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

this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
    light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
    sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
    i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to                            

                                 ­                        vertigo.
                                           in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
         long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
    120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
  form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,

                                          are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
    and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
      of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
     to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
     after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
               that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.

Thought first begins in
          mouth

                         Tzara

a Sun with a slow metabolism
       excreting    sterile   doves

            or    roses in machineries     of     crimson

I feel   the  same   inflammation

   when    thought   first starts    in the   mouth

   and ends    a derailed    train:      *******
      in   an    alley      of   locomotives

this    titular  token   of the   grave  sorrow of the World
      sinking   in   your   sleep   a  dagger

or          
               simply   a
promise

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.

Wilfredo

from above i know you saw
what my hands are capable of doing

in front of the hospital,
a fistfight out of pretentious rumbles.

language of war
sabotaged my silence — trickled,
pried my squalid mouth
with jibing
        lips

once upon the nascent
   stance of night
(that is
  over the libidinal moon: i have my
way with colored forget)

   a dog walked this Earth
hunting for something — the drunk
    applaud of night swings the ides
  into an endless dance

    you turn in your grave like
  the replicate of an oncoming wave,
   bringing the ocean closer
   to the burning
   of my
    
          mouth, wordless —

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.

everything in its own defeat —
but we need not be that
with common travail.
take as a word is to say
the world is flat
and streets fat with fools.

from downtown,
i have here genuine
beam bourbon —
we want it to slide clean,
desire it to crash rough;
streets will
echo old haunts and
we
will be larger
if not bolder
than hounds.

Your reluctance to bark, your canine ogling. How I envy you dog. Because you are innocent.
      Because you dawdle in your
        coil of tonal mane.
Because you weep no deaths.
Because you somersault no beginnings.
Because you do not heed the call of silence — just stupidly beautiful curiosity you cannot word, a scruff grunt or a maniacal burst of motion. Because you only
    find yourself in a ***-lock
and drowse right after.
Because there is nothing in this
     world too immense for your
   smallness. Tottering behind the furniture, sleeping underneath
        the study, wagging your tail vehemently, welcoming with beastly pounces any stranger heralded by the wind passing
     through opened doors,

because you have no daily commute,
     no dread for the inevitable,
  because your fruitions are measured to no better than
  a toss of supplication or simply
gnawing at an old bone.

   Because tomorrow
i will go to Pasay and earn a living
for perhaps, nothing— my works remain unread, my voice
     still dies in its reticence, if not clubbed state.
   Because tomorrow there
will be a long line of people running
     in circles on the head of the
  nail and soon it will rain.

Because you and I share
     the same air yet never
  carry the same iron of crosses
     or surmounts of ineffable
  boulders — i feel more chained
     without a leash while you
   feast in the manna of hours,
chasing a speck of shadow
      or lounging at every time-trickle.

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

it was raining that morning – so much the effloresce of colors
making their way back into the sky; there were the strangest forms of
clouds, their bodies assuming shapes and geometries, obscured angles
like that of two coiled lovers on a bed, whose bones ache the septuagenarian
but still at ease when it comes to building fire; no birds were out that day
and the busy binatog vendor blared into the streets like an unwanted nuisance,
it was already afternoon when you had your eyes wake up to mine,
your simian jaw curved to a hook of the C in crescendo, your voice the twilight
and the familiar passing of birds, the gush of blood inside of you;
there are such speeds that ultimate a crash, or a fragment – the semantics
of motion do not appeal to both of us, but we ceaselessly exist in those
moments when all of your movements summon, say, the sea, but that is a metaphor
used overtime, overwrought and taken out of its blue – say, your grandfather’s pendulum
watch impaled to the wall on a heady standstill, face to face with a linoleumed wall
that shouted its age – its superficial maquillage falling out of its slenderness
fashioned to secretive ******: something both you and I know, something that does not
come well with age, something that only some shadows choose to eschew in light.
  in a faraway place, there might be parakeets but this time, underneath the cusped sky
and the parasol that was drenched by drizzle that we let dry by the doorstep,
there is something about the gnash of rusting metal-work that tells me time has its own
way of claiming things, renaming them, and bringing them back in awry stances nestled
in tight, wrestling nooks of space, dark and dust on ground – keeping us leaping in place,
    swift with dreams of wings and aviaries, be it elocutionary with farce
or just keeping it real by the unreal of our imaginations – like birds swell in the sheen
  of the sky’s flayed bone, sliding in and out of the fringes of the aureole until such gardens
  are flustered with monochrome: this perfect dagguerotype of day.

