here is the cold
heralding my bones.
shivering in the cranial
are the spine of many visions.

here is the announcement
of it in mid-step:

space is our station.
movement's tenure is endless -
a separate illusion
bleak like an unwanted behemoth,
gnawing the skin like
a raged lover would
in summery heat of body.

here is the miracle
of its pursuit:
mind extricates itself
from frame morphing solitarily,
squandering the mist
of this inward-breaking commune.
like a prisoner swallowed
by a garrison, lapping in recalcitrant afterthought,
eyeing for conflagrations.

Always when moments slip into
   silence, I dream only truly of your easy
   language with urgent intimations.

I have always listened to the deep
drone of the animal struggling to be
freed inside of you – housing a pain it
does not fully understand, welcoming strange
darkness encircling us like fugitives.

you remind me of my voice so small,
so fragile, so mute in the mutiny of your song,
  keen with listening as in ear to the fullness of the world,
  a form of trying analysis

when it was only yourself spoken with recall
of days when you were young, ablaze, engraved into the wind,
myself looking back, still finally seeing you

  in the continual of running, singing songs,
  trembling in the wake of the blue hour.

here, there is not much to look
at. in this 3 AM tapestry,
the moon cloaking itself
in profound dark, stark and unseen,
stars borrowing their coruscations
from their white mother
in choreographed intermissions.

only a swan-song undelivered
an a dwarf carved in noiseless stone. the bougainvillea casts
its webbed shadow on the concreted canvas. soon, the night will turn
rattling in its black bed, and then clamber back to its resignation
and the identical day of yesterday's inception will revisit
us through interstices of leaves,
forking these illuminations
without allegories nor travails,
just light and its lenient pedagogy.

there is not much to gaze at,
let alone speak to, in this
deepening spectacle. only
this swan-song that remains a secret between i and this indomitable figurine.
the moon stilled in its lulled repose, stars minding their own
saturations, as the day is in close transit, nearly opening the door of this pale fixture, entering with affable demeanor greeting me
through a hundredfold of anonymous eyes heavy with discernments.

we are both naked. you
     know what happened to me
     the night my mother kept
     on bellowing sad songs in
     the morose of 3 AM.
     you have all inscriptions
     sculpted into the shearing
     of the wind and my bones
     riveted in places now
     tremble as the slow oblivion
     of falling asleep scare me.
     as i collapse onto your mauve
     chest like a bookmark pressed
     in between the leaves of a
     book, there are lines that we
     recite in total silence:
     you did to me as i did to you
     what needs to be done in the
     time of our bold awakening.
     we dressed each other with
     the velvet truth of love.

two hungry hands
in a ***-lock.

and the other two
roam like
superfluous men
in parks.

when she is on all fours,
she is
metamorphosis
and cocoons out, madly,
an assaulted butterfly.

heaven in the flutter
   and lissomeness
   in the tremble, poised,

  taking another being
    to dawn.

You’re well-received in the Sun, this extraordinary Wednesday with nothing
  to do but to look out the window in transit and feel the breeze
  when it happens, that it takes a sojourn also – imagine it into form of all things
  gone wrong when love took its place.
  a linkage of all misguided features and ghosts, some travesties along the way
but it is all good once you bet on horses in burning stables, each eventual fall
  of hand into another hand – you see his, and sense a potential glower into
  detail. The patter of rain when it falls hard, and taking into account bodies
   flaying in unrestricted pace, breaking – when the impossibility of an immovable object
   meets
                   an almost impenetrable force or reckoning and no distance or collision was met,
  only retch at the volatility of the variables we have no use for
     such as love.

our bodies are worn out
of transitions yet we cannot complain, because with this,
our supplications are temporal
or forever, it is much to our liking. numeral once more
are the aches of toil
and soon enough, there will be
a spark to put an end to this
darkness of living our lives. we cannot complain anymore. our soul cuts itself in our movements yet we go unaware of it, barefaced with pride over the things we own, things we want and do not need - we remain to be the culprit to our own soul's demise and what do we do to fend of their emphases? we cling onto things without thinking their affectations, and we blame the pressing happenstances of our deprivations - bereft of soul's spruce, lights flay over our homes to illuminate what is touchable, what is frantic upon sensorial matters. we dwarf ourselves down to the size of our own shallow ponds and like fish struggling to subsist, we flame in the water and drown in potamic navigations of our tired limbs. we search for meaning yet we resign to what circumstances allow to pass through our structures. our soul is famished over the drought of our landscapes - we resign to its surrender because we are frightened to smallness by the weight of the duties we neglect to ourselves.
this mortal flame is close to dying
and there is no enkindling it
to its full glare.

what have we done!

to accept our nameable days,
   the plenitude of them,
  means we are to be forgotten;

to come in flesh with
    our words and clothe us with
      them, will mean that soon,
  eyes shall, through malleability,
      unsheathe us all
    to our impurities.

a gaping orifice is in the seascape
   singing elaborate music,
  and to gyrate to this
will mean that there is a hand to
   hold until the songs fade
   to their closing.

to become love means to be aware
   of what our hands can do,
   what our bodies can flinchingly
  shut with their capacity to
   mend distances,
    what amount of words could
  hurt, what silence could scar
    and what nuisance could
  stir mundane abstractions,
and to become presence
    means to embrace our departures, why a thing ceases to
  stay is a question in the pristine void and beats back with a voiceless answer: love, and its
   telltale askance!

  to become and simply be,
   coming to be and ceasing to be,
what to make out of it,
  that in the flesh and the indelible mark of loving,
  its rampant depictions are all
     but ash.

