dragged in miles of feet through dunes of sand? I ask you again, and you show no signs of being uninhabited. Although there is sometimes the warmth of pressing sheens, you take them as the passing of buses – you emphasize the waning. Although this has been written, there isn’t so much writing done here. If I could be abject like say, a washrag in your home, there would be little difference made.

3
To keep myself intent is declaration. To quote otherwise the world that you breathe in, simply suppression. It is much imaginable that way, much more attainable, resolute and quick with sense. A new kind of wailing. What I want, I destroy by earnest regard. There is a paradoxical way to cultivate this thing: and it is to leave it there, thriving in a space meant to contain it, alone. Nothing will be retained – it will always be one, and never two. You believed me. I asked you again. Your answer compressed everything to shadow.

There is no reason for the wind
to maneuver

propagate cold in this province.
sullen this progeny when they declared

it so. The hue of it stark, dispersed.
What the hands pass on

as something with limit,
an azimuth reached.

The found body in tow, what season
limits this chance? This serene boy

catching up with a sullen, walled-in image
handing over a bent shadow

to knife this life. This economy of utterance
for I have no duplicate of your town.

I wait for it to arrive in this segment,
when time becomes impossible

a task to endure. Falls away, never settles,
searching balance – grasping what you speak.

it happened this morning
the air ripe with contention.

the unsustainable weather with its
impertinent grip on the bell-hand,
no light could shed the shadows unbeheld
(umbilicus of steel, remotely the
       dense crowd letting each other
    go, searching out fringes of moon.)

days and their forlorn bannerets, from farewells wrought
    into the world by a steady hand
 i say to all:

 labyrinths with no hint
    of darkness
(stillnesses immensely froth out,
   searing the islands of eyes)
the turning wave of the sea
     slants into the mountains, so we shrivel
  whatever is left of our implacable themes,

  i have here, my heart as clear as a rose's
     geography, thorns the clarion of trifles.

I.

Time elapses, clock’s dumb head says it all.
                   Not you. To lose sight of. X is where you stood,
           and this is where you will begin without my grace.

   Imagination as toll, if a thing hurtling is to punch into
        the wall defending you, what sound will startle? Imagine marionettes
           moving to no strings. A god sitting on top of our heads, like a pin
       to commence a fractal of dance. If this dance is memory, we know its accuracy.
      But what is its color? I tremble at the thought of your feet
                         setting in pale soil. I may have answered.

II.

   It joys me to be wrong, when the gorgeous agony of pain
            is what binds us together. Each to each, the real time not any longer
         hers, but mine of only difficult pattern. Let me revel in this heroism.

III.

   Things continue to move as I do not. Starting at the center, sure to break
     hem. I ran out of words to name this. Not elegiac. Perennial but short.
              In all extensions, elastic like water. Hairbreadth as in none other but plunge,
             drowned in a marvelous catch. In my hand, a piece of the moon
   twitches, drifting as a signal of life, in a certain mode
                               of hearsay: in the night she thinks of  you.

IV.

   I grant light to things but they cannot see its father. This room is anxious of
its vicious clutter. I must move out, beginning with old paint, crumpled papers,
   dust on the ground, shyness of the sheet’s accent erasing its folds from last night.
   Only the kind order is to do and undo.         Time continues from this intermission.
   I write only to regret. I have so much to say
   to you, but never to one another.

V.

           I broke the news without delicadeza. This is resounding of traction. This has us
           naked, crawling towards a predicate. A fine practice of
     moving towards a parallel edge,
     facing different directions when done.
      I broke the news: *I broke. You amalgamate. Time stops. You must continue on.

i am the father of these words yet,

these mischievous children
run away in the loquacious dark
chasing lithe-clothed, supple-limbed
girls whirling up and about the prairie
of these versifications without home
     in mind or remembering —
(the home of my mind wary of
the past and its old cobwebs,
or the slaughter of ordinariness
with a dull blade poised to cull,
these mindful creatures assassinating
diaphanous muses disrobing themselves,
serpents shedding their integuments.)
   oh and when they return home sullied,
after a day's squalid scamper past
  the muck, the twitch of atmosphere,
    the horizon ladled with clouds
  in white metamorphosis, i remove their
  clothes and send them to the fences of sleep — impish dream-callers,
  yes I am the father of these words
and they flourish, swelling up, learning
   to harangue their own father, sending
    him to borderless retreat.