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.

moseying on to senseless expulsions
the width of the hot, throbbing room

pulls away and cannot parry
   thrusts

breath stabs double angst
shuddering to speak only hands know
language, scent evicts
all names

goes   to   a   deathly  departure
  through sad, flittering windows

forgets    who   he   is

in  the   sovereign  of your  sleep,
   you ****. tousle. scream out of bed
   flailing.

         like   fish
  out     of    water,
       the   current of    immediacy.

     i will     write you
a boy    in     his
        fetal     nature:

    bright-*****,   holding  a   crimson  balloon
       in his   small  hand (a  reminder   of
       levitations)
    teeth white    as endless   snow
         the flat-footed lotus
   wading     in
         the     waters      of   senescence

    you will    take    it
   as a holster      cradles      gunmetal
       as      parking lots    fill
       parks    with  senile    men
    waving canes   into    the Sun
        yellow-teeth    and   brittle-*****
  
        you      will    wake
    and       smile   your way   half-painted,
      half-illuminated   like   a dagguerreotype
         in my    mind's   chamber
       your   half-nose,   *******,
           you snoring   beast   in   the jungle
     of   my frailty

         i too falling in sleep
     the red   balloon    let go
           into    the   cirrus.

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.

what now moves  the mouth of her  to speak? giving of  weight, unloosening like  a child from a mother's
  arms and assumes  the back of mirrors. giving
  as in giving way to salt of sea and coming back with
 heaviness of a wave, lapping the abyss is what this ripe blade pushes into her skin when all move
 but stray, foreshortening distance like a bullet unwound from a marvelous catch then
 prides herself dumb from all contention, aching to part twilight are hands, reaching for sibilant days or simply  her once perfume all the world knows.

You feel stories are always unsolicited. You do not want them.
You want to feel the agony of the moment – all the more the electricity of it. A moment mottled by
rain this ordinary Thursday afternoon, or the dust eloping in the wind as we drove past 50 in the middle
of the night, you telling me I do not clean my car thoroughly, like that of a lady’s. You feel stories pose
no importance. Say, at the edge of our seats or at the jagged lip of a cliff – you would dare say jump,
alone, unwound, unfettered, resolute, obvious and available in truancy, out of incalculable fear of
existing – you took the plunge and claimed it’s all the same. Apertures frantic with dazed visions of
fondness. Vertical leap, cutting through the vague sky. Keeping some sense of freedom, yet we are not
as free as we think. You do not want a story. You do not buy its thrills. You chortle at the idea of lasting things because they have hands that are clenched and frenzied. They brand. They are territorial. You are no territory. You are an island, adrift somewhere, breathing on its own in between penumbras of want
and coasts of dread.  You feel characters do not change scripts. They change how you say things. Say, when he told you were needed, and I told you that you insist your forceful importance – you felt the need
to dab into the air and spire through the thickness of the dark, flamboyant with the color of freedom, you said, pale as a dove, I am free. Finally, the man might have left somewhere without you knowing it, and just as you are unclenching your wings, you project your pace into the sky like an unseen margin in the invisibility of all invisibilities – it is impossible to look away. You felt stories are not needed. You wanted experience. The end of a dull knife, the sound of a .45 shot into the sky as the police circle the filthy streets of Quezon City. You in your Chuck Taylors, running, looking for some tough nook to hide in – omen of another rain in sight. You remembered when you first bathed in rain and laughed a laugh so impossible with high notes and shrills – you laughed away like you were not coming back, because there is no need for a story. Now left to wondering in the vastness of the room before me, was it something
to be believed? A broken orchestra enters with its surrendering music and everything is ended. I fell asleep, still dreaming of running away.