— bard of night,
         keeper of metal.
furious light flaunts no avatar.

            shadows chant a sequence
              of deathly ire. loam, dearth and girdled to
         silver mane of canal.

     Dos has died.

   father took him into an unfamiliar curve
wandered off into a reverberating
      disquiet.

                  i have buried him
      together with all loyalties — concealed
him in thin space,  decreed him
     all dogdom with     unction,

   swimmingly now, still you go, leaving
     us. it has been six years and all eternity's motors gnash
        
                 afloat is the bird
     and in the nearby ken is another dog
     panting in death-daring heat,
          
      Dos has died.

I jump out of the windows of my sanity
  just to go back into the utter shamefulness of the page.
- self to self, Feb. 2, 2012 (drunk and shattered)


i have gone back to
where i do not know,
but i know my place
in this finite moment

there is an echo exhuming
the silence,
minting something in the soul,
flowering first in the ear,
and into the overgrowth
felt by the shaking hand — this andante
    of a following.

i come not with light,
only a twist of a shadow.
the night is absolute with
garbled song
and i struggle to understand
as all other slept on such lissomeness
of beds that i do not know of,

i know not where i am.
my body has already gone rogue
with its proprioceptions yet,
i doubt not my place
in this moment — this poem.

madmen fools and nothing,
the mien — brazen, stupefied glance
and hungry for light, our words gutted
like our enemies in our ill-thought.

this road dredges, the aporetic line
sifting through new divisions, something
an equation forgets the dividend
and almost always a salient permutation
of men and women and the "takatak" boy
peddling cigarettes to claptrap ***
of metal envoys,

  reciprocating some chances of restive
dreadnaught, diffusion of sweat in
scalding heat of 12:41 afternoon sun
and smoking with bystanders
unaware of the doldrum and the ennui

   it was a fine day in Ortigas.

Revel in space, yet not darkled, still
the **** and span of things that breeds
airlessness; The trees are evenly cut,
and their overgrowth seems like a forethought.
Where I am from, we eat fish with
our bare hands and our furniture, from bodies
of sandalwood, crushed with the scent of
peregrines. The morning makes you conscious
of space, and altogether the height of trees
syncopates to a nauseating stillness. In the awning
hours, leaves punctuate the ground – the cicada
with its machinistic song prowls, spills like
water from a broken vase toppled by me
years younger, raw, agile, deftly windless,
  wounded in love, lovingly wounded,
perhaps if there is a word for it, then let me
have my way, easily fraught with its meaning:
   a casualty. Sometimes the timeworn folks
would light cigarettes underneath the canopy
of a mango tree to banish ants and send them back
  to their queens – roosters in their wrinkled stations
croon in stasis, a song for the somnolent. I become
what the seasons evict. Constancy. Rearing weight
and gravity from nocturne. Tears are communal.
They make us aware of the weight of the Earth.
Somewhere, a funebre stilts through the silence,
and the jangle of little pieces spells out fortuity,
men in huddles mending pain by the sleight of hand,
a toss of a card, spinning in its imaginary axis: fate,
   feigned and fine-tuned to belief that it is controllable,
a variable, or a tabulation marred by frailty. From where
I am from, people stride through the streets naked,
soldering baskets filled with fruits gossamer from the
harvest, children suckling their mothers, the music of sweeping
metastasizes throughout the afternoon, and the same clouds
contort themselves to afford wry proposition: it is a day tender
with wonder, its allure overwrought, its sheen unremarkable.
  The funebre leaves with a necessary abundance of absence.
All the leaves depart from their mothering boughs,
  collapsing on the dreary back of the loam like penitence.
Like how once when you were young, you tinkered with
the fresh scab of your wound and felt the pain confine
  itself there, a part of you, that has now healed, but is still
      available for the world to break once again.

There is an inch of sleight in this house – this cold chair,
a burst of cologne clogging a 20 minute stride. The stringent
air tonight blusters deeper than gashing sheens.

The little dryad of dew outside and the cadenza of frogs
after lambaste of rain. Whenever you sing, your voice
communes an immense pain, something unconscious of its
gravity, something that levitates back to momentary ululations

swelling in the grime of times and heady chances. A long stretch
of a day submerged in silence resembling a howl underwater.

