someplace called  space,  in the sunken word of healing,
   like woodwork inched, thumbed down to the last utterance
    of prayer – someplace called      space,  a hermetic enclosure of sometimes
     words    of   fancy like,    sometimes love, most of  the time   hate,
   convoluted   as amaranth.   in  someplace  called   space  there are a number
   of  things  worth mentioning in enigmatic form.   sometimes   no words
      threaten nuances, and   sometimes  (it does)  silence  (a)  bounteous
        dullness   of (what I perceive to  be  a fabulation of  the word)  sense.

love shakes loose, light;  which twirls  in a cornerless  square often
     dreaming sidereal circle, which rotunds sidewind to such darkness that laps
up    this  sequence:   as  sea takes to  shore,    as   people who move (restlessly,
      tirelessly, senselessly)  through    space.

her hand will be moonlight
by him: quietly

have we become beautiful
sound? movement of dancers

and fangs of music— birds
stirring elsewhere,

abandoning trees, you
and trilling waywardly across sound, me

all is disquiet in days your lips
have sung honeyed softness

i could hear it like a flower
whose petals are blue

deepening in silence.
her smile will be harlequinade

by him and an adagio of scherzo
by her will make feet trample

the accident of water: pond-strove
of love's bend asks

have we become rivers
leaping in temporal splendors

as when it will never
give sleep its ****** whiteness again

i sing through morning's trek
and we, deeper then rain-washed stone,

will be all but moon and dark,
oh, you, me — unclosed without protest

pressed against the wall
of love's domain.

Whose dreary face now becomes warmth – an ash turning
  into a single drop of water

I love and I have – and I know that when she looks
  she does not. Nothing moves the bird of her dawn but

her. Proletariats sing of steel in the night and I deaden
   within their homes. Whose dreary face now becomes

the steady light on the porch – a thigh, or a river, turning
   into a single gasp of song.

I love and I have – and I know that when she sings
   she does not. Her silence moves the moon deep within

its womb and annuls. Each moment in her shoes, she is absent,
   and I taste the pale death of her precise waist,

her sharp tongue having me curved when enough was said
  when empty was sure. I know whose face I am talking to,

but knows not what day has escaped me. The possible:
to bring her so small in my hand, and invent her this fate,

to be unclenching like water and virile like stone. I know
  the singular act of her likeness is born out of my lack:

there is a spring-clean image traipsing the water. I must chase
  where it streams, and its origins not my own.

The city borders us two as we are demanded by the daily:
  the smell of a home shoals me a satiny sob. Still the marvelous

sky, a knife, if not referring to me, the cut lily that is the Sun.
  Whose dreary face now becomes a store,

commerce, becomes the silver of hills, becomes the gray assault
  of an old cathedral, becomes the surety of a transaction

and then becomes wind chiming through cities. Becomes inquiry
  between I love and I have – becomes dearth and is proud.

   Nothing will stop the train arriving: when thirsty for a glimpse
  like mine a fountain or a singular wave from an opened window,

she passes – and does not look for me.

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

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

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

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

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

the sonofabitch tremor
  from a tall cup of americano

i am somewhere in the heart of Libis
  feeling the libidinous snarl
  of trucks, the poignant treason
    of leaves slamming against each other,
  the bamboozle of the youth

   this is my 5th poem sliding out
    of my whetstone mouth
   sharpening the dull blade of tongue
    as the harum-scarum of the swivel
   door crafts a rising hullaballoo.

    spilling coffee on my ****** white
     this sonofabitch tremor
    terrorizes the purity of the *******
       clenched against no succor,
    eyes squinting in lachrymose fretting
      palpebral shade of tossed out gray
        caprice of clouds — no
  
   more coffee
      for me,
          these words nudging me
   keeping me awake with
      persistence.

through  the mirror a light-forsaken  world

     in a used    leather jacket, the  packed  scent of   cigarette
exacts   itself   in  the  calendar,

     hung     on  the  wall  it  discloses  a shadow compressing

an  answer    as   in  

   where     once  to  feel  gliding  into the  air  a figure on the ground
       is   song        of   color – that  it is the   truest  manuscript
   whenever   I    yield    into

             the inseparable  gesture   of   foolishness  as    entering

a  scene     and  coming

     back   only  to  be  an   uninterrupted   furniture   fixed  in the  finest  day.

There is so much     space demands
and it isn't just     minding it.