somewhere in Antipolo
tonight,

let me tell you a lie:

the swell sheen of the moon
   is borrowed.

this laughter is, too.
the streets with their
useless names,
the stir of the wind through
the dark's basin.

these words
purloined from the gut,
out of the frame,
and onto paper.

while staring at the moon,
i have this melancholy string
of smoke twining in its
  foetal nature.
a threat of storm is coming and soon
together with all the dead specimens,
    i will be buried in the rain,

yet now, locked in the arms of
   stillness
  yellow and blue and red alternations
    from the edge of the radiant void,

    goodbye.

pious claptrap of hubbub
across the room;
you are some slender bridge
  over my waters
skimpy passage, bend so obscure
there is something
that i always take
away from you
and there is almost always too
something frequently given
back to me like a stare
even so you are eyeless
and still despite having eyes
and tender with movement,
our silence pointing out
the salacious clasp of shadow's muck
on the repugnant wall,

there is so much in common
to a body of sea and a headless sun,
where sometimes when you enter
my mind, i purposefully leap
out of it freely moving, hovering
in austere blankness, almost
cerebrally assassinating imaginations
and their claimed realness,
wishing you were somewhere far
yet within the eye to hold closer.

look at your
    familiar edges
    as i open you
    s l o w l y,
    delicately as
    autumn kisses full,
    the ground of no
    pulchritude,
    and smell you
    burning with
    indomitable perfume.
    page after page,
   leaf after leaf
   and so it goes that
   my love fares
     moribund tides
    of unrest.

       and in steep
   silence, the unsettling dream
   of dust in the stolid dark
   repeats like the many spires
     of day and the troubles
    of night - in my heart-shelf
    i shall fasten you to mine
     chest, dream mazy into
    the paragraphs of your kisses
     as my eyes end to read
      in their gentle closing.
     in the morning, i shall
       come to being, and read
        you again!

when i look at you
to say something in pace of rafts
on rivers,

cadencing
claptrap swerve of wording
in tongue's avenue

         is its nature—

    spreading contagion of ill pride.
seeking diadems in fields of night larks
   singing heavily, unapologetic, eulogizing
   mornings none we could take,

  whirling inside our bodies like
     stirred poisons in vials. past the unreadiness of moonlight waxing
    stellified are the waters now, clear
in first light,
    
      like fish underneath our bellies.

Catullus, you have lied.
You have lied, all of you.
You Shakespeare, have
fabulated sleep too in the
delve of the word.

Neruda, you have lied,
And only Ibsen braved
the fault of men:

I am alone
You are alone
And the quibbling breath
of this life will flower
inanimately in your ears,

and look below us!
a goading fall,
a threatening lunge
oh, vertiginous is this death!
i shout your name
and wait
for the quintessential echo:

a small muteness.

out for no nursery of accolade.
i am trying to sound my way
into a great mishap.
wing me the streets of all and i shall
give back their names to their fathers.

taut as a gun is held,
these words wield their unapologetic
assaults.

the next face i see will be the victim,
and it will be ******.
the discombobulated moon
gloats without a price tonight.
the white hand of it sees a figment of solace, rumples it,
disconcerts a votive clearing
reducing it to a bawl of
a windswept tumble of leaves.

i am now in front of the machine;
its salutary silence, its waiting groans,
its orchestra of trite gears slamming
the ornate of words and cutting
the stem of the flower that once
hurt me with its beauty,

i see your face
in this mound of havoc.
the pain of marvel's presence,
inclemencies of longings

everything takes space and trembles
  in its place.

1

   flumine stretches to the small of her back
as the    clock  slowly    runs off from
         twilight    to   midnight

     perfect time   for    assault   but  undeclared

say   when   tugging of   hair  to expose
     the jugular --  that is   where you plunge
           the  message

          when  biting   the   lip   becomes
        predatory,  when sweat    is   the telling
           trace  putting  the  clandestine, ******

        or  easily   when   hold   becomes   grip
     else it was just   estrangement    face to face
           in the   dark,  cannot  remember   features
              only   textures --  walled up message tongued    in   all   fours as if  a crucifix or idle
           penitence

2

        whoever  was   steering   was   just
    teaching  how    to   hate,   treats as   open and
        easy target,   mapping  out   what   to sequester
           and   authoring   silence    as    acquiescence.

     first trust  is   given  and   is thrusting deeper
   in   hollow   grievance. we have   no   use  for  it
        and so    we    take   it as   the first  step
            out   of   the door  keeping  love unharmed
     only  to be   taken   in  unmindful of   its implosion.

