darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll peer through the flaxen strand
   of night

with your color that excites,

and think myself the blue pither of fire
  or a flummoxed stone left unturned.

it's not the rapture of a knowledgeable
   beast or the common grip
   of the eye's gift for unsparing detail.

it's the way the queen moves to all
    corners unclenching a fold of sidereal,

and then like a child with almond eyes
  spruced up, spritzed this morning's
  incandescent dye,

the lapping of strange tides revealing
    fish with dreams of brine

or that one moment when you had
   at first light, the hot flush of coming
      into, recognizing insatiable appetite,

  whistling its overdue intent and the detritus
        we try to hide when we had that virginal moment of    once and  never looking back
      at mirrors.

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!

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.

in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.

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.

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.

Earth fosters all
    singing upstream
        the affect of
green — certain
    thingsthe
g
allan
Try
         moreover once
and folding the ineffablewater
    d
ownthe
            hill
the hands of the world
     fondling   t
he universe
      like a totterin
Ganimal
     doused in an amalgamof
     fire
   tucked in our laughter
       sweet summer
    surmise of all warmth

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.

1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.

2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?

3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.

4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.

5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
   Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.

6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
    And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.

7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.

8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.

9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.

10  Disappearance.

gravitate in me
   ever so
    s    l     o    w       l        y
  and ineffablycontinuousforgetthehaltandpressonlikeahandtoapageturning­adayandforgettingthenight,

   a featherlight detritus,
       or matutinal climb vertical among
    hills, this is you in most fervent memory:

    snowing now endlessly,
     i slalom through the obstacles
       of you without no clear sight
         of tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

the dharma
       burns
       in the bone -
       love is no synopsis
       to our caged delusions.
       death, why, only a dearth
       diorama of the
       incontrovertible
       denouement.
       the unsinkable truth
       so avidly assiduous
       that if dogma bleeds final,
       our beginnings stem only
       from the rose of
       ephemeral loves
       and in the end shall
       we meet god - only i,
       in the seethe of these
       phrases, have burnt
       wilder than any light.

The immediacy of the ambulance turned speech into stone,
  and the gyratory red and blue which is still unknown to me
  grips with bewilderment.

Passing your decrepit home in Santolan. The slovenly lawn
that welcomes an oncoming figure, sometimes I.

The love will stay there,
deep into its sepulcher – fingers of grass sprawl in arbitraries;
answers unknown to ourselves, questions leaving
themselves carefully placed in irrefragable order,

the brooding future that strides a fugitive,
straining our place – the warmth of its absence
oblivious to us like a pretend fireside casting shadows, aslant,
on any figure trivial to us.

we begin to shiver in the blue of night, darkening around us.
the moss-grown silence securing its station somewhere unseen,
but felt,

like this individual morning.

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 –

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.

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.

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.

Fallibly, this evening, the moon over movements
exposed to prying dimness.

Everything is resigned to silence. The balcony
peering through the vastness, the moon like a tonsure
of a septuagenarian paving a hole in the sky.

The Earth moves with feet: plantar, tiptoeing –
out of propulsion from underneath the ground,
turns to sway, a clenched league of roots

the dog outside fashioned to sleep, draped by
the curtains left to dry in the bleak behemoth.
a stone his own size, or the emptiness my own weight.

Here are misspent days under hermetic space.
I am a child left to my own salt. I lift sleep’s lids
and what dreams diminish in realness is nothing but a tide
that clings more to brine than my hands – leading me back to
where I have found myself verily this evening,

the old Moon repeating itself, unfinished still.

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.

vestal nights clamber
the perennial diadem
of quiet mountains—

Shadow as proof of memory: the indistinct light spilling on the tablework together with smears of water. The smell of hair on his skin now is engraved as lesson. At the tip of her tongue is strange wonder. Said this inner life when it starts to crumble, you are witnessed in the soar. Bedraggled through the ***** of the street, a hand, or a vestige.

Her bony prominences of hand kneaded to retain as memory – to be swallowed by the full procession after; stroke as compromise: as if mapping all out. This is not how it should happen. It would happen when a safe distance is maintained by two bodies: the other sleuthing, the other moving in finite directions. An end will be revelry.

– took whatever it was that cannot be contained by the body. Remember first when you took the dive
     into the water, as if never to return again, together with silent fish and errant current.
                                Underneath the blue, light still casts shadow in interstices. Conveying weight
     in water – your mouth as conduit, my body as land for the till and clearing. Or my longing. Or a soon to be discovered ambiguity. Skimming through your moving imperatives, telling me you cannot
               commit to quantum movements. That in that event, the world will throw you
syncopated images, that it will give rise to your hiding altitude and lob you to vertigo.