Feel        space
like how you feel a hand glide
over your breast and      ****
   your intricacies with surgery-precision.

There isn't much     space when
there are two people in the room.

Heed      space
and soak your body into various calls
like       coming
             into world with fullness,
you     arrive and take
     space,        therefore, you are.
lewd   fat air circumventing past
  open windows announcing more

       s p a c e

on the fryer or inside the common
heliotrope of dawn lies     space
and its absurd eyelids submerge the
  soul into inconsolable mouths
    with the droll of a wilting word,

  there is much ado said over
certain vacuities    and its sole kinship
  is always its emphasis.
  it takes being alone    to sing beautifully
       yet a marginal dance of    swan
meandering    in    space takes    two
     (as mortise
                       and tenon)
  each without,      senselessly moving.

(i, who have died, making this)
   looks at the mirror
     of this
   and sees clearly
       tastes freely
       hears soundly
       opens delicately

    a god in form.

    now the windows of my
     soul are open
    now the doors of my
     heart are unlocked
    now the roads of my
     sinews undone
    now the home of my
     laughter loose in
      the wilding air

(i, who have lived, ending this)

    still sees a god
    in the many haloed hours
    i am truer than any water
    sloshing against the blue
    dream of shores,
  
    now my feet tread softly
     the illimitable earth
    now my hands rest like
     children from a day's frolic
    now my heart is wan as
  a seraph's musing is sepulchered.
     now my mind sprawls endlessly
    amongst cathedrals sleeping
     immensely in the night

(i, becoming a god,
    in believing and denying this)

entering the gradual hour,
this wraith without announcement,
without wreathe, without the
song of bells nor the fracas
of cathedrals.

are you always like this?
have you already deciphered
the enigma imbued on the twists
of our roads? have you already quieted the anthem of emptiness?

when silence befalls you, do you trill on the same bough after your tired flight? with what weight of water do you scrunch the already dampened foliage? outside windows and all openings there is only the old moon's wane, and in this uniform exactitude, do you speak what remains to be said? what are only these words that remain so small in us? why have we not foreseen their deaths?

why must you go in the irretrievable dark and emerge with
only scarce light? why must now your languid bones rattle underneath the ground of this formlessness and speak to me the languages i conceive on my own
and not from your once brazenness?

before your rigor was the sibilant stridence of your once wry smile.
we cannot find it in us anymore,
and somewhere yet again, inside of us, rallies still with its mayday and its warfare,
something only a shadow could
only ***** in the total dark.

Thorns. It was all thorns, this thing of a hand, making its way,
swirling across the small of my back. We are here again. In this
working of the way, trying to make some sense out of our
elicited absurdity; Names. We are both made of them.
Some take a toll in our bodies and mostly turn themselves,
a parting wave, or a hinge that does not work – closes all stalls,
the thumping on the walls, and then some indifferent silence
penetrates the two of us: aberration. We are here again, trapped
inside this console. Our tabulated quotients do not rear the best
of our equations. Now there is distance in such short space that could
hold no less than a matchflame, or a little hummingbird, prying open,
the leaf that turns with us in the ground. The rapture of freedom
does not enclose me. Like a shuddering blade of grass bowing down
to the perpetrating rain, I am within arm’s reach with the stones that
refuse to give out answers. We have burned the bramble. Our buds,
of no use. The wind blows, and that is it. No solace. Taking time
to sojourn deep into something we both know as a standstill,
a petrified tree at the bend of the road, or this  undeniable thing
                  that asks for a different name: love,      something torn.

the pall of a long day
in sheer white burden
lay inexplicably all
deaths unrehearsed

gargantuan immovable and relentless

like the wide wind cutting through
the blink of an eyelid
or a mortal's fragmented word -hands fret for amalgams
of all brokenness cupped to
the size of all that is loved
in hundredweight

casting their heaviness
upon all of us, pinning us down -
mildew to grass as the hours
draw emphases

             (displaced
               stilled, looking
               outside the
                 window.)

my unbridled dreams of you
remain to be all celestially wounded
in this nebula of emotions—
when i close my eyes
   and take the dark like you are for
mine to own, i think only
    of the stars and the moon
  the way a man that hungers
    for a woman thinks about
   what is underneath the vestal chemise,
   yet stumbles upon
     a nameless constellation.