There will be many sorrows and they will take form of doves,
assume the skin of the populace. They will come in a volume of
names pressing the linoleumed musk the way the body turns
maneuvering over the saltine, the mattress, juxtaposed to a lover,

a brusque aroma of coffee brushing away the calm demeanor
of the morning, dragging along the weight of its lassitude
towards the sprays of fern opening a dense ornate of forget,

you, in all places that pulse without recall – an obtuse
fish feeling its life in a surge of blue, overtime, finally knowing
    what it means *to sing and drone only words.

now the word is naked

                                      perched on stone naked

the door is naked
                                     the oncoming figure naked

        stored in space naked

   meant to    contain the naked

                            I try to pry open your  silence  naked

and   caught within the last magnitude of a noise so   naked

            conceived an   outlier    naked

with    an  exact   measurement   that   is distant from  a  scene so   fair  and naked

    
      once  again  uttered  when  ripe   a meaning   naked

     with  the  body   of  an  hourglass   naked

                  whose  residence   is    naked

and an    impedance  of   a futurity   made   naked

                      by a lit   indigo   sky   naked       there are   no   skies   naked

only    clothed     by    a  closed    sheen   when   provoked  turns    naked

              you    are    naked


in  this  performance   from   beginning,    midway,   and   then  finality    naked

      in   a  cavity   meant   for    one   as a womb you   once were   in   naked

     in  your   fetal,  your  styled    font   obscured   how  the   body   contorts      naked

For a moment, I doubt your possibility. Like clues to a riddle
    filling its minor gaps. And then, from a seen distance,
    you sidle as if to arrive so sudden, yet slow with great impedance,
    an absence I am familiar of. Next to the sound of the not-so-distant
  I am deaf, wearing the same heavy mask of silence. In sequence,
  when we talk, I am pale wall, I am crumpled flower, I am riddance.
I am the many versions of bad dreams
  rolled in one, deep slumber. Easy it was the first time, when it was said
with precision, the things we were before, set loose in the air. Hard it was
now like a trick I have to unlearn forever. Alighting love a blind journey,
second sight as if responsibility. I watch myself wear out by much dailiness.

For a lifetime, I may, will it short so long then when I must
care less, the freedom, keep your face as instilment, memory, recall. You are
introduced without light; all the more I love the sight, so dark the enigma, gets
lost because distance always is telling of a long path – imprecise the steps, surety
   when feet fall, breaking the bones like twigs. I did not mean to disrupt
     your harmony – that is why dance is always a lack of another,
                             *“Catch the music, love, I must drop movement
   and seek your return.”

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

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

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

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

           forget.

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

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

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

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

all that is the sea
  
         in
               one
         full
                    wave:


      the fritter of each line
      reaching for shores,
      the multitude of eyes
      in in phosphorescenr sand:
      memory etched
      in flumine! erased by
      the arrival of blue hands
      rinsing all, leaving foam
      of passing tides already
      full with derelicts.
      sibilance of breath speaking
      its origin and now
      i swim past all ruins,
      moss, seaweed, crush of
      light and opaque contest,
      lifting with the voyage
      of a ripple, and back to
      your breast,
      i dream of fish!

it is something that has
made me once laugh.
and now that it is something
that is done to perpetuate
a divinity of its savoir faire,
or unfurl the evocativeness of
  sartorial workmanship,
it is something that inhabits
me like an imagined pit
that a body should plummet into
and crash, having fallen off
from the boughs of a bottomless dream.

like snow or silence, drops onto its vastness and fastens in it such felicitous rigor greeting it
   like an old companion, reminding
   me of these unimpeachable occurrences: as a wrinkled log is petrified, where mosses pullulate to archipelagic green, where wild ivies sprawl like children in the high-afternoon, or clandestine Paraneoptera ensconced somewhere within the triviality
    of demarcated stones in
the dark's cunning edge,

  my body knows its peace,
   all borderless without flounce
  flourishing in its still life.

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.

who shall then dare
        dream  the    Sun  to be   a flower
or    a   new, keen city     higher than  steeples   and umbilicus of   wires
     disavowed  streets  and    herds of   proletariats?

      and   if so   then it   shall be   a flower
who   picks   itself   from the    unmoving   Earth  then what   steady light
   will     it   bring?  who  will   join it   in its   revelry  and who  shall be
    brave   with trembling  hands  to hold   it in  hand  taut   like loves
divined  and  forever   is spring   and  forever    is winter   endless with ephemeral whiteness
    and   bells    are a-ringing    and  clouds are  twitching so as to sail where
      nobody   has   ever    visited

     always    it   is   Spring
    and    in my   hand is  the  Sun   or the   florid  aureole
       burning    in my   palm   and  the moon   is my   love
            whose night   is carefully a  fraction
   of   flower placing   an inch   of sleep    in   my body,
       always   it   is  lovely

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

       compose the current of the body and listen to its    brunt

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

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

away     from  here      is  the  loveliest   day

     it’s   definitive    to   quit   a resolution:

no    more   of   waste  /    shelter    may   mean   a  contrast between

     most   days  alone      and     some  days   with

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

       see me   through   a jaundiced   eye|

  a   hand     labored  from,  exhausted  and besieged|

         no   longer   someone’s    your   conflicting   a   possible

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

what    object   you    have    no    use  for.