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.

"In a room where the truth naked, shining"

                                The body wishing to break
   but cannot    still in fragile pace
            stringing  defeat   so sure in the air

     and rising from salvaged metal
   compressing everything to scrap;

         Every single one mum as water in basin --

   I am    akin  to  all  their   silences.
         What language could run its smoothness
     if not the same voice relishing in the beginning,
        drawing this reticence much more immense,
    commensurate if not death in the afternoon?

           From this room there is the disquiet
    taking form, the symmetry of a knife,
           crushed deep within my plight
            of wanton need. The night's meaning reduced
   to a stockpile of laundry soiled from yesterday's
           scuffle, the same metronomic sound of
  
       the world dropping from a high place,
   my hands dreading the catch from the fall.

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.

Why this house? This house that walks without frame? Only air strides
circumventing the dome. The permeable atmosphere
flows freely shaking water down my arms,
          pulp by pulp, fragment by fragment,
consolations for tippling music streaming in the ears.
Blowing arias – intone of regret, or the loss of beautiful things.
Preferring silence over sanguine narratives. How are we to assuage yearning?
   I heard someone say, “The ideal is unattainable.” – strange, holding
the small of one’s back and lament the narrow ends of the world.
   Strange the flight of birds, the hum of buses past Quezon City.
It would drone that you do not know her – and that she is never somebody
  else’s – that is dearth consoled. Your palm indents delineate not fate
but the steady distances of things close to contact, eluding tragedies.
                          Why this house, and why you?
I have no blueprint of your home. I know not what festoons the balustrades.
   Your rue for the absence of a balcony. A panel over earthenware I suppose,
or partitions to separate dreams from stilled things impaled to the wall.
   I presume there are photographs of you in every corner
to remind you   of your gathered storms.
                         I know not the smell of your home, but I have your
nameless fragrance on my shirt wedged, ambulating with me through the halls of
    where I chase moments like cirrus stirring in a somersault of summer.
  Make use of  bowls with
      evening water  and flush the specter down like how you would, cold water
into throat from a night of weeping. Somewhere there,
    the China will remind me of your elliptical face in
                the intensity of leaving. Your eyes
the windows for birds humming a music I do not hear.   I have been to too many neighborhoods,
I have seen unfinished structures foretold by obliged scaffolds holding together
                     a would-be home. Why this house? There are only shadows intimate on
the floor. The sudden burst of impossibilities watered down, attenuated by
            piercing glances through the thickest of nights black with remorse.
The palpable silence gyrates and the diameters of the world are too close
     to break in sidereal circles.
Why this house?   Because you are in it, and outside,
    through the thick quietude, underneath the paling moonlight,
                         you pretend you see nobody.

you cannot escape poetry.

there’s poetry in the uneven streets of *Salcedo.
just to exhibit, ogle at the preen park
  and watch the ravenous trees write in a treatise:
    only shadows are engraved. gravity, their paperweight.
there’s poetry on the oncoming figure,
  a woman in a pencil skirt, disfiguring herself
to pick up her wallet – she wrote herself in cursive,
    cruising in front of the aperture, a form of C in crescendo,
then jackknifes back to slender posture reaching for the sky,
    arms to sides like armaments poised to strike.
making itself known through whimsical imperatives,
   the wind that bludgeons the trees, and smites the poles:
      written in hieroglyphic – the fall of leaves and the felled
  ash of morning, deepening in its station.
you cannot escape poetry
    whereas, I start remembering you without consolation.
  the sudden onset of your memory thrusts through
       the escarpment following a steep descent towards
           my body, a figurine, without water.
you will die here. and from what has been retained,
      will arrive the inescapable.