how you fade out in me:

to the last strand of intruder hair
on the cold tiled floor
no lift of gleam extols
yesterday's rumpled ticket
to a cinema
the blast of light on your
beautiful face
your keen eye on the smolder
of the word
up until the final
worn-out, knotted breath
and the tear-stain when it
started to rain and our parasols
were rid of their jejune roles
and i leaving a space
after the air prevaricates
the braid of trees in summer
still hoping
still hoping
for
you

All the roads are closed. Silence metastasizes through the stretch of EDSA. Cold seeps in bone. Sun still flagellates.
        Oscillate through sound space and whitewashed walls. Seismic grunt of jeepney awakens the signs: no avatars, yet. The night was as deep as any lover, a fine blistering moon glares through lit rivers.
   Nothing exists except heads of tacks and maimed populace ambulating across roads sequined with ermine light. The disquiet approximates   the lightness of
buildings in repair. Scaffolds, ubiquitous lovers,
    clouds explode into white, and everything else like pain, pales in comparison with the slow twitch of everything.
     Today there will be no siren nor
   simultaneous joust of cyclists in perpetual motion— just you contending
   against hues of all graffiti:
Cataract of anguish. News of killing.
    Incarnadine trees netted with aureoles burning bright in solstices. Penumbral undulation of
           forethought and afterthought.
   Dislimned – all; you, left
       in polaroid taken in solitary shutter,
    in pursuit of light.

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

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

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

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

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

are we but nothing whilst we live?

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.

carve you, me,
made godly a being from
kink of Earth when all
hands and the leprous
sneer of folding pavement sway
swing a swift embrace,
bringing a face
when you read me blind,
crooning a tune
when you reverberate me deaf,
touching me warm
when you swarm me coldly,
fevering me a saltine sweat
when you chase around
a fleeting image,
preening through the impedance
or was it a dance
when you move me, limbless—
leitmotif lures
    to nets of waiting
when you break the hue
   of an adjusted format
telling no lost piece; oh, you,
i, our strangeness, our fondled ways,
  our being taken away to care
for only rogue night. our
   having chanced upon each other
in between mellifluous slowness
   of paces and our frequent sojourns,
  looking for something
     unfamiliar.

who were you then
in the passing of that moment?
no shutter to capture nor net
to lattice over,
a thing refusing to stay, willed out
of the chancing upon
to engrave something  to the bone,
profound like the deepest of moons—

it courses on, your elusiveness
only feeding my vision
squinting at the edge of the void,
in this sea of many names without
faces clear and familiar,
striding past each other,
    gone away, your smile
leaving a trace in mine.

still as cold chair,
the sound and the unsound.
the clearing
wanes.

i think of nameless streets
and pry their memories.
when a steady hand reaches
for air, it is an effort to rename things
  their shabby selves. their yearnings
  crumble underneath awnings of a new,
  wounded moon.

   the   light   through
the    room, and the   shadows it pours.
  its working, a quiet punctuation
in  mere sentences   our own  silence,
  shattering at flight's first   thought.
 gravitations   may   be  heavy.
the   height   verily   not   its measure.


transitions   piled  like  old records;
  trailing the monsoon on  our backs,
 the persistence of daylight  and   coffee,
    plodding  in  heat, its vertical crawl -
   this metastatic fall.

i dream of old structures. dreaming
is the product of stasis. a consequence
of movement.

    dreams can only be too real. there is word
 that it thrives where it is assailed.
     an act of the body, conversing the limit.

in the stern per-second
  a full bloom
   ushers

neither fire
    nor blood

but two
    sizable lips
   purely almost kisses, dank like
    a rose in the rain, keeping
their moony arc hidden in
   the daze of a color's prime

to make yours naked
    with a smile by a hurled
  word from mine to yours,
   what beauty of it?

there are many others--
  flaxen hair
  dew of earlobes
  riverbed eyes
  sinuous fingers
  tiny feet

  take all of them
   but never
  your smile.

falling into subterranean sleep, I notice such blackness
   bypasses a pinprick of light; dreams are avenues
   to enigmas presenting themselves as someone forgotten.
sleep laves labyrinths with incandescent sequins.
    everybody is strange here, interlocutor commune,
still yet nothing I can understand – better be braille, or
    contrapuntal dance, but still you uttered nothing;
your locutionary silence seeks no contentment.