Detachment as question. They must run. They must remain fugitives – to be unseen by the rest, and only themselves know their seams, symmetries, contours even in absences. Even the sky now is engorged with cirrus. Soon, like half-truth, or wildfire brash against green, the pallor will deface the atmosphere and give it unction of rain. Must they be reminded that they should run.
                               But you are in a city, and it is impossible to not be thrown out of line by another     figure. Names will be given. Directories will be solicited. Voice necessary to halve
                    this blatant quiet. And then to remind you of your sudden place, they will build a map
or a bridge with their arms outstretched into the sky, looking at you with life brimming through
      their eyes – the smoke of your departure once again curling in its fetal nature
       against their brows. Everything you do and undo is a forecast of some liminal finality,
  as if all of this is birthed by the same oblivion – and that all forgetfulness feels that same in different
          cities that may or may not know your name. And that in changing season, there will
always be
        a hand that will be held even in its tiniest detail – all of the shadows once
                      cast by your small body drunk in its proud altitude – we both
know   whose hand I am    thinking of

the ghosts of many days.

here are the many eyes insidiously cutting through insides, gutting them out of their poisons and their moribund steps, assuaging none.

before the step was the flesh,
and before flesh was the emptiness,
keen with its marble eyes
like sizing down an already
thwarted opponent.

these pallid-faced buildings
peer through the sleepless concrete
like fathers searching for children.
like crows scavenging for
truths behind myriad lies of death.

here comes the marauder thieving
again, the gutter's chagrin.
underneath stirs the deathly
**** of rats, the deep inset
of petrichor hiding behind
the overcast of a death foretold.
streets continue to emblazon
their nameless turns:
George Street bayoneting through
Pitt as a ragamuffin dog slithers
past Castlereagh, scrounging for
bones with forgotten pains.

the ghosts of many days
weaving the loom of sky
tender with sound of labyrinthine
flapping through the hollow
of dawn as my fingers
clash in battle, rearing this nailed triumph.

apparitions tracking me down,
chasing me with vivid light
through uneventful avenues
forking without meaning
past the hammered cinders,
away from the frozen barricades
in stiffening cold,

ghosts of many days
coming back with unprompted tongues
and their pertinacious susurrus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

naming my father's victories
past monoliths trapped
in glass case

and tracing my mother's tenderness
across the film negatives
we've no use for anymore.

yesterday was
a victory for my kindred,
while i still drag the augury of
yesteryears lovelessly
athwart the narrow corridors

yet this
man is still the wind

or a bamboo in duress
forced to
breakpoint.

the dinner clatter in the
kitchen mellows down to
wary dregs. my brother laughs
affording atonement
and everything at the verge
of palpable revelry,

i the unspoken yet
heard. my mother often wonders
from who did i inherit
such mood:
all dark
and trudging the infinite.

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.

I celebrate my burning you into. Celebrate this body, take it across the river. Today is unremarkable

because I now understand the common day – the finding, the threatened property of where



I once stood gazing stone-heavy     against   your   pavement   that   was    touch



a single    handful   of  your   meaning  was       it    lilted       and  is     now    delighted


surrendering in    the dizzying    way   home





shapes     one’s    work      now     I   have    no   use   for      you


when    occurred     one   day        it    whispered


a    world                opened   before     and    I          dug


for   what      was      your          body :                 lifeless      |     clinging    to

        return  
                               your   extant           river       now         *nostalgia

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.

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.

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.

your immensely spread parasol:
it is your downpour consoling
these tumultuous iterations.

the mordant edge of your
susurrations:
it is your word painting my silence.

i have watched your slow fires
raze the inundation.
you have done it well
without trouble
without peril.

i have witnessed your
somnambular sun
mutilate with its precise dagger,
the stubborn bud of
contained splendor.
you have done it well
without blunder
without complication.

i have seen the conception
of your darknesses
and i took them as my own;
its sovereign over my
fragilities,
its tyranny over my
small territories,
its amplitude over the
softness of my voice.
i have done it well.
even with dire postulations.
even if i am
cast into a lulled out perdition.
it is like
there exists between us,
a tryst,
and the lions there lay,
roaring.

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.

raise high, the roof-beam
mounting the fiery stream
   burning the windows, burning
  the death-devout silence,
    burning the disquiet on the pyre
of ourselves — darkly halved,
    lightly complete; the operant
rose is ready to roam the immortal garden and no petal will perish,
    no moan of thorn will be heard,

  raise high, the roof-beam.
  your lifest breath and all that is not,
   emerging supreme against all
smallness and rotund, no bells bellow
   the bickering name, or the defunct
subterfuge of O God dancing to
    sew His name augured. raise high,
the roof-beam the monolith of your
    body's never-ending groove
waving me across all the world
    no sojourn could annul — once
mortally blessed and twice naive.

  it is our rite of spring, what the wind
wields a strange horror's sound summoning a dark-trilling raven.
  waters princely kneel in the sheer
dark's afterthought when my clothes
    fail me evermore. it is our life
singing separately: morning, and the divided evening. the knowledge of scepter is passed on to the ignorant
  now all-knowingly removing all dress
and the glint of crystal-moments.