3

       we  then  have   damage   portrayals  as   if
   we   have   a   long divide,  or  a grueling  history,
       hit from our   blinded  sides.  

     a  man   from  another  country   could have  taken    you   from   this  juncture,
        but  he    is   somewhere lugging objects
 he   has   no use   for in   a haul  that was meant to
             drift  him away   from  sheer possibility

   and so   we   remain   here, a promise that things  will  start to exact  relevance, until  then
          we    remain, waiting for    our   smoke to
  dissipate when the last   fizz   of   fire   is sounded.

4

    you   do   to   me   what   i do   to   you
        as  if  polarities   are  clear   reversals
   and   then   back  again   with hope

       so i  drink   from   your   mouth   what i have
given   as   your   body   depletes,   your   fingers
      crenelate as   you     rebuild   your   stronghold,

          my   emptiness a  catchbasin  of  all the
   rain   growing   inside  you,  your  body  swollen,
       ready to burst  and   after   that
           perhaps,      forgive.

vestal nights clamber
the perennial diadem
of quiet mountains—

Dramaturgy

1

I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.

It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.

2

Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.

3

Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.

4

Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.

5

He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.

6

They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake.  A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.

7

Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for

it was with greater risk that I knew
  that when I let you in,
your metaphysics, my being would acquaint
  itself to such metanoia:

that there was such an air in your voice
  that would sway me a forest and give me
a necklace of sunlight. like a well-oiled machine
  I let your gruel work its way like a beast
claiming the calm, like the youth purloining the silence,
   like the death making most frugal the earth and its troves.

little night, black bird of my heart: when you
take your flight in me, solder me up
  there, vertiginously above the floor:

     all those of much the land that coats
our feet’s trembling aches,
    all that still laughs
   without what joy shapes with its motherly hands
where you assume the stillness as something
  the shadow languages and transfixes
   in all of the days

   lays captured, a darkness too
halved, voyaging without eyes, in every direction
eclipsing with the sound of incontrovertible music,
     echoing, rippling in me with
alterations.

warm of sun through percolator cloud
      waft of wind stale, flat on surface
  all-fours;
   mezzotint of sky blooms like an aged flower across the skirt of the dawn
     lingering the acrobat hurtling
across hideous moonlight.

   there is an exhausted sundial
in the feeble aurora. one Wednesday
   yet all too many a day, tumble
of the calendar and the pompous talk
    of clammy water over the pockmarked
streets from yesterday's surfeit rain.
    
i enter the hellish car fostering
   the sun's fervor in the subcompact
like a tiny universe, constellations of
    sweat on my forehead, a crumpled
  carton of Marlboro in my pocket
   whiff of dried leaf clinging to finger
     this formidable silence across
      the lounging Mahogany, on the road
treading homeward — caught in
     wave of the next moment,
    underneath the rain of a once tear
shed facing walls slouching towards
  despondent sheets and scrunched body;
claimed whoever sees the
    face of indelible yesterday, tremulous aspen tree dressed with cicatrices of old,
  birds unraveling incarnadine wound from
     upheaval of scabs, disheveled dog
  naked without any reason at all,
         weak in dog-joints and reeking
in dog-flesh carrying on his back the
   supremacy of the sun,
  
i too, here, homebound and downtown
    sings sleepy the reveille,
   bridging the darkness there
    letting in all aches and dangerous
  playthings for strange men, open

   the gates, mother, the pearl
of detergent I smell, in my hands shaped
     cleverly, the rust of gate
and the saw-tooth music grating the
   afternoon frightened and small,
resigned to bed; dark's afterthought.

in here fires an obvious chore:
he says
it is
from Sagada

its appropriate turmoil
sinks in the sinus,
leaving a trace of bitter
in my tongue
encapsulating my world
in the cerebra now sweet
candid electric
feisty and almost psychic

there is this
instantaneous lightning
shaking my jungles loose
out of birds on tethers.

this is something real,
he says it is from Sagada.
my dreams there made
nailed in exiled silences
behind this lamp
drinking beer
cold
warm water music
in ear.