                                           i have never heard such riot
of laughter toss me out of sleep. perhaps it was our undoing,
   our deepest, secretive entrails unloosen us in such fashion
   worth depicting as obscenely courageous, the width
of arm-span the size of outstretched islands, and stepping into
   that particular wideness, are my small feet traipsing
   swiftly throbbing in the heat of choosing:
to go      or     to stay – cyclic spectacle that eschews
            dailiness that I know I may have forgotten you in faces
of lampposts, the pared skin of onion, the gleaming washlines,
     the white feral on the rooftops, a blank piece of paper,
            a munificent Bulacan sky, or any sky at that since
they are all bleached and they arrive not with wind but
    with lashes: the color of white that flagellates, that blinds,
        that oscillates in space which is then reduced to the
     back of my hand: I know this. I know all of this.

                                                we were not naked, yet something
         buried in the skin reveals itself disarmed, mumbling
             an earnest palaver of questions I have no answers for.
                     what happened? where are we? should we just – die?
                                   an echoing reverb, or simply a song – a metronomic
          carousal of swan-song I have heard before persists
                            and maybe all this time,
                                                       we have been awake, in separate cities.

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.

this thespian ardor.
aokigahara-
jukai, suicide of morning trills.

mata ang may bitbit ng
dagitab ng bawat sandali

at waring mga kamay na aba,
ang karagatan na may kalong na katahimikan;
sinusuri ng ilaw ang lahat,
mga palad na nagdadaop.
ang halakhak sa sukal ng gabi.
ang batong binabalinguyngoy sa lalim
ng bawat pag-tingin

itong mga kamay
tanaw ng mata


ang alaala

suppose words
are water and our bodies, wells—

flat on our bellies, our unsuspecting laughter supersedes their suddenness.

too late to unsay the space they occupy.
they arrive not with wind galloping
through trees.
they continually commit a nuisance
to us here in this decrepit home,
christening us with depthless sleep.

— what transpires beyond these shadowed moments unlearn the hairbreadth syntax of their perilous measures:

even the morning has no promise of May.
i say that in wide-flung hours of April when leaves begin to smoulder a cluster of red in the brindled breast of foliages, and rushed like lions to a slaughter, paring the flesh from the bone, these words unsheathe us more than the Earth shedding its skin — a dull synonym of how we are pressed against walls, our bones outstretched to breaking, ourselves displaced somewhere where the air of rescue does not wholly kiss us.

there is no image fainter than what was painted. no machinery can outlast the weight that is carried —

persisting lovelessly, a ragged meadow.
clambering ceaselessly, the warmest of bodies recoiled in melee.

suppose words
are such black-red thorns becoming petals and stems merely lovelorn, joyful to the eye
and hands are moons the bedfellows uninvited, you hiding behind shadows
    of changeless flowers:

so much the quiet way of this fate
reduced to hair-trigger.

thighed and pried lilies, dew slips frightened to a mist of trouble;
morning sleighs its brilliant face,
  such a luminous beginning to a dislimned end — far less touchingly than
a lullaby, this hot water music scaldingly
  presses on naked and whispers to them
  a new name without forgetfulness.

the weight is immense — anchored down, full of something in excess. there are doors that wish to commence oblivion, windows yearn to squint at the Earth so timidly muted in the body.

suppose your body is a home and the night subtly the wind that blows,
topples the roof-beam —

may your sleep be still and unshaken,
  your unperturbed garden slouches with a bounty of emerging flowers;
may your windows to the soul
  be always ready for birds that secretly
move in virulent strings of melody,

  something the world sings screaming
of life, something the stone of a fool
  so supple in hearing, something
the heavens hold together with the
  purest hand, something we precisely
    dream, such that we

        suppose you angels
  and us, the witnesses.

man emerges from this
darksome ether.
  this: time suspended
  in the ballpark, without fetters.

i have dreamt the truth
  of my vicarious call.
is it not that my measures secure
   these constitutions
      of ineffable fruitions?

it is likened to our heartland's
     acrimonies: dreaming in the
  misty vale of sleep is the word
     and its insistent void,
  riddled by amorous intent
     of barefaced realisms.
  there is nothing here but
  subservience of fantasy's    burlesque fanfare
    on broad vaudeville.

man sinks into the bottom
  of this, rests in the
soft hands of this earth-woven
word - a poem's importunate nativity where all supremacies
     are born ceaselessly!