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

an ant fell in between the page
   of the book,

even its own silence it does not understand.
from where to climb it does not know,
all steps carve discourse;

staggering in its littleness, its fragile
  mind takes on the mystery of star
and its delicate body swells in the sheen
   of words.

as in the night, it trails the moon's slender stem that transfixes
   a constellation's ephemerality:
a soldier tumbled over, undulant,
  amazed in betweenness of light
and dark when god himself dies
   before his fall was born,

o trencherman, deep in the peril
  of a word's closing, fusion of
knowledge's breakwater and permutations of bluntness,

the unwelcoming abyss is your kingdom,
  unwillingly enduring the taut blow
    without purpose — when the book is shut, to what dark do you imagine your
  eyes? to what enigma does your senses
wake up to? and to what erudition does
   your silence keep flowering?

an ant fell into the book, and in its turning page, it rides each changing wave like
  the white in its pale, blue horse,

arriving at different shores, yet all the same, a notable fate: stilled and dizzy
washed and unmoving in the abject night.

this is now your

        a
         r
          m

      and all the fingers now mashed for
   love is an ellipsis
    
    and these are now her
       l o i n s
        and there
        a flower untouched
         by the somersault
          of summer
           and *** only a folly
            of fools
             there is only this.
               poetry of the senses
                that when we both
                 die, i have gone,
                  and she is still
                   alive.

real is the form.

here now is a colony of words,
or an empire of assault from the
many truths that smite us.

our hearts gallop altogether
past the prairie of imaginations:
this movement, this locutionary,
this waltz adagios its way
to a pace that knows no sojourn.
let us raise our clenched fists
always angelward.
we are young in this agronomy.
our hands remind us of their increasing responsibilities.
our inner light realizes the throng of our shadows - away from the dark
we go pursuant to all effulgence.
let us unpin our juvenile wings
  from the clasp of what startles
us back to our flawed origins.
a flumine of flawlessness awaits
the steep end of our possibilities.

let us not neglect this.
let us, hand in hand, straightforwardly, break from our nascent states and unfurl in a craze of the so many things that capture our potentials.
outside my home, the streets are vacuous, famished from the twirling laughter of children.
once, the grass is giddy from the lightsome meanderings of our superfluous feet! where did all the days crawl to? these limbless serpents that pillage the fruits of our sageness.

i look outside and the mellow moon
enters with its lithe figure
through the hollow spaces of doors
to lairs where the youth are sleeping, unmindful of what dreams log onto the papers of their souls.
heed the call and do not let
it go, running off into another hapless length of waiting.

real is the form.
there is no lie in our rawness.
the voice inside us is tender
with message, purging our poisons
into detox and preparing with
new energies, our
flesh for our consigned ventures.

the voluminous pages are still
white and new, words besmirched still yearn to be written - there is no getting realer than the realization of our clarion call:

real is the form
and in the blank veranda of green
we sift through wordlessness,
gaping our mouths now,
contributing a verse,
     or a song!

these faces on the wall that have no eyes,
the young children with blood escaping from their hands
   as they    pick up a mound of the Earth and  throw at genuflected  roses.
these battered men   in parks   searching  for light
   and   my woman   is no longer with  me.

it’s all  vaudeville:  this obnoxious working of continuance,
these redundant  flutings,   these  unprecedented fluctuations.

opening  the yellow gates  to death
as the  automobile churns the  last of its exhausted snarl.
   we    are children   peering through   glass cases
as   death laughs at his   hopeless  clientele,
    sad,   desolate   progenies   in   working-classes,
in   parks,  in factories,   somewhere along Mendiola,
  or  just treading the waist-high  hellish   froths   of   Dapitan,
    there’s   always   death in   the nooks   of the quiet
and from   where birds    stir in  sidereal circles,   death
  with his hands    resting   on the   cage,   chases us  back to  our homes.

death   the changing of the   gatekeeper.
death  the   telling machine.
death   the dentist.
death   my next door neighbor.
death,   this boorish broken-winged   Maya twitching in  front
   of my dog’s shadow  shot out of the Sun’s  shameful recoil.
death,   my loud and loutish muse,
death    the   truant,
death,   the   copious  fog somewhere in Kennon Rd.
   death,   in my   hands through   darkness    and  light,
death   through troves   of enigma,
      death   through   undisputed clearings,
death    the   long line  of red beads   in EDSA,
  death  the gates   of Plaridel,

     it’s the moon   following you,   trailing your measure,
i hold   my woman’s used   shirt,  pick up her photographs
    and there’s no tender movement left but  the still-seeking   lion
prowling   the jungles   of my  heart,   seared by  lovelorn undoing.
  