in the provincia, scarcely dense
of terrors and their territories,

oh, why the familiar "magtataho"
resonating in the hollow gray-lipped gutter

the batter of eggs and their absolute
nuclei in the dome of the bowl

so trilling of birds christening the town
with their sibilant breeze— myriad gyration of the "banderitas",

aye, my heart gallops in its shearing throb
and no moon shall eclipse underneath
the unheard druid of strife-torn memorabilia;

all green, prancing and zithering the shadow of the bramble and the tawny
body of this brindled Earth, all mine
to take in my mouth
the supplication of silence,

all mine, the fine afternoon!

Mine eyes retain the scourge
      of love

       blueness bites vogue sun
  scarring moon-clusters in
    unyielding boughs lamenting
      this sidereal zither.

Mine eyes burn pale fire
     through chaffed hands pallid
      markings wall-scrunched
      and depthless now

      names wield swords as their
   sharp edges bequeath wound upon
   wound taking helm to helm,
        no shattered voice of pain.

  Mine eyes still these urgent
    importances distilling the
     crucial hour's wane - unreliable sundial seeking the sun
    to scale shadows telling time

     Mine eyes know
    her nudeness vague, her bareness clear, her voice splintering the woodwork of soul,
    keeping it in a jar,
    
    urn,
      rotundly incarcerated there,
    mouth sings lip-meanderings
      multiplied wolves at
     the door.

o, anomie, the gnash of train-gear
its locomotive song
a non-metropolitan shadow carrying
the weight of all:

life in grandest scheme—
nothing pressed against
nothing,
like a boulder dragged to the
pinnacle of no preordained vertigo,
to be watched to fall down
in rampant perpetuity,
o, Sisyphus, the world spirals
in an indifferent universe.
must our lives tilt to be nourished
by the water of despair,
   this is our fate yet still
i refuse to believe. there are finite
truths to accomplish:

the lucid invitation of the desert's fever.
the deepening dark, the fugitive pastel-hued sky, the intensity of rain
     in complete darkness.

it is the dawn in the Mediterranean festooned by supple, tawny women,
    as sunlight moves past
    the fused shade,

  my, i have died!
     in this exact moment, or the
ordinary yesterday,
     i know not.

be on the qui vive when love
  is flyblown-piquant in the air
  that we breathe,
         shall we do splendidly here
where we once cried for benediction
in this station where love broke our
bones and laughed us away?

there is no retrieval of the memory
in the siege of nostalgia
when the past comes back with
the fracas of one hundred men marching
underneath the flagella
          of stark moments—

the streets will soon be named
after deaths, yet not one bears
   a trace of you.

worthy of impedance  over time.
cause of this   space is to
   deliver me sleep-shaped. exit lights harbor
   sounds of the coming into just when you are
   born and raised, held completely
         against light    favouring  the source.

undenied, the demand   of   this
     assemble.    in any given climate, moderate
       but will not touch ground.  frothing elsewhere
    true  life, once again this   machine: in between
  labor     and     rest  is   the impossible.  to reach
     for a certain ****** midair. height is  palpable
  and will   rinse   flesh anew, how  urgent
      before i decompose   into   blue shear
         in   sky   face to  face   with   the
   all-too-immediate    rasp    of   ground  pulling
      together,  cast into   the  unloved  water
         breaking    apart   like  mesh   unwanted.

he   is  over   space   and this   is
     to    measure   warmth,   when execution
  is    the     verge  of  undoing.  so  barely-living
    and   claiming  it   so,   the   cause  of this
      performance
           is    to  free    the body |  
    making  past the  divide, careless and  almost faced
      beyond   a forthcoming   of  rescue:
    have escaped, have gone   and   already here.

Like a pack of dogs lounging
  in minutes, minutes, minutes, eyeing an endless treacle.
it’s worth the shot.
     what is?