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

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

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

the line between dreams
  and wakefulness is          thin,

in Ghanam North.
before me, the landscape rogue without
heat lays naked, ash-lorn-true all around;

cold pure, and air distilled
night keen with its eyes strobe around
  revealing drowned pine.

the wall between the living
   and the dead is              frail.

the diaspora trace through names
  what is retained: vestigial, frightful;
   a stone’s throw at the nearby mosque
  crying in prayer, bellowing through the ashen
     quadrangle, a dazed interlocutor.

moving past things unmoving.
the astragalus feels the slow tumult,
   silence as remnant, trilling,
                                     free, carrying a message,
         *Ta’ala.

gOd

must have
   been somewhere else
      for he had forgotten there
  is a planet called Earth


squall of the morning harboring at bay
the howl of the wind rampaging
  through the tired streets,
  i take no sorry hints from the bends
and turns, nor did i hear the gutter weep.
  only the baritone snarl of the swathe
    of brute air through the entire vein
      of the city.

here now is the voluble thwart,
crumbling in the heart of it
   are mere species, the slavered hounds
    of being chained to verily existing here, even the infinitesimal
    were not spared in the glib downpour.
  
windows shut deep into stillness,
the automaton shadow submerged
in delirious light, as winds once again
   with unannounced perditions

   uplifting the nails, tossing the
  alloys like birds swift in the catapult
of breezy flights, lives sojourning,
     some left only a scarring story,
    or just prodigal and nothing else.
carcass stench carves its reek
      in the onlooker, the rat **** foams
altogether with the brine, a cesspool
    of unheard screams dwarfed by
      the circular roar of the grey behemoth
  showing only its unblinking eye

running, searching for a place
    to go less terrifying
         than this, a bearable departure,
   or a hopeless sling at rescue,
luckless imperative,
       today's vibrant children,
ashen tomorrow,
      gone.

In crepuscular tapestry
   telling of mauve night

and the dull color of
  stones intimate

with waves from an
open  sea of laughter

the sound of you
in the hollow of me

      keeping watch over hills,
my body hunting your blue echo.

words   what   more  than  silence,    criminal
    shaded    meanings   plump like   the  mien  of   a night-strewn    beast.

words   what    more   than   sounding for   it
  the   night   hemming   into,   less  than   a fugitive   by definition

   words   do   I   deny   the   static  of   soul    when   quiet then
          places      the    cholera   in    our  abdomens ?

to   say   when   the   nature  of   the tangent   is   a   voyage
     of   the   story   you’re  telling,    masked   behind  a non-sequitur


  that     does   not   intersect   elsewhere   issued   by
     a   lack.     where    else   are   we   only   slightly   connected

                       when    we    move     to   break   a   point,   or  to   distract

a   face     once   again   foreign, your   name   emerging   as   whimper.
       coming    out   denied.

   words   what   more   than    revenge,    your   sound   less   than an alternative
            bandwidth    confusing      its     meaning

coming     out    undisguised.

because our dreams of leaf-canopies and lignin
arrive at a certain variety of green, we will zither
anew with song

here in Bulacan; all the leaves are capsized
brandishing inflorescences as naked as
  the scent of petrichor girdled
on the cobblestones: they are forsaken not by
trees but by seasons only, a twofold deliberation
of caprice: there is only two of what is spoken.
   such is the warmth and coldness,
missing their obvious targets, hesitant and abstruse,
  scattered and at long last, never collected

deftly camouflaged in the familiar drapery,
“Tantusan mo!” as they cry for marks to remember,
we touch the cicatrix to measure with our jagged hands
how much we have forgotten.

what we cease to remember descends deep, as wash-hand basins
concur such depth,
into the well of ourselves, later to discover such
perilous foundling in the squall of either morning or evening,
   still devoid of sense: still arguing whether there is much
to reconcile with what has been found and what has been pictured
   now, altered by such loss: this is danger, and so is nothing,

swollen and tender, the waters of the estero reek of such
remembering – we cannot ignore its perfume, oddly taking the shape
of the next dagger slowly making its way towards the back
of the skull to pare with river-run precision, what we all
try to hold back inside; so as if to say,
             “Tantusan mo!” to remember
where     we last    took  off,  like a heron,
   or a  bird, wary of distances.

Plaridel Moon
upon us shows
only a quarter of its
churlish grin

this circular deathlessness.

the moon's harp
evokes sound
as vermilion stars
and crepuscules
shatter in the distance.
i sit still about
to lose form
as waxes melt
dislimning even
deeper,
the night
and with its hoarse voice
through the window,
it sinks
deeper
deeper
deeper.

