that moves from its mooring: it was from interstice
          to intersection somewhere in Poblacion.
          I was once there, looking for loose change beside
          the market. Quickly I began as though an impression
          was made past the kiosks dense with the matrimony
          of the tabloids and print: its dearth on the streets
          of Plaridel. Mud caked at the grey backs of gutters,
          a spectacle
                                              of leaves on the ground like deft
          hands place them there for empires.

         the first that I touched: wind,
         last: your face, wind was it only that you and I were
                          never off-tangent, always, minus the blindfold,
             seeking endlessly as though things refuse to be found,
              pulsing in the heat of hiding grace.

      
          and goes back to its source: something too splayed for science,
          only too easy with a child’s fancy – chauffeurs playing checkers,
          crossing each other out within conjunctions – much you or I,
          our weights syndetic and our weightlessness, imagined – as if phrasings
          loose like waters from the spigot left open: mother arrives, haranguing.
                       like how it was simple for the wind to remind us fit to this
                 meet constantly receiving your incidence, and my place stilled
                to familiar topographies.

          a window is left open, with its hands in the terminal of silence
                holding light like obdurate stone; the surrender registers
                with grievous art, you curved like a bent question mark,
           or a swollen oblation borrowing its sheen from the ****
                    of bobbing beacons – the candid Manilascape you kept on
                           fevering for              like an open sentence

               only to find its birth.

Is this emptiness
or cosmic space

a love for dark or consummate
absence?

You lay there
and I, here
in the same
tangential uniformity.

we are but together
splintered, then separate,
making no difference.

you, in your place
and I, in mine

like some unattended baggage
dragged mechanically
by a tireless conveyor,

a hound in pursuit
of its own tail in intense circles,

left to my own silence brought
to the brink of all the noise.

*

The morning with its peripatetic
crush of garlic and spry birds.

In an unassuming distance
strip to void, teased to rogue,
the light does not arrive with
its usual taciturn warmth;

your mother gives you a pear
to pare and ******,

my mother, the same in giving,
yet another thing worth grazing

say, the old skeleton of an empty
wine bottle,

a cold stride past womb-tender
bungalows and sleep-shaped mailboxes.
the feel of its bone , gutted out of flesh.

a compelling strike of silence
permeates more silence – like a prayer thumbed
down to its last throng.

there will be no dialogue.
this is the same quietude
in miles that assume our places.

maybe once you knew this domicile
like the curve of your bow-leg,
or the glint of your inner thigh.

the word “love” falls flat on the surface,
taking its station amongst the masses,
flying with the birds soon dead in their tracks.
the word “love” slits,
cuts open, unloosening a wound,

your mother in the kitchen paring
the flesh from the bone,

and you hear it,

as we look out of separate windows,
the hush churning sound,
spreading on all fours once in this room.

the morning lays out its hairbreadth
wire of memory

in some place unknown to us,
to size the measure our own,
still yet not ours, you in your home,

and I, somewhere outside the world
fathoming shadows their own things not ours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this flourishing silence feels more of
a trite hack-job than it is a writing stint.
     my fingers (frenzied, brazen) continue to tap
and my mind starts to spill like a spigot
   left open. I have taken to smoking and laughing
away

       in an obscured day for myself in the parking lot
and sometimes I can do without company; only the snarl
of the well-oiled tractor in front of me.

    the days are full of yellow and the Sun is a dog
on a leash. the roses smell of brine and their slender
stems bones of the young.

    I can see cheeks flushed with red and skirts
neatly trimmed just above knobby knees
   and I know somewhere in that tender flesh,
a man sifts without knowing what it feels to eat
    bone before flesh, flesh after bone. my silently augured
procurement of today’s induced comatose is but
    a Freudian slip – the world with its burly physique
is a chauvinistic man
           drinking whisky in the red light district of hazy Makati.

                 each slapdash word in penitent reprisal
is the moment’s clearest reprieve. I am glad that this room
is darker than the eyes of the love I have lost
     staring back with a mound of the abysmal or the yearnings
      of a chagrined mother startled back to her home;
  it must be dreamy, the dogs outside pant in heat
        and the obnoxious *** of vehicles outside bears the cadence
  of two people   starting to fall in love:  all chaotic and unmoving,
             fastened to the Earth, aware of the passing minutes,
                                         wishing to be somewhere else but there.

a memory is brutal.
a chronic paring,
with knife-precision.