it is much like rain this hot evening,
          prompt in arrival to assuage default
                  settings

   like most days when in the intimate dark
          which love I clutch and whose
              hands i ****** shatter before me

    between the moment just arriving
        and the press of disappearance

     this body that dartles onto the leadened
          cathedral of  your heart, the jaundice
     of your repeated self accumulates

           to harangue this true evening yellow
    starting a burlesque of moon, flushed

         in the punctuation of mildew. grass
   its fragrance the first time and the last,
         translated - a revision of wind's gesticulstions. else it was strangely always
      pure dusk, wide-eyed, awake in futurity

    dare the hands clench and the feet
       mingle with swift pace much like
    rain    this   evening      forgetting
      a jammed, rusted   parasol
  
          your first time underneath the world,
       Summer ending in a blink of an eye,
          a stab of bated breath.

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.

Spritzed me with rain, this morning.
   Rooftops unravel inner coating like old scabs
   to wounds. Quiescent mercy of the Sun
   bleared behind curtains of cumulus. There is a far
   more in-depth correlation between an insurmountable
  ex-facto and the fruition of affront:
           something a sutured lip unwraps, a sotto voce.

                                                          ­    Murmuring murmurings,
       tousled the leaves to a zither like salad on a depthless bowl:
    a coarse susurrus unattainable through lip-reading: tongue’s the
   scythe and the message that rummages athwart, something
                                 that rushes in the blood, a scrape on the sinew
                 as I coil in pain like a thing in womb revealing its fetal nature.
                              something that speaks for another one – ventriloquism
                       in its keenest sense,        speak for me, you, both of us lost
                                in frenzied translation.

such    darkness   is another  fleeting  thing
    and so   is   the   bird  of  your
                        arrival, mine    windows   receiving   bird-song,
  elegiac – pining  against   perennial  trees,
     sounds     of   well-put     strikes    bringing   back
       to   a  time   not    mine but   hastily  endure,

    and    light  is  but  another  figure   posing   for   itself,
       a  backlash  of  photographs  again   not
  mine      but      this   time    masterfully   endure
     all  that   is    mine,    being
       still    and   keeping     what
the  silence  holds   with   its    tumultuous   hands,
     a    song   once   my    roof-beams   heard   but
refused     to   declare: a   fugitive   frisked  out of
  the   nooks    of   depthless  sleep   is    I,   inspected
by   the   wide-eyed   gazebo     of     morning,   and    a    specter
    whose   name    I   cannot   recall,  completing   this  brokenness.
I am    neither      poet
     nor    bard,      stripped  of   words
and   I,    past everything  else that  makes   sweet  music,
   possess    no     mandolin.

figurined affectations
weary on their pedestals,
high-pouncing in their
formless wind,
whimpering in their places,

like a woman imagined
in leitmotif - chords
outstretched to symphonic wrestle,
lissome fingers touch
gossamer ground
lips wovenly shut to figure
out in silence, its language.

this is a showcase of longing,
yet, wildly it goes
with its urgency, into the
   unrests of my cerebra,
imprisoned there, slumbering there, thieving and thriving there.

plenitude steps taken in those
    DMs. my hands in the tense wind

are two hounds in a ***-lock.
somnambulate if you may, in the pretense of this
   grotesquerie. sing to me, you might, lax in tune
and foreboding by consent.

on the floor now, aslant, like two dogs
   waiting in servitude,
  the detritus of shedding – outside to no windows,
I perceive an elongated white of moon.

you must have hurt the world
with your darling feet.
carrying the night, deciphered from above,
whose distance is this that switches
to impact?

from the look of your face in the drone
   of sleep,
I doubt my presence

but when the radio of dream soon dies
and your breath ****** out of you
like a vacated city,

the undulant breath, a fair warning
and myself simply, an aftermath.

Exhaled when sexed up a hole in a thing
particular is this day surprisingly surpassing

without end, if when volatile
consider stasis; ripples initial a signature

on plainclothes this Sunday. Silenced
his fist over dinner, this raconteur of beginning

splits to an end tracing a line between
stiffened    voice prior to   mouthing it so:

we have nothing to do here but absence zeroed
in like a marksman. Rendered it full

to a trembling gait stooping over parallels,
put it inside a box and hem it into a trundling vessel

send it to the edge of sun gruff with fever
   your derelict day inside this news.