through   the  bottom of  the sky and the  unchanging roof-beam,
  the weathervane ceases to  a sojourn  and the  wind is  trapped
    in   a place  where we   cannot   utter any word  between the  gnashing
  of   our teeth – through the wasted   years,  through  the sleeping in  and out
  of   homes filled  with beatings,  to cathedrals swollen with  tribulations,
      and to   the vineyards     wrung   out   of wine,    my  lover,   walking  through  fire,
        sound     silence.

nariyan ka nanaman,
  naninibasib na tila

kahapon lamang ay bukas—

kapit-puso kitang pakakawalan
kasabay ng pagtila ng ulan,
pagbukadkad ng bulaklak,
pagtawid ng bulalakaw

at pagkatapos ay akin kang babalikan
  sa kung saan ay wala ka na,
  at ng sa gayon ay aking maramdamang
  muli ang itinatangi ng katahimikan:
ang maganda **** mukha,
  ang 'di maikubling init ng iyong bisig,
  ang mga araw na nalulunod sa lalim
   ng iyong dating pagtitig sa akin
   na ngayo'y isa na lamang panaginip
     ng antipára — ramdam ko ang lahat,
  at mayroong distansyang hindi kayang
     isara ng kahit anong pagwawakas

  ng katotohanang alam ko sa pag-iisa,
    na tila kahapon lamang ang bukas.

cast death to who hears it most reverberating.

he hears it at noon, at sundown, at the
raising light of moon, half-mast set
glaringly through a pond of the word.
he hears it goad through the synagogue,
the pew, the assault of avian,
in the most chilling cold, in the ferocious
water of heat sinking ships to
their metallic deaths.
he heeds it now, fencing thick air
attended by the densest shadow,
he moves with it, its compelling invitation
from darkness to darkness, the faith
of contrition fizzles into the splintered hour,  moves with it, moved by it;
he writes, tottering animal of furious wording; the hill there yonder draped
by heavy cloud, rinsed by rain salting
its *******—

cast death to who feels it most sensuously.

he opens his eyes and darkness is infinite.
he opens the window and no light
lifts, awakens.
these juxtaposition of roads, the feasting
of the lamppost, feeding the wick with
infinitesimal flame, quickening the twinight, the courtyard, the amble of strange populace.
he words the earthenware, the figment of deepest abstract, says her name,
            Martina, he has her gone in
  the ashen hour, the wind that once blew
   spruced stillicide on the roof of this home has dithered away in the inexorable.
he squints to inconsolable brightness
     Martina sheds trembling in her
       eyes ready for ever now,
and then writes as time trickles from
   the ephemeral gush of spigot,
slivering the horizon by the unending stream of the familiar dawn, repeats its hymn, beheading the garden.

   he will not name the end of all,
   he will not count the hours dead
   wearing the hand like a glove,
  a word from stiff dark to flagrant one:
     cast death upon him who knows not.

For instance, recall daisies,
or if you have not seen one, so much the better.
Paint me a crass picture and sleep
on the shallow crevasse. Stilt through
the orchard and search there: nothing still.
Even the nothingness is form-fitting, and thus,
your vestigial image of daisies. Mold something
out of the vacuity, and there a retrograde sculpture
will wind back to clay. Cornerstones have your name,
and your name even so, has taciturnly placed stones.

Stones. These tiny bodies that lay, undemanding,
scourged by the rapid passage of a carriage.
I wait there, with them, still thinking of daisies.
I know of a child, cylindrically obtuse, in front of the mirror.
Have you seen yourself in the hazy windows
of the Metro? What do you see? I still see daisies.
Or people with heads of daisies. But remember your
forethought of daisies? They are nothing. I am a beheaded daisy
in the lackadaisical wind of Summer. There is nothing to gain
here but the sadness of cold passing. And the child that I am speaking
of, his name, Magno. Sturdy like the rucksack he’s carrying,
lovelessly trundling altogether with the pipes and the
handrails, almost signaling the alarm without warning.

This uncared-for sultry evening decides to splinter
itself against the masses. Again, the daisies appear to me,
this time, in heady form rogue with peripatetic fragrance.
Magno used to unearth daisies and give them to her
mother when he was stiflingly young – he hustled through
the carefully placed furniture. Whatever happened to him,
I know not. And just like the daisies we have come to know now,
trains that do not belong to anyone, and the daisies too, that go
unheard of and unknown to the behest of the city,
have gone into the subtle beginning of everything
that once started in itself, the form of splendor. Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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.