****
sharpens
clears
the smoke
of obvious
hesitations
after
the
spar
of senses triumph
over reasons
and now here
lies
everything
(real
  and earthen,
ripe for
  taking):
feelings have
so many names
and we try
to adjust
it into singular
etymology - something that
is easy for us to make
  and break
like

****.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this    day    will     evolve    tomorrow
  and    we   can   say   amid   transition

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

are   we   but    unsure.

For days, waited on to complete a task that was a call from surrender. Waited for it to bloom and when
ready,           beheaded.

1 To be cut from and origamied into
2 Severed then placed on a tomb
3 Until left for days unanswered
4 Lasted the strict climate held in the air
5 Unafraid between the firmament and arid ground
6 Grew roots into what was held, what was spoken, what was asked from
7 Answered by the body, the severance, the fruition

When no sounded rescue,      perished,  held   like a statue.

I.

On the surface easily gliding,
  are my hands. I keep on the table
  an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
  becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
  a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
  ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
   whose face I can almost touch.
  When let go of closure, air thins and I move
  secretly with fluency. This is how objects
  escape my grip.

II.

  In front of the eatery, a transit.
  I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
  a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
  The face next to me, disquieting the music
   of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
   like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
   another throng of absence. As a substitute
   for beings shackled to duty,
   the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
   borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
   the wind through opened windows.

III.

    Define space as a venue for collision.
    Say when a red-haired woman straddling
    a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
    She ascribes her presence to my footing
    and from where she left off, I take form
    of her expired movement.
                     Found strangeness is that space
    is what happens when remembered. But hold no
    bearing and rear contrivance,
     trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
     the in-betweenness and then transmutes
     an occurence,
             say the volatile shape of a hand when
    clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
    feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
    reticence of a troubling question.

IV.

            A man carries a take away and is now
     amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
     housing a familiar language. Home.
    
      But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
    trying to transact a being angled towards home.
    They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches  the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
             Air once stale, is now succulent with the
      resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
      and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
      home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
         of times the vehicle trundles within
     the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
        with rest. He is home,
     unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
          freed from a vitrine.

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 is like a juxtaposition to
idle trains of fading or
a transcendental manuscript.
death of a man foretold
in every syllable.
i could be gutted out of
and displaced into the dearth,
in doing the dailiness of this life.

in the eventide, when these
walls lurch in, sizing me down
in sleep's hyperbole - a mere chasm
or say, nothing but a gap in
continuity, there is something
that is within striking distance
when you first wrote:

"Truth naked as a shaved dog."

it is your mind's paradigm
that has passed a torch to light
my way through the labyrinth.
it is like your deaths take my deaths.
it is when you pursue the trellises
of all-telling lies that i take
to learning, the belligerence
of wars and the tearing of the heaven in midnight's augury.

it is like you are haplessly
trying to teach me something
without voice.
without life's syllabus.
the only common prognosis
is that i have a sediment of
your soul through litanies
and you do not know me nor
am i a captive in your peripheries.

the wind takes your words
with it -- limping like
wounded creatures or perturbed
unions of cicada, flying away
are also these words
searching for asylums.

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

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

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

Nothing like this assault.

In here you were gradually
introduced. The keen sense
for identity realized,

the distance that was a sullen
word for madness, a tender
perimeter established.

The calm wind as not-so-distant.
You in your plain clothes this afternoon,
lost in a commute of phases.

This weather schemes to be
your leitmotif.  This is of no
identical ownership but breakage.

In here you were met with constant
delimitation, yet always you are
as you always were, perhaps,

quite unsure of the next face
dislimned past the delicatessen.
The barkeep yesterday wiped the glass

clean as I watched from the edge
of poor furnitures. You, sudden,

of no warning, no clear word
for objects, has objections for marvels
made clear still opaque in the eye of you.

That when you were brought
into the world, I had you coming as
soft blow in the wilderness

hardly tractable, all by yourself
as I witnessed everything, past dead
underfoot, being all necessary

to yourself,  as you always were
in various settings and adjustments.
You were sure of the unsure and I

am in the middle of things
feeling the winding of it all, the breaking,
and the passing.

Nothing like this assault.

Picture it when in a flash of a description, brought you the news
  it said was your derelict.

when    in becoming      we   ultimately   fail
   our   being   championed   by   our   unbecoming

seeking   the   real   scathed   by a sizeable   truth
    like a    persimmon    in  your   tender   hand.