I heard he went into a crash,
    and that Rey went into the deep blue dreaming of
    fins and fish – that *******. Brenn was up in the hills.
it’s a wonderful day to fill this space with the electric frill
               of laughter. Open that Emperador held loose in that
   cheap, slender bottle. That’s worth the stipend, in exchange for
    light – clarity, be it crass, and unsoundly. These ungodly hours
    will form a God, trying to go home, slurring, shaking in his gait,
      hailing a trisikad or a tricycle back to Philomena’s arms.
  it was a magnificent day – you know it is. The squalid canals
     are filled with the ******* under the care of a tyrant.
        Jon looks like he’s cut up for matrimony. We jeer and give out
  no jell so as to ridicule him into chaining himself to a passing.
       Empyrean is the mood now: all primed for the blackened chapel’s chase
  down the pews towards recognizing the smallest children inside ourselves.
     This moment is far from over. Like a skipping Betamax. A gramophone
        clamped in the kinked note lost somewhere in the sound byte,
  try this matrix for the forgotten. Tomorrow we will curse ourselves
      for the proud challenge, rivaling ourselves in the process.

    Like dogs in heat. Like dogs aching to ****. Like dogs
      garroted by the selfish hands of the neighbor. Like old bones
                 sleeping in troves we have forgotten.

next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
     a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
     her body not even the slightest resistance.
  
after bathing when feet barely dried
      leaves pools, like an admission of something.

i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
     unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
     by the neighboor as you confessed one
     April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
         now aged, wind reentering a distance
     like i imagine your hand in my denim.
     spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.

  carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
      wasting its voice to no audience,
  when we crawled from one room to another
       leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
    and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
      across a tablature is music of creaking wood
      and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
     on the bedpost softly sings

              a punishment: now an urge to go back
     yet not knowing which door to enter,
           every surrounding object as witness,
      memorized a minute's completion,
  refusing to map out which way to go.

was exhumed by stern-faced defeat
as all others revel in victories.
i only watch the limpid light
slowly frittering back to its
console as the barkeep hands me
my 7th beer of the night

as i handed them the first defense
of the inveigling tactic i have yet
to put them through and send their
young minds to equipoised trial.

i have felt ears poor without
understanding but the welcoming warmth of the light shone against
my already bleared body pierced
through the unclear of words,
as i read them littlest of
my far-slung poems, bardic
and resolute yet rogue upon sound
thinly hanging, barely on a spindle of plaudit.

the barkeep bestows me my 8th bottle and i have felt some
slow ease encroach me with lighter burnt retreat,
as i left,
unfinished.

she goes             freeing herself
and stops            to break her fall
suddenly            to gather herself

and begin again    with such brazenness
was it        the moon
and not     the far-flung bird of song?
was it        the brigade of shadows
and not     the heady kisses of night?

     she keels over like a vast wave
stretching    her   arms   into   the sky
once   again,  permitting    herself   to be seen
   not  by  the moon,
not  by   the   hale  of such  night  that struggles   not  to
   tipple   over   her hair   that demands    a   different hue
  of  silence
   but    by  herself     in   the mirror
the   metamorphosis,
     true   to  the   claim   of   the   world
  except    she   is   not   to  flutter   away,
                             just     yet –

my frolicsome feet can only
imagine with their bones
the dream of what venture
requires me to go
farther to reach you.

it is with each step that
these passing trembles
conclude their premonitions.

it is when my hands wind-hover
in thick space that my mind
levitates itself and lifts to
draw with a shaking hand,
its own topography.

(x) is your place
      (y) is mine
   and somewhere in this
  haphazard equation is an
  algorithm that makes sound as
  all the circles are small
  without sides, and all shapes
  continue to break without form,
  encircling us now are the shards
  of this equation's
        fervent stridence.

   all of this is stellified
    without mind's authority -
only a heart's persistent longing
   and a trifle of courage,
  when these sordid amplitudes
    flounder to no swaying,
  there will be bridges for me
    to stride on so as to
  close the distances and
      silence the enigmas
  with their sought-for answers.

the mere bookend soon became the fury of beautiful beginning!

death so small when you
have the world in your lightsome hands.

the way your face crinkles
at the glare of a word's
furious light

and the way your eyes
widen anew like tapestries
and the bird of syllables
stills itself in
the woven shrub. unwrapping with utmost care is your mind's calloused hands, revealing a spar of darkness and light.
unsealing you is your yearning's
fingers, like autumn to snow's enveloped remnant.

oh how the world
sinks in its solitary axis.
oh how the comets intermingle
in orbit, greeting each other
with flamboyant punctuations back to loose fluidity
for us to drink and revel in.