The peril of this thing is to imagine you in the
     word marvel.

Anything that must point towards the Sun
     must be tender with meanings

in the dinnerless evening
of the leaden chapel of silence there is always
a fury in its own movement say,

a touch of a hand on my svelte upholstery,
machination of an enigmatic discourse towards

fluidity of bedazzlement simply by saying
   you want to go out in the center of which
   pulses with a different life but with the same name,

or to briefly wonder
   if the word marvel is its own fault and
accurately measured in longitudinal  fashion,

so innocent on the passenger seat now groping for
some warmth from the black subcompact with metronomic sounds,

the mechanical work of this droning disfigurement
   is that even in wings

you    are relentlessly     going   and going
   crossing points   and delineating   crosswalks

with more   x-ed  angels  lamenting their   able wingspan.

Unable to give birth to new conflagration – grace of prayers is nothing but
   sadness stilled in sandalwood and simply this poem,
a letter of intent to crush your face and fracture your bones the same
     way you do with mine, in every evening where

the final squall of the throbbing moon is a realization of the answer:
I am the one who wants to drown you in total darkness,
    and my final word wanting to scar.

i  arrogantly   imagine
  rain (splayed on the pavement) as something
  too short to ****** with, in plea, so as to say that
genuflecting on a field of budding roses suddenly
blooms wide-eyed skies so brazenly, an aperture that
winks not abruptly to shed tear.

somewhere along the lambaste,
humidity takes form of a nauseating swathe
of demise and immediately, in transit, comes back,
  a cold, haranguing wind – something borrowed,
something ephemeral, something that causes trouble
to the frail gestures of a rose, or a child in consummate siesta,
or simply the sudden intone of a band bursting midway
  through the sullen thoroughfare –
  
    colors seem to intensify, the world inflamed like
a contusion, the wind like a gaff maneuvering the
trees, and I, lost in somnolence, can only remember so much
of the afternoons lost wandering about nothing
when rain has happened and nothing existed before me
   but the braille of seasons and the obsequious  shadow
     swayed by nothing but light’s silent radio; much like heaven
and I, here on Earth,
                          looking out   in     the    rain;

there is always,
yet sometimes, the light reclining
on air.

this is the gesture where
the music is born.

a twist of a shadow
unfurls like the first touch of
autumn's hand to pry open
the flowers precisely without hunger yet out of effulgent kindness. this matutinal flowering
    is dislimned by the pressing question of a quotidian sun -

  without reason of imagination,
  these words burst out of
   the silence like blood through
   the steel vein of the world struck with a hoard of lightning
    as the following of rain in
  fusillade extinguished the waters
   reduced to sound - no reprisals invoked.

   it all begins like this,
   with only love glancing
   through windowless homes,
   searching to find inhabitants:
    these intruder words
    sleeping, awakened, now stir
   madly in the dark to make
      light through and through.

a glint of the Earth in delight
  is in bare sight and how we leap not with
our body but with our mind.

a handful of air swallowing
  the air – love that somehow
half-rhymes yet not even so entirely with hover
   shows the infinitude of possibilities

when it was not your palm that reads
   an incipient star but a moon half-bitten
by an outraged soul when it was not
  your  body
       I  have  found
but    an   isle  full of  noises
   and I so much  the quiet,
  shall not  return  with  the wind  so as
   to  set  sail and  farther off into  blackening  space
    onto  a realized sea tinctured with
      such  blue  blood, o  sea,  which somehow
rhymes  with but  the  end of
  you and I coming   to   be –

a gentle foreboding:

bidding salutation
and a formless farewell,

into a toboggan of
a bottomless memory.

when things begin themselves
as fine objects, i see their
threats of fading. refulgent light traipsing back to its console.
a tangle of words congealing
to become a forest infested with
voices passing through and perfectly occupying space.

or when you open your mouth
as if you were to say something,
its almost perfectness,
its straightening out the fringes
of my soul to rumple them again,
blue head nostalgia peering
through a soft drape of water,
something as untranslatable as
the shatter of a wave with its forgotten foam slowly making its way down the stairs of jagged rocks, leaving no marks on the very core of thinking this.

when you are about to claw your way back to a memory's drop on the silence of still objects,
reducing all wounds to scars
and there will be no commune
to still its message or tuck its blaring clarity underneath tongues labyrinthine without anything to say, and that what remains to be
conceived is

that this silence
remains to
be something familiar,
like speech - or departures.