                                   This is the default

sketched    over  a sagging   paper, plugged within the air
   the   motes  depart   and  is  as easy  as it is  explained:  an elusive

thing   that may never   be   captured.   Something   the   arriving
    betrays   then assuages     with   a   word   treated benignly:
                         a    transit.

let   gray  define  the  day:       let   the   file    describe   the   motive:
           let    presence    soil     where    we   stood   our   place
            like    a   monument:         let   it   seek   a   real  object
                or  a   found   language

a    wafting   presence     is    lost   somewhere    gliding   over   unnamed   territories
   commencing       a   displacement   said    was    our    undisputable     location

                     roads   becoming   roads     vehicles   becoming   salvage
                  birds   becoming   orchestra      shambles   becoming   complete
                                   thus      dearth    becoming      us   before     our  denied   image
        from    a    source   that      was     our    implacable    place   like  a   deadspot    discovered

the world (with its stupendous body)
      timidly pirouettes,
 all by all and little by little
     deep by deep everyone in the Earth
  reveals the reaping of the sow
     and the girls and boys loutishly sing
 as daisies tremble within the verdigris;

    i know Spring like the palm
 of my hand, the virulent string of birds
     that strangles the daylight.
 this motion-filled plenitude where forgetfulness turned like a parting wave
   back to the sea where we all find ourselves
 afloat, unburied, vainly pressed in the sand
    lifting fish close to laughter; with such keen disappearances the mothering moon swarms our fate   and tossing dreamers
      out of diminutive sleep at her  festive  sight   close to  coruscating here:

    the smallest of voices quite like the  tiny bursting truths  from the  fountain of our lives
           unsaying why    we continually  breathe and bayonet  through the  air like leafless boughs   quivering within  the arms of stillness: life's but a  peculiar  form of  dance
      and  death i think is no  larger  than ourselves.

be blunter not, be no folly still:
this is our heartland's voice.

we are not this land's tenant,
nor are we the shadows that inhabit
  light — this is out highest meed,
we go on with nobler steads.

  languorous scraps of warfare
  and a ****** of metal heed the
  clarion call of our oneness yet when
   it rains all shall rend in rust
    as how our nation
    furiously drowns yet emerges
     victorious past the renegade of hours!

  in it and from it
shall rise the true meaning
    of our blood.
our large voices mellow down
   in our guts outdoing our smallness - there is a river of
   phantasmagoria yet its
   rustle is same in its breadth in
     our deep land. o, yelp never a lie!
  
consider truthfully brutal
   affording solace:
  it is our form reshaping our body.
  it is our wills carving our flesh.
  it is the dreams that are ensanguined
     in us that forge the arms of
      our fatherland: language!

I.* there is no thicker undergrowth than feeling. first to go is reason, everything
    else levitates into something graver than say, one foot deep  in the grave
     and the other somewhere off-tangent like an offbeat adagio zigzagging
      into slammed slalom.

II. the crush of oregano against mortar, and the clasping of a hand. carbon monoxide
      fades into air as youth takes on momentousness. take for instance this once soft
    hand like a breath of cotton in a precipitate noon: once whirling in claustrophobic
      space, this slight inch of feelingfulness is dazed into the span of *Maya windhovering
       somewhere unseen like paramours *******.

III. from the window you can feel the bluster of falsetto disintegrate at its slouched peak,
       and from where you hear it, a dance thwarts itself like a cigarette ember
       convulsing mid-air – that slow, repugnant twitch: that is you, when you first
        broke your silence in thick shrouds of disgust over strobe-lighted simian jaw.

IV. what else is there but to take this sour ocean in front of me and decode something
       the blue always means mellow but the froth of white something the tragic caprice
        of tropic: some nights, they remind me of bodies careening repeatedly; some days
                    they just are, like you, just are, like a riot and only sound, or sleep and only
          reticence, something short of wonder and terse with reply.

V. there is a cluster of harmonies flowering in my mind when the sensurround of din
        starts conflagrations in the ornate dark of ear. my limbs snake in the garden
        of plank, my shin bitten in sharp reiterations – my mind crossing the equinox
         looking for shade, or possible, a parasol underneath the crimson of rain.
           say this is the sky, this dense space when I motion both hands into a length
       not an inch could ever devour. suddenly a boy made out of a man, flustered
        in jangled arpeggios and unapologetic thought like a letter of debt opened,
         paying no heed the mind and only what the body dictates: a smash on the
    escritoire or vigorously scratching scalp, reopening scabs and watching
                old blood ooze dry like a lightweight webbed impression
  of       a    dreamy legato.