[Brecht: ice | water | steam]

I. To Thaw

     an uncompromising war against emotion
    and its content         is of  total

            concession

closer   to   the   body   in   fervid   heat

you are a patron of this commerce

       after  you a water-lasting event:

your fluidity that deflects an accepted mass  as if sacrificial
    on a  venue  or a passage  fitting  the body

II. To Consume

and when you cut through with infinite fatigue
you    are proximal      to an agape     jar    housed

  the  question   how   vast   and  accurate  the  detainment and  the   quench  thereafter

             how when   a   flood   renames

a   corner    and  turns    number   to   record   of  wreckage

     making a memory  innumerable

III. To Dissipate

   is initiative    when anterior and disparate

cannot be held and accounted   for   in

   an   erroneous         register          whelms  in   hems right shut

passing   through    an   interstice   your   affinity   to    console

         and  when   in   a flash   of  a  scene


   unfound

with what you had in your hands was simply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this unruly night
is macadamized on the wall,

whit its bare-knuckled steel mangled
to a ferruginous glaze of rust.

the dismal kiss of
      cold on the unclenching fist of the dark
is irretrievable in the grass,

soon, glass-faces will break as my simian jaw
was once shattered by a scuffle in the twilight-bells
      of recess.

  it is like the night dances and in awe,
struck by some rude awakening, we sit forever
  emptied of beauties.

even the flesh rouses to startle the reared relation
   of calla – its hot-flush widespread of petals
  thought I am given always, an intone of forgetfulness.

   such pure lunges and gyrations – we all have
spaces to cross latching us in total placeness like
    black hooks impinging voices to a shriek,

  yet surely they go off wandering in sunsets
waning in the formless crepuscular, waiting the night
  to pour stringencies,
  
    small-breathed furies futile
        like arsenic.

i listen to all these
dying cadences, these internal convocations that i,
dazed into the fullness of flesh
and realness of bones and their
fantasized congregations on
my body,
these whispers recollecting
sobriquets that in oneness,
shall unashamedly endure ---

this tough call
singular in silence and in tenderness,

that in this readiness
you will give back what is mine
to own

these sudden and indelible
thrusts, these nebulous stares
that pulse with the life of
stars, and the ineffable echoes
of your caves that summon
my foolishness - these vibrant nightingales in hiding!

now, I will try to abandon time and space
in this form of truancy.

what is this abandonment trying to measure?
  the abeyance of presence.

what is the measured variable trying
to dissect? the impossibility of absence.

a poem aspires to be something concrete. a poem
   is what is real and imagined in the same context.

I try to invoke Abad -- what is imagined is most
   real.  this shall be its leitmotif.

now, i imagine the horizon as a point

of origin, or a template to some familiar projection,
  or a tagebuch summarized into a fine line
of allegories and denouement.

what this line tries to prove is that

an enjambment is a mimesis.

acknowledge the sublimity of a
  creation. notice that the sequence that will
be promised is diegesis of absence as form
     but not a poem as in a poem that enshrines
lucidity -- but the lack of it.

there is only the photograph of horizon
   as hypothesis of perpetuality. this now

is a subject, a speculative undertaking rearing a
   poem -- writing as preparatory for absence,

finishing a line as pursuit of thesis, gravity of
    its heft as tabulation of emphasis, or
verbosity, which may be telling of meaning or chronology.

a poem that is not a poem,
  But poem as a form of absence

that aspires to be a poem.

what is transpiring now is that i am assuming
   an utterance: utterance as being here,

and perhaps voice as sound of becoming but not finality
   of presence, and sound as disappearance

post-peak. its point-source silence and formation
   of thought, and then a poem is written as

evidence of disappearance in deep and close
   contest with a vision coming from another

audience as an objective supposition or
   reaction that may propel an exchange

but only when silence is entertained does
  silence happen, and so this may be dismissed

as a monologue among dialogues insofar as
    only to pinpoint this arrogant feat:

i may be speaking glossolalia, or in tongues,
  and that i seek no reprieve nor vestige,

all the more response -- intone of voice
   stilling itself in the tense setting

of being gazed upon, glazed with coherence
  of senses from one identity to another say,

you hear me speak as in speaking
as baring sound.
   but now that i have spoken, i have already undone

  the quiet to stir volumes and amplitudes
to attest sound-fade as vital component of absence,

whereas this poem produces ample sound
  if you pay close attention to yourself reading

in the lull form of reading (your
breathing will have intensified here,

your reasoning will have made so much
  noise here) as i continue to whittle

away in form of verse, verse not as poem,
  verseliteration not as occupancy of space,

but all in all, a body of work
that is a visage of movement - or a trace of absence, physics of space and kinesis of departure.

a delineation of a thing that was once
   thriving in threshold accompanied

by its tendency to wane: sound may be an
     analogue of unheard, as sound is impervious
to quietude but quietude conscious of sound
     and its potential,

that quiet coheres to its inclination to consummation,

this completeness so emphatic,
this allegory as
  absence the somatic, axiomatic,

indefatigable machinery of a presage,
   or continuity -- this poem that is not a poem,

but an excess of sound, a body that
   deserves end,  a punctuation.
     verity of this argument in basest form.

this body of work as absence
  and its completeness, volition

of its enigma: is this the end
  of sound or your silence summoned?

to drag it back, its recalcitrant body,
   is form of revision, then possession

of an absence, a recollection that will have granted
   seamless entry and translation

which passes on from its origin to
  a new clause -- to end it here, now and pass

over as readable only in the background that is
   an embellishment of absence amongst

things in exclusive continuity, to have this produced
   in space as empirical of absence,

and to punctuate this, a mystification,
or say, acceptable fabrication,

to read and extricate as acceptance of an absence
   as form: this poem that is not a poem but

only a physicality delimited -- to speculate
and study
as disbelief, and to have done such simply

demystification of its transition.