Take salt for sea. And blue for feeling.
Litmus blue, say it will, squalid yellow
are the dead and the living continue on,
  swept onward.

Take air for flight and space for descent.
  When you are held, raised into this,
you will fall at last – take a sudden slither
   of skin as farewell, catacombing mist
  as    salutation but

   you      go    ineffably

whenever, well-paced,
     well-oiled,

you will continue on
  despite
     final   exhaustions.

i shall carry with me
   the steel morning as words
   unmoving in swathes,
   petrified
   in my shoulders
   and i shrug,
   unbecoming of Atlas.
   all the birds gone.
   only trees zither
   untold messages -
   all stones displaced
   in riverbed silence.
   in the night
   there is a lyre
   and the fingers
   nimble-dancing, unplayed,
   alone as wind
   fuses with ornate drivel.
   my bones rattle
   in unimpeachable oblivion!
   an inamorata weeping
   left touched without
   violent hands, arms choke
   out nuisances from
   still-sitting inamoratas.
   the loom of my hands
   famished with light's fabric,
   the children's laughter
   frayed as i genuflect in thorns
   and bleed only minute blood.
   the threshold breaks
   in the unrest of somnolent eyes.
   a somnambulist without path,
   a path without feet,
   or no journey at all!
   time's monuments leveled off
   the Earth and the clanging
   of metal collides with air,
   a senseless caveat -
   all gone, all gone!

the word admits truth
and the feeling confirms its ruin

of the world i know. trees spar
wind, birds cross tapestry;
the old moon's wane hesitates,
  the bilious lark does not

heed what i know of the world
   and our entrails speaking
a hint of such sorry recall—
something a memory gives back,
lighting a beacon, passing a mortal flame

  into my hands, the heliotrope,
  haplessly flapping its wings now
    unpinned crooning a voice
of the world – twilight in one song.

there are many things trembling, disparate, conscious of their
     spaces. things appear colossal when near. rife as tongued word,
     an approximation – a misuse of time;

     dealing more for sight than feeling, things snap in a very short distance.
     fire burning glowers pale. lilt of a sentence in speech.

      a luminescence is nearness. its impact, relative – brands it a different
      form, recalls it, a clear warning as message.

      what is yearned for is distant. mostly what’s ignored is as obvious
      as want. you, both at the same time, undulating.

Death among other deaths as the hour becomes moist
   by the rage of oncoming minutes. The scent of rain lingering
   everywhere – here from the end of the most sullen sight
   flaying the document.

This among the cheapest of things – to find the beauty
   gone in all things. I am reduced to turning moments
to body parts – people to signals, currents, beacons;

        you   are  the  arms  pressed   within   monuments.
eyes   crushed   in  glare   this very catatonic     second
      in   flash   gone,  whoever    lies   in  the  parking lot   with me
         the feet   that have gone     missing.

    name-recall passes as clearing. Close protocols
     to   guard a well-oiled machine
         beheading the avenue.    This anomaly

   is the common thing within stains   trading
         cleanliness among     fabrics we  are cut  from   the
      same      origin: now    let    rain.

deep within the prowling dark,
  in the stillness, these hands
    forage the steel scaffolds
       of pain.

in the stillness --
    the rain and the floor,
      the toppled silence,
    sleeping in the flurry of
      these contestations are
    no petty solicitations.

i want for only a hand
     to pacify unquiet eyes
    dizzy with questions.