  raise high, the roof-beam, o luminous ire
   fulgent light and our foetal coil
      an angel to whisper an arrival
from the fall, the roof-beam, raised
      high forever.

in the lighter steps of yesteryears come the name of which
I cannot remember insofar as I am awash with the delusion
of what a poem, or what to make out of a poem, or what use
is there, to heave out poems – I was then raw, supple if you
may allow, like dew on blade of grass, face front
   against the blithesome matutinal, heart somewhere displaced,
beginning to look for something the inward expects,
  as though things happen for the first time again,
  with wisdom of what to look for – resigned, young,
      inconsistent with the word, fetal in my hands: pen and paper.
a well-guarded secret
   swaying in tune, curtailed by some sort of split-second inhibition,
    trying to save face and give this blandness a whole new meaning
and arrive at two intersecting points where the lost self will be
     redeemed in finding – monologue of sorts, dark it was,
  dampened by such bleakness, this leitmotif;
     all around me purged of sound, strip to rogue without
       senses, suddenness at the tip of my body, lunging at any
feat of light that succeeds to champion this behemoth of blackness,
    to complete this impedance, a singular impetus to fruition ekphrasis,
yet not quite, deep in the study again, as though
     yesteryears are all but the days starting to disintegrate
  into tiny segments to wreak something devastatingly vague, as in,
   a language curled in the tongue, relentlessly flexed against the wall
     of me, losing yet no little piece.

Too hot. Tousled paper-thin music. 23. Nothing else matters but the conscious: psychic, physical — I arrive, take space, therefore I am. Nothing hurts deeper. Stays. Dagger to gut. Always, the dogs are, always. Much harder for the soul to plead in front of inviting cathedrals. Fire in this side of the Earth. Running. Out of time. Running out of time.
                     Crossing criss-cross of cars.
    Curious cat gets run over, bones break,
    brains splatter, blood dries faster than
    water.
          Flattened by things: menials, stereo cool. Subcompact breathing space. Clinging on to dangerous playthings is
recherché to the average. Death is nice.
Twice of it, better. Breathe fast. Live faster—
Short moments believable. 23 ~ 55. An equivocal calling to mind. Gamblers here
have no parlay. It's senselessness against
another throb of it. Nothing accrues for
greater victories. Slam the ride, deface
the labyrinth. Take it. Ride fast. Do it slow. Pace is everything. The tempo is infinite,
dance wears away like chip on the old floor. Out of cigarettes.
         It is splendid enough to remember
the horses that jumped past
fences of pain than having to mount
   them in all separate mornings,    severances, all that.  There's no magic
in farewell. There's no lie in that.

we lay silent on the floor like
leaves in June.
i held her arms like tightly-knit stars
in the loom of the sky.
the invisible hand of the moon
enters through the window quietly,
our breaths twining, slowly rising
like dust, lift altogether in the moonlight.

soon she will fall asleep and i too.
i hear a distant crooning in the night
as she careens, pulls the covers.
through intruder somnolence,
a gentle hand whirls as the winds
of many days banner our lives -
the leaves that we entirely are,
on the same bed's thorough agricultures,
were blown apart by the wind that
has brought us together,
now apart, whispering
good night.

there is nothing here, much fill of
the vacuous – just tired mesh;
a precise ruling
     of chaos, like how my mother told
me over folding clothes that i have
   my own way of destroying things.

dizzied and then clamped by my
way of default fixtures past furnitures
and a break on the lip of the wound
having knelt on a shard of glass
   age 7 in familial entrails —

knowing how heavy my steps were
by looking justly at worn-out shoes,
pieces of the Earth jammed on slits,
  their countenance earthen, exhausted
from the mundane. walls chaffed
from childish gnaws, drunk on turpentine.
stock-still hands of an old watch with
   dents for portrayal of agonies

in the dresser, clothes pretending not
  much to do

  and when it started to place its
  affect, i have learned enough to love
   was commonplace for hurt,
  and that there is a false horizon
  staring back through tough heads
of protruding nails, giving back a dignified
  image of contrition — in the mirror
a furiously slaughtered conjuring
   of what i once held in my hands
vivisecting to discover evidence
  fingers painted red, running the fugitive,
rogue without emphasis,
    
               hurrying back to home
  photographs nailed to their stations
  with cases fractured, deep into halved
   smiles, mother locating me with
an old chipped drinking glass, telling me
    i have my way
          of ruining things.

whenever the silences
fall on our supple bodies,
it is as if we are strangers.

now that i am coming home to you,
the memories make the evenings
longer, stretching them to their
capacities.

when we are lulled out
in the surge of the next moment,
our eyes pull us back to
each other's arms as we struggle
to make collision. whenever a bendable luminary lifts to light your face in utter calmness, many stories ache to be told and now, once more,

i hurry home to the warmth
of your hearth,
tender with the conflagrations
of my heart's tillage
and all the aggregations and their accompanying pains,

i have voluminous stories to
still in your ears. these intimate susurrations.

will you listen?