what joy is the sight
of you, reading.
what bliss is the sight of
reading you, as bold as the word
is in sensuous print,
yet shy as a daffodil shivering
in the wind,
unheard of as a hurl of a voice
in the zenith,
trembling in your hands,

the word of the world.

wind goes ballistic.
the farther the birds are to complete
    this absence, the better

quicker exchange of easy avatars
   in Magsaysay, where no strobe
  roams and only alternations of taxi
      zigzag in stolen hours.

remember you pale,
   forget you raw with blood.
 eyes see all what silence divests.

in some dark place, we must
  all have many cicatrices. blue is the hand
whirling outside, serious with its narratives
    and tenuous notes.

lightening up
the fleeting truth of togetherness,
its ample weight something virtuous
    in perceived realness is

that      all guesses wan and wild
     exhilarating the    words we   utter
  riding along the strange   Sun,   our
  headlong  chronology of    rue.

pointing easterly,
azure skies of course
   this afternoon.
washlines drenched in
  high-sun,
precise contraptions
    deter spread of
anomalies seen daily.

  you tell me
hare's the fool
  you had once in your
 fledgling hands and died.
hare's foot
   is luck more than
imaginary.
  when no one is looking but
always i, keening in the total
    image -- it cannot
be you, impossible
   under ineffable skies
and twilight-erased  mud;

moments are   disavowal.
   you    like   the sound
so withdrawn   from  contestation,
  so easily your accurate self
liking   the   captured  dissonance.

you know   a fine day when
   it happens,
slow ****** of the vertical,
   highest  time to quit, bid for
a sequestered   place   free
      and absolute in variables: x is the lie.
all the intimate
    dark   you   pulse  with   the life
of   beautiful  horses

          gaining lightsome distance,
an approbative signal of technicolor
    painting   your   face  with   all
       things basking.
                     truant.

o, this sea
  of living , mortal blood -
sleeps in the silage of
    gleaming flesh

us, the brute million,
    enisled here, fish roaming
  up and about hurried currents,
   a muddle of breath aloud
      or a hoard of a dream,

  we, wet with continuities.
   ah, populace, maddened
    furiously sauntering
    back to homes.

death arrives to feelingfulness,
    all who wish to forget.
sometimes the way seeking the cold
   from which the sun lifts in its hands
    the heat pressed against
   the mad and the strife-torn heart
   affords nothingness still.

pain is etched in stone— all for no one
    to hear, but he who is frozen beside
    the petrified willow like a brook
   unthawed from the ice of its call.
  at the brink of it watch all birds,
    strings, petals of days and the leap
      without any sign of swelter from
    a day's stridence.

  how do they fit through the seam
    of this river— altogether in riverrun
     and aching, wind is full and stringent,
      with its figure white in moon,
       even whiter with hand-woven quiet.

gOd put a smile on your face
      your eyes (half-thrush like two beings in the dark
and a gladiola of light spurns to chide in its bickering excess,
    birds, birds of morning and paradisiacal streets half-wittingly
       fork to single-handedness, a star is uttered and altars sing
           rarely-beloved, a dance-song of soul) and their parenthetical
    rush to what continues to live suddenly as if to say its conscious
       death is a room without flowers.

We have this peculiar practice, both of us. We partake in the delight of nothing.
We are two walls being vandalized. And then we are the same walls being photographed
by onlookers. And we become the complicated eye of the strangers. We become the beauty
they try to subscribe to in strange calligraphies, bent caricatures, and flagrant peripatetics.
  We have the most outlandish of penchants, especially when nothing happens while
            everything happens. Forget the sidereal zeroes of this equation. We are one
  unanswerable phenomenon tractioned by a willing cohesion. Put into mouth what fingers
    cannot do. The one in pursuit is divided by blame and the other a fugitive.
              Mind takes space when absence does its duty. There is ease in accepting
  that a body impaled in a moment may bear no gravity.
                                                                             We have disparaging repetitions.
   We invest in invented lives. We know not much from here but we know
                      the end it tries to exact in itself. The silence teems in that probability:
   all static, intrinsic, and jarring. We both know a fine day when it happens.
                         Lurking sounds of hermetic space brought to life by informed choices.
                Clinking of bottles and the silver of fish on the platter. A book stolen
from a place where everything is organized – strangely enough, the disarray people
          are capable of with their hands is not preempted
                        by a custodian. We have godless moments. Say for example, this body
   houses a river and on its flaxen waters we have already let go of everything.
                 Soft waters gnaw flesh and shadow off immediate impulses.
                                 We have bizarre practices, both of us, separate.
      Desire is dispersal. Weathering the diaspora is grace.
              We both are gilded by attendance, and in rooms fat with people we are
                                marauders of space together with them – our lives so unobstructed,
            free, and proliferating. Why can’t we house ourselves? Why can’t we cling
                 like ivy to walls of stone, melancholy to walls of blood?
                                          We have this peculiar practice, both of us. Separate. No warnings,
   no conveyed messages, no alarms. To be unmoved in moving, to be moving
                           in stasis.