i want a kiss to take in its flight, your splinters - woodworks
      of a name's recrimination.
i want feet to stride past
    the torrents of such distinct
    cry, outward, as though an outburst - the stars wrestle the
    wind as the shadows are loose
      in their own leash.
i want only an ample body quivering
    skyward, giving in to sliver
   in a multitude of glass,
     like the tiny fingers of rain
   crashing into the earth blind
      with force, roadless, tender
   with the night's tenure,
      amongst livid walls,
and then only ripples, to pulse with the many gilt days of dozing suns until these eyes awaken to
   the brew of an unfilled sky.

girls in lithe dresses
  still in photographs

they hurt like daggers—

being this young
  hurts like a dagger, too as
their eyes divine something
  in me,
or their hurtling way of being so
    ineffably in place
  and i, placeless,
  skin flushed hot
   like receiving a multitude of tongues,
    this juvenility,
   everything around me is lissomeness
     just— tryingly closing my eyes
hoping to be awakened by the roaring
     of blood in vein,
  put to sleep by a lapidary brush
    of hum: a delicate soft-petalled song
       but i am a child
   lost in a field
         of various flowers.

sleep strewn loveliness sink in the
silence of this evanescent twilight —

a dream's citadel superimposed
in high calligraph.
shadow's monolith dancing away
from a mutiny of light. there is a gathering
here unknown,

as the moon fathers these
intimations doubling astonishment in
all limpid signs and praised symbols.
i see now clearly,
the lighthouse belle!
i feel more evidently,
the charring of the clammy water!
i ache more freely
as the stones are put in
equipoised trial - nudely manning the
coasts of dread!

to myself alone i sing
where all fires resurrected - here now,
close to dine the coruscation
of the vertiginous star heady on its way
towards the complete blackness of god's
face trilling behind numeral starscape—

small creatures standing on the
shoulders of dreams
mounting the dwarfed ******* of
mountains and aware of the river's
errant split.

against all light are the many toppled
dreams held together into makeshift amalgam, traced in outward light is
the vestige of the unwatched now
obscenely put into picture like the wind's contrapuntal waltz against the interstices of grass feasting in their moveable glee.

o, dreams and what if they are
curtailed to the bottomless notion
of ground's innocuous stare, to crumble
underneath the feet of the giant whom
i once knelt in front of, ravished, keeping worlds together like a mothering tongue
to day-scarred kindred, these words
   thrown from the gather of clouds
      formless shapes of inimitable rain,
  
   the bells may be out of songs,
  cathedrals too, wrung out of prayers,
    oblivion yawns waiting for its
     next guest— here in the dream
  cradled in the shoulder of it
      unharmed, untouched and only
       deeply feeling for all that is
       retained, walking in the Earth.

outside, the world
half-blind, half-illuminated
       i solder mine tremulous fingers
   to unsullied white and begin
      to pry the promised mirth;

joyously i and the smoke
   of fetal curve, rising like a hand
glistening my forehead!
   death strides past the juxtaposition
of scaffolds and i heed the call
   of the clarion void. the shadow's
pantomime comes to a close
   and the iron sea of curtains
move altogether.

  oh my mother weeps
  and so my father, the nonchalant
    always, my brother
and sister learning the form of
     early departures,

a long lineage of passing,
mustering the immense weight
of dying. we seek death not—
   living flourishes for naught.

never always the princely thing
  to do, but when i have death
   in between the fingers, berating
my smallness,

    it is either obliteration
or salvation, eluding inhibition.

the guttural baritone fixes
the tone of the bravado.
  unafraid of the world's conspiracy
sweltering, is this fan of flame.

              luto
linis
           laba

  thumbing down a prayer
of the last leaf, this wondrous tendril.
   all the taverns shake still
in the spleen of contention.
       this is the penultimate tonic:
when the world is not moving
   and when all the bottles are drained
of their oceans, when the women are
   dull and our lovelorn duties double
  their weights, oh, and when we are
  at the edge of desires from what
   you perceive as "hairtrigger",

    we will once more savour the
  emptiness of all and wring
    the seas of their blue and guzzle
        a swig,
     drink or two even if you
know me not.

black crushed pupil tipping at its
  peak with a mild sheen
  discombobulating words
  to their own contained madnesses
  putting an apostrophe
  on everything
  it lays sight on

  a salvage of disrupted vision
  wrings true wind blowing through
  the white steel of dangerous contraption
  in the hand and takes to leaping
  of faith, a restless voyage:

  a volute image lightheaded
  still with the passing to and from—
  nomadic breath still splendidly
  penetrating through all sound
   and silence and words
    like fire wily without intent,
      the moon. only there. without a name.