VI. the night deepens with the warmth of its black upholstery – we do not know
      when to stop and bid for home. last to go is will of force and first to arrive
     in the bleakness like a recalcitrant thought often straying outside with the
       strut of a yuppie, fervor of old haunt. i conjure an image over the cold chair,
    its steel framework thighs untouched, its four decrepit legs the foundation
       of something that refuses to admit its weakness. the very base of what would
   catch the anchorage of my gravity, the very heart of all, and the flattened back
      with a vandal that says “Soleil was here.” the liver shattering in the trance
                    of everything.

VII. night is stupor. i am the lilt of words from a rambunctious machine.         there seems to be an afterthought that separates
                       a concept of vastness and the tactility of narrow ether.
        a word is uttered in extremis - something heaven eschews
                with its bright, arrogant face.

-- 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.

it happened this morning
the air ripe with contention.

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

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

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

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

June is dead-still
trees converse with other
language mocking the trilling
of birds. North of here
there is a visitation. Virgins
are being transferred
all Monday housed in foreign
homes. Oregano
perennial, ingrained on
roof beam the rise and fall of,
a languid mirage outside
much less than an inveterate superstition.
Past the bridge where I once laughed
as a child when my father
surged past ploughed fields.
this almost overtakeless summer
minting its blazing core
and now rivers cut this town.
The derelict nectar of youth,
how lovely it was the first time
to pierce through age, an arcade
  rising from the carrion that was
our birthright under the throbbing heat.
Who touched what
to turn room into bedlam – slowly, these
evincing hours paint me the
grandiloquent picture of all
when the moon a foolish assumption
under a rain-soaked grassland
moist enough for crickets, venue for
frog hidden somewhere, outlined by a cadenza,
us, humming along in our
cast-off night clothes, meagerly this
climate tumescent in this town.

i remember
(a pluchritudinal memory)
when almost so effortlessly
our lives lied to us most indefinitely
in the hours that return with
lashes and chains—

as in clothes heavy soldered
to washlines, the waft in the air is as familiar as the rain cooling
the blades of grass you speak of,
something the dark only conjures
waiting at the brink of my unclosed retina.
i know all of these well-placed memories
like furniture you have arranged
under the hollow hands of the home.
yet barely even so, a fond memory of—
the daedalus outside or the cut
gladiolus, plucked out of the moseying hour's vicious wingtip.

we do not always die like this.
when all our dying whispers are thrusted
underneath mouths of stone,
when all of our wishes hold a flame
paler than a vague rekindling of the dead.

sometimes promised something an ellipsis would half-ponder and postpone
in word's mid-birth.

the raging moon had waned.
all the windows shunned — hermetic,
air outside potent, leaving all books
half-read yet fully opened.
the children hide behind thin shades
of roses,
i can hear the steely grit of the flesh
pared from the bone as my mother
guillotines with kitchenware

we do not always die instantaneously.
most of our ways to go leave
demarcations on soul — something so easily displaced, doubled array of its arrival into half-wakefulness.

something only a last prayer thumbed
down to the last bead
and we cannot cry anymore.

night's flumine seeks to rebuild the wound undone delicately
leaving my breath and betraying my body.

we somehow always die like this.

even the dullest of knives
can **** —

a smile has fallen deep into
the silence.

wincing on and off
like terrible vertigo.

it is you lashing across
dispersing images

seeping like ruthless mileage
underneath the bone.

you come in the room
full of these hours splintered

an outpour with a foreboding,
like spindrift you wet my lips

sealed shut and silence
is all the language i understand.

what good is there that this hungry
cavalcade gapes its mouth

and metastasizes like an opulent
laugh as maniacal as drum-taps?

your are river with feet or pond
sprawling mad, enigmatical.

is this the clearing motes depart,
unhinging the crepuscular

and fade out, as a cat shrieks tumbling writhing fornication of metal and rust?

even sleep cannot manage such realness,
and the doubleness of its comatose

or say, a war in spite of its radical
artillery. between two cities lost,

its indefatigable exertion pullulates
to a hand, laying garlands

over the same blue lament of sky
and the unawakened orioles.