do you remember one
     morning when it rained,
  chrysanthemums then lined the streets
  and each petal whirred to the sound of your passing?

you were too, a flower
in my hand. deep underneath the ground
you murmur, letting the twilight darkle
   into twinight. it was the dawn of your becoming.
the sky’s panging brought you here.

you suddenly filled all the mouths
that waited for you, with the marine of your name.
because we were joined by haunts that revisit us
  in this river of life
and that is why the unperturbed stone,
    the incongruent leap of water,
the bodies that sprucely lay adrift with the fluminous ways
      of the world all know you and i
because we are but from one source
    surrounding them in their laughter and silence
when we are apart as though
  they cannot sing when we do not make music
  they cannot wake when they darkly wait for us
  in their homes, trembling with unlit lamps of dust and sleep
  they cannot lift in the moonlight when we strip
  them of their fear
  as though they cannot love in the midst
      of spring when we are but two separate leaves
falling endlessly – finding each other in the Earth.

digress from this river that flows into a straight line. the following here
   will be that there is another body waiting at the brink of
      another figure lacking in speech: brook as excursion.

this plaintive leitmotif this afternoon. everything smells
        of old furniture. something this is trying
to preserve wrung out of suspicion, shorn out of air
        and unrest. when I begin saying it, and when I become
what I want to become, I will fold you in a manner

of houses. tell me of the footfall before I plunge.
   outside my home you will be waiting

for a question because you liked the idea that
       askance is the heart of all assertions.
and I will slowly begin to realize that imagination
   as machine, has not failed me.

when moved by the sight of you,
   gradually dissipate.

when halted by the inching step of
   your basis,
take a moment as evidence

and use as ground for furtive contest.

when there is evitable cipher of silence,
     I will phrase gestures into something like a metaphor
would induce

    when there is meaning, there is the moving away
and coming unabashed, pendulum your way into two walls
   as weathered as this house. Your face, a thousand adorations.
                  your heart a truism in the heat
   of naivety in place of a wild embrace.
              your hands this evening, tremulous, nervously seeking
to be one with my measurement: this thing that has nothing to do with me,
      except we have such fondness over allowing sorry states.
that we have use for what we have no use for. This thing,
   a fragment so foreign to me,
                            like hearing my name disintegrate, as if a thing
     of obsolescence, as everything is.

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!

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.

the car outside. you in your plain clothes;
I solemnize over this slow hill of flesh
when you lay down after the dredge.

it was your old automobile. somewhere in the
console, piping in the shell of night, your once
swift-footed self.

it was for Mico, you said.

this thing of time that was once early.
you in your white shirt with blotches of
yellow, like some aureole-bitten lip of bougainvillea.

some cold smitten flitter peering out
of the window of your gray head, your sage,
prattling about its conscious footing, this automobile.

are we but disputes and all that sense,
eluding us? somewhere in Malolos, the fatigued
machinery with its lilting rotor

modulates a once wild memory:
you, still in your white shirt. two bodies
drained of inertia – otherwise occupying song and silence,

our volition nothing but jarring (unmindful of its scathing dialect),
our terms to ourselves fabulated, the savannah drunk
in dappled light that evening – in front of the hospital,
mum as a nurse.

you pass on the keys to him,
learning new language. by the thousand strophes
of this lurching sea with its plodding delay,

your once bright bone, quickening in slow delight
now, as his face obscures yours with wonderment,
this evening – both of you in your denims,
   all three of us in a huddle stamped
  with heavy understanding.

carve your heart in me, love.
deeper and away, our tender kisses bid the full moon farewell.
the pungent swelter of breath and the verdure of leaving furiously sway in attendance.

i can see you now through the pane of the next minute,
moving near with a moment's fervent undulation.
together with anonymous eyes, the stars watch in glee
unsheathing the night, flayed like a bare bone.

your thigh's silken river, brindled and flowing like words
from any loose tongue fragile enough to break.
my shaking hands tremble with a fresh fruit's succulent emergence,
rid of alarms, wringing the wine out of it for mine to drink.

chanting the mellow, the bed whirls with noise
when all of these volumes slither back to their caves,
i will touch with my territorial hands, your body's ample darkness and choke its depth,
concluding the sepulcher with the lightsome fire of my kiss and its workmanship.

all the things we once left trilling marks on
remain stilled,
watching at the edge of the pantheon, our souls unashamedly admitting that we are uncertain with ourselves.

i can hardly surrender fears to your brazen feelingfulness yet as your fingers try to unclose what the winter of living has hidden in the shroud of cold,
i find in me that we are each to ourselves
like autumn's tawny daughters.

the gentle ray of your wyes searches me
underneath the tumble of virginal sheets.
your ******* tingling fleshly in the sharp
stab of the air's crisp arrival through
the windows.