1 Method:

Witness nothing but the body
    hurtling at best, if not dilapidated.

Cusped in space, never held.
Behead the music,

    if not the conductor.

It will happen when everything has
  expired in the threshing.

Wring me pure, make me delicate,
  chain me in the wrongness.

    Embody this figurine pierce it with stem
  break it gossamer as petals imperiled ad infinitum
       sleek as a metaphor rising from rinsed perfume.

2 Chance Operation:

  Say when she caresses / this mired  setting:
  it is   of  preparation.

  Seize this mean when preparatory.

 Turn you as inside-out cleared from veiling.
  In a vitrine you wish to be freed from,
  examined, never granted meaning;

  Mundane the discovery.
  A throb of fever gone from tepid bath
  walking into space, abled.        

  Acute blunder is study, wash me with theory.
  Sullen is the word for it, entitled to acute error.

  Say when    it  ceases,
   tranquilized. Never waking up, fastens to

3 Dreamwork:

  Always still is the heart.
  I envy the water midstream. Fingers partition
 
   when infiltration is sure of. A conscious removal
   merits the continual of lobotomies.

  Augur this dim presence, make it raw again
      infallibly, make it my body. Forge my skin out of
   and  listen to  it. Feel the drone   of  this machine

   making space less tolerable. This begins
      an end, but of what pursuit is this here

   always  a  vision Blinded  by   definition
         away    from   here?

like a forest inhabited
by varmints
are my hands
wanting that again
that close-enough
of a slouching to nirvana
  that demands a higher
  price, to have that between
  parched lips again
  even if my body
  still aches
  even if my mouth
still has in its dungeon,
   the aftertaste
like a garage for autumn
  abluted by the picking.
in this room of my mind darkened
   by a gnawing desire,
  its most secret deaths—

impending, singing and almost—
i have you now in my hands
   sealing my fate.

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?

-- the moon hangs like
   a pendant over the supple
   collarbone of the night.

  under my raft is your
  ocean raising
    the reticence.
  calligraphic and all graffiti:
   sunshine walks
   with elegiac primrose.
   moonlight's facade
   dons harlequin mask sprinkling
   with its white hands
   stars with anonymous eyes
   examining ichthyic gravel

     an unearthing, only moribund.
like a question dangling like wild moss on grafted lips of concrete,
        revealing all
        but only too little
        is understood.

This old dog out of dogdom,
   in all of bones scattered elsewhere remaining
   to be unseen, hidden in old glory and flushed lives

In all their shapes and sizes they have
   their bow-legs and their collarbones dangerously
   recoiling in and out as if to ****** fully bare
   for me to see -- invisible hands for invisible reapings they go ******* clad else there was wind
    in all rooms winnowing to make good use of
    my time and unhinge the doors to toss them out
    of their senses and into mine
    letting them wear me thin like paint to turpentine,
    in this house that refuses to let go
    of fragrances underneath this cold rondure

I have forgotten how it was to love
    and clad myself fat with flattened foolishness
     not having loved enough to remember their
      weights crushing my bones so dearly feigned
      my eyes and skins love-crumbled and
      positioned to surpass their flow amidst breaths
      held like ******* or my collected body going
      into another's and completely vanishing
      in a thick scent of fluids so virulent and mundane,
       putting a smile on my face and an anchor
      to my wrongness as if to drag along ineluctable
      and loveless down the stream of many names
       i will confess to my first-born son

   so we can fill parks and stare at them once more,
     laughing at how they have broken us.