Are names telling of something?
When you were young, you were taught to name shapes,
    count figures with your tiny, slender fingers,
      read text like creed, memorize facts like incantations
so that when it is time that you are already raw
     and machinated into the fullness of your body,

you are ready. Ready like the gull darting
            into the deep blue to filch the marine.
  Ready like artillery to fray.
                       Ready like genuflected children
    in contrition – left the peccadillo aloft, canopied
         by a thumbed down word of prayer;

Are names telling of something?
       What do they delineate? A sense of ownership?
A demystification? What machine does
               it pledge allegiance to? Sage of old?
   A frantic fretting of sensibilities? Erudition, or at the very least, obscurantism?

If we leave a thing without a name, what will
     that thing be?

It cannot be held – to what extent?
It cannot be owned – for what reason?
It cannot be classified – for what? to saturate it with comprehension
      to ensure a fate underneath a conceptualized bent
               of attestation and abomination?

         If I left you without a name and only held you in my hands like
  a thing waiting to be used, to be fondled,

            what will you make out of it? Will you darkle and then dissipate
in the thinnest air? Or will you remain? Are names exacted so that

                  when a thing leaves the body, when an abstraction leaves a moment,
there is a device we can use to drone it into coming back? So that we know
                 that in addressing it, there is a sure claim that it will move back
      and retrace tractable errors? So that in the aftermath,

                                we are certain of the weight it casts upon our sorry and aching
  bodies that refuse to make love? So that there will be words to be written
                   and voices to be launched in form of song

                 with identities assured to match the thirst?

      Why does this deserve a name? Why are these hands undeserving
                   of territories? Why is there dissent when there is desire?

   The answer lies in the silence of every passing day famished by
        evidence: this thing that has no name will remain

                  as punishment for being – so that when it is time to
    prosecute, there will be no
                                        firm basis for eulogies.

and so the continually pained
  redressed, sawn-off are fingers

  to halt the clutch of things
  not ours -- pure in the hour of

  restlessness, all oblivious/
  and no such mechanism as dream when

  our tides harbor at shore,
  paled and on bent knees wryly

  seeking plenitude hours compressed
  in uncollected days, in here was uttered

  its rapture of light displaying its luminosity
  of absence, this is what they said it would

  be but did not come to be, seen only
  at a distance coming to intimate terms with

  pilgrims of shadowed cities bearing no
  names. our nakedness to its promise

  do so sing, nothing else but move to
  its beat, alive are we but not too long,

  this interlocutor, for now
  we dig our hands in mud and face the sun.

i have in my hands,
your round,
virginal fruit
and my eyes pare
all clothing
  reducing you
  to obscene ******.
all your juice
  trickling out of,
slow is the
      slither.
pebbled body after
    pebbled body. builds
its pace plastered to wall, and then swiftly runs
    with full gravity.
succinctly, a
   sidereal persimmon,
until your peels wear
   me thin and your flesh
  rots in compost,
my mouth
savoring the emptiness.

beloved    I     dreamt   of you
      dreaming   atilt against   the lilies –
the   dawn   with   its mouth
        tottering before   like   an animal
   shying away from the   automaton sky.
     it     is    in your hair full   of evenings
      I saw the   moon not   with its  tail
  but with the   hooves   of the deathless    sea
      of this droning   silence,
           not with    its stride     of    sidereal measure
but    the    mount of    it past    a thousand  days
       tainted   with    crimson,  it   is not  with lithe  hands
of  churlish   girls   that I have    plucked you   out   of that
         garden but   with   the immense   hand
   of   such obscure   understanding  from sleep’s peculiar
  mouth   made divine    in me, the   word that   christens   what
  felled    star rises     from    the   palm  of such   darkness,
    
     that    in   the immensity   of your   sleep,  I am but   a bird
passing     athwart the    windows and   yearn so   much   the breeze
   that  touches   you    in your timid    sleep
           like     dreams     like     *****       like    sirens  
                  like    love    cunning   with   its     fluent   spires
          of   perfumes.

enduring quiet -
hands clasped sealing all tyrants,
a tumultuous poem.