going down and finding myself in you
(my tongue breaking free from my mouth's dungeon leaving all words
and soldering this avid yearning)
dancing inside you
in sempiternal motion,
i can feel the sweetness
at the verge of breaking
like the length of words reduced
to all-telling moans.

rising and falling in the stillness
is the aftertaste, leaving me bright in
youngness, laughing freely
behind whose flumine hair sleeps
in the eventide far from ending

as my hand still roams like a starved beast
in the jungle of slackening breaths
and gushes of blood,
hunting for something still,
drunk in believing that this moist venture
will lead me to an unfaltering belief
that it was your heart that i have had
in my hands, forever to endure—

these moments
and their stark absences.

life the grandest stage.
     life, gelid waters – I, the pompous admiral.
life, thorns withholding enigmas,
     clenching the true blood of flowers.
  life, the flimsiest avant-garde.

  our measures
  conceal all our knowledge,
    our fondness of exactitudes
bludgeons us to back to our smallness.

  the heart, like a riot,
  will always scream blood.
  the soul, like a jailbird,
will always carve a song.
  the mind, like a grave,
will turn soundless filled with bones.

  some will beat back to the same old music,
  assaulting the others with a concealed knife
gutting all of us as we lay still – the rest shaking around us.

  when I was young, I was unsure of myself
  and now that I have aged, it is all but the same:

I am a horde of drunkards.
I am the incessant pendulum.
I am the night-watch
and sometimes I am being watched by the night itself.
I am the loutish vandal on the wall.
I am hot, steaming music I am an earful of ***
I am a handful of hollow I am the dandelion whittling away
in the garden of full women seething with woes
I am the catapult of air from the sling of trees I am a somber god
I am an ungodly god I walk over toppled waters past genuflected hills
like maddened horses screaming victory
I am a limbless beast crawling back home
I am young I am old
my blood ravages the sinews of my body – I am a binaural cinematheque
   of slow minutes I am a mausoleum of chiaroscuros
I am all pleasure pleasure pleasure
I am just as ****** as everyone I am sour mash stirred in a wide-mouthed
      glass clinking together with this heavy slither of attendance around me
  somewhere in Pasay
I am love I love I am hate and I hate
I am forever the lion that roars at what life has done to us
    and they will cage me soon when the roses shy away from the deliberate daylight
and when all of this is through
               I have only just     begun.

my love,
  when the winds of
    change ravage
the boughs of this union


i will cling onto you
as though startled
   and frightened,
like ivies weary of their
    vertical
          climb
  
   like these passerine fingers
   moving closer to the
     leaflets of your soul,
    perching in warmth,
       my little summer,
   my winding aubade welcomed
with  bird-song!

i know not how she twists her
aches into the reprise of her
heart's persistent pleadings.

   her hands touch marred walls.
   her swift glanced put to rest
   some lost vision waxing in
   weathered trellis
   which music ****** her ears
   with temperamental ballad.
   how my day slowly unravels
   itself from the cocoon
   of questions
   and answer metamorphosed,
   a fluttering butterfly.

but i know when she moves
i feel the Earth move, as in a club
of wind pursues the willingness
of each leaf leaping from their boughs.

but i know when she converses,
the quiet rests its forlorn mouth
and shudders to some acquiescing commune.

but i know when she loves when
she does not love me, when she hates so much with her furious heart when she loved me still
in imperiousness solely our own,

   there was a language only i
   know her lips mouth to soothe
   the paroxysm of consternation
   and lullaby me through
   the wakefulness of all things.

awaken love in me
gently. fallible.
     spontaneous.
     alive.

laying beneath the sense of each
word is the armistice
  of mind versus heart
  of body versus stillness
  of sound versus silence
  of distance versus proximities.

this long-winded gasp of breath
     holding on to gravitas
     keeping things in their
     designations.

or this desperate hum of quietude
     yearning to be noticed,
    concealed in immense portage
     flowing to be bequeathed
     to cupped hands and touch
      a face callow. mild. tender.
  
like water falling again
    and again in repetitions
     memorized - permitting
   desire to utter plainly rendering love's easy, breakable structures.

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

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

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

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

there is a way to part from
                   what separates us | converse issued
  by this curious distance |  toying with the
           proposition at sundown |  where to go
    when  you are home |  look at me across
          the eye and  see  copies

              true  breaking  in mirrors between
    shards  graphed  and  measured   go
           through me  you say  where   are  we  now
     that  we  have  gone?

        i  am  all  your   textures   shuffled  by
        hand    all  your  susurrus  folded   slid
        underneath    my   tongue   --  messages
        through a fusuma of teeth  piercing  air:
        breath mine to your  own mine  still  past
       clouds   in   dizzy   formations   head   northwest
        where  you belong, i sleuth  but  not demand
        an  opposite  of   presence, much palaver
       when it is thrown out in the  open  bare as
        a  shaved  beast
 
       how  does  a memory   walk   in  stilts
              past  cities   dreaming  impish
        with   a    proposal

      let      us      flee --

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

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

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

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

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

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