A   twist on  the ****  may
   bring about   another  bout    of   setting this   into
the  brightest  contest:

in  the  middle   of  so  many  arrivals
    become   departure
   even   when   coming   into.

Fold   this   abandon   into   prayer
    and  slide it  underneath
  a pillow – your pillow, a  dagger
    to    wage   fray.

lean  toward   the  absence  like  a lover,
  dream   befallen   like  an  unwanted  visitor.
devise  a  plan  as  if  nothing  was here   at play.
   there is  nothing   here  but the

tentativeness    of   space – it may or   may not  happen,
   what  of   it, as if  it is  possible,

our   bravest   reach   to  things   we  recall
  is  our   conscious   error,   pity  our  duty
  if   not   our   image   cast   mirror to  broken   mirror
    shared   is the   damage   blown   by  wind

shorn   out   of   an eyelid’s  flutter,   weaving,
     turned  to    writhe   in   this    mortal   bed

this    day    will     evolve    tomorrow
  and    we   can   say   amid   transition

we     are   coming   to   be,   and   being   as we  have   went
  how,  in   this     frail   wonder

are   we   but    unsure.

an accumulation of
the not-so-distant insofar as
a whelm of cafard..

it is something that my hands
have seen with their drones,
something that bloviates
with intermittent speech,
a reaching-for-and-out hauling
of tempests as these

shadows renegade the dark
and join necessities of clarity
to combobulate their hue
into white without any trace of remembering, whatsoever.

yet in this scraping perimeter,
everything is within reach
yet unmoving - teeth do not gnash
anymore to grit their cadences,
mouths are swollen with something. a name perhaps? or a random memory of something we chortled about?
or were they bitten off by the fangs and their unrelenting incise,
suturing the lesions and removing the scabs of these wounds?

something that is purulent in laughter is just as crimson as in pain - these photographs watermarked by an effloresce of blood from which has lived once
in this world full in movement and in flesh now gone.

What of her, bags packed and then unpacked later on
when they denied you of entry. You did not make it past
the deadline, or before it was purely yourself necessary to
incidence. You intersect, moor yourself to the center
of transactions – the force and shape of it, your tired image
sauntering past weathered windows.  The sound of tickets
being torn caused you trembling – doors held for body,
    hinges a hand-signal, error communicating through neglect
you didn’t listen to him, because he did not tell you
of its necessity. You were a day late as many others are,

almost a bullet hitting,
a crash postponed,
death by biting the barrel.
      Two lovers hinting at each other through open windows,
  hands are doves waving, parting the evening, almost this
  paled technique of fate to put you in a place you do not want.

But what to realize after, when all of this is nothing but
a disorder. They cleared the throat and gave you something
to remember: denied. Loose without a threat, even.
   A sensitivity so endless felt through volumes of people
  walking past metal detectors with smiles plastered, framed,
  crawling deep inside the mouth of it. The idea of   towards

a destination that is now far within reach, beyond the order
of things. You are one brash mistake away from assault.
That promise of a waiting bed in another country. Let alone,
the taste of the land burning what leftover Sun there is in the mouth,
  made you lose sight of, and now it is raining all over the city
  without umbrellas.

Hands       places I haven’t known
   in her room taking-light all I have known

groping for some place I haven’t known
     from her   belly once with the life I have    known

of   value, I cross an   ocean I have not known
  to know  my girth   within  her rondure eye   I have known

to live   with   is   a cross I carry to a  hill I  haven’t  known
     seeking    correspondence   from   rocks that I have   known

to be   much  wiser,    in account of what  I have not known
    yet to   be wholly   complete as in ready  for fragmenting   I have known

as   means    to    live   in  summaries I have not known
   to    be  a tracer   of evidence, as if a  search    party    I   have   known

to    be   your  hands  in  all the   places in my  body I have not known
  to    be   sequestered by   the face you   carry all these years that   I   have   known.