        •

a memory is fatal
only when it rains—
all the rooms are gray.

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

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

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

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

has the land covered with banner;
I am not dead yet. Who, despite his exhaustion,

caught up with chance, was able to do so,
  an amend to frame a surrender.

Reimagining a spider gut whatever was available,
in the cornered stucco: obliteration was there, sexed

a hole. Clings to a ruined childhood taken
  as deification – finalizing a document.

Search the database: he is still alive. Put together
all the ruthless and the stalking and piece out

a material impossible to be cunning.

the evening collapsing on his shoulder, shrugged
an hour of betrayal. An hour, made up little seconds,

fathered by an assembly of minutes – an hour difficult
  to wake up from, with a dream of an infinite future

nothing else was known from but if and an end
unerringly spared by this night

reachable out of scarcity that was the limpid past,
cuts through, is like a knife, dividing disaster

to share within habit – a harbinger, an announcement.

treading masterfully this  autumn-long  road  where
    at the  end of  first light so begins  your fragile  darkness.


i know  not where you  wait for  me as  birds in  all geographies
      land without further   recall; as though   by  saying  that the  Summer
  has   dealt   its   cards   and the serrated  grass   folds  when it thinks
   the  rain   to be everywhere   descending,  falling  as lithely   as a lover
     whose cockeyed    miracle  first has meted out   a singular  trapping  fate
         of hands that interlock    to    no   retreat.

i   know  not  the silence of  the Earth  when all is caliginously
    intact    without knowing. but  then should you  return, your  eyes
will   light all  the   lamps awaiting   your   shuddering step  and fruition
       us  both the  ineffable   rendering  me  forever  the life  of roses.

( i  do not  know which  gravitates me back  to   where we
      first   saw each other; only  something   in me  does not   think
   but is constantly   supremed   by   feelingfulness   when it   is not
    the wind   but your   breath not   in the garden   of   joys but  in the exuberance
     of    all that    is made  immense in me by  your    eyes,
         when    it is     not the   taut   clamp    of   the   sea    at   bay
but    the   island of your   hands   clutching   the penumbra  of my heart,
   shattering     the shadow   and letting   loose   a  sprightly   dove
        here     and   a  hummingbird    there)

timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.

one idle hand slides through the balustrade
in a hurry

my life quickening
shattering beneath the earthen ground of

this tower in this stucco-perfect day
in this wondrous moon suffused

by my dissent. it is all anticipation
and warning, all suspicion, this one

that has no name. say when space happens
a body in a body ****** in the aqueous hand,
and dreams of fish,

say this space once marred now
occupied by us, or you, say you are not to be
mistaken for my being and simply
for absence to happen

you must sway, dartle into this thick
array of contests and then

in a sharp stab of air, bleeding,
quicker than the drying of streets in April,
space will happen.

describe this moment by not only using one
   word – one word used is often times crippling, scarring at that,
when all else revels in the multiplicity; even one strange moment
can be duplicated. the allure different, but still enthralling.
  except you are, when one word was hurled. I have all of this
in varying amplitudes. you will take them all like a gaping hole
   in the mouth of the darkest night and overdose in light, you slung
at such reachable height yet gloating in air like you are your own travesty
       deciphered. face as taunt. hands as feat. limbs
their steady bridges.    the guise of your face, a counterbalance. supple voice,
a trembling scenario of infinitude. i hear this is a way to
       avoid hysteria, to identify

all things as nameless, shapeless if possible. only viciously imagined
    form, contoured into the vacancy denied. this is a way to mitigate
                        demands. to keep a thing from identifying itself
so when  it   comes that   these things start unmooring themselves,
                    they will not administer their potencies. so that when they come back,
  you will keep mum like white of camphor, or the black of a hilt,
        the blue of the sky – something that cannot be perforated.
    so that when they come back, the return will never carry
            their attars, that pivotal minute will never fluctuate into an hour
     of  density, so that their namelessness
                         will be easily dismissed as the expected howl of a dog
   in the middle of the already fractured night, or a cat’s enigmatic drone
                       in its concentration. So that this thing

will remain  to have no name and that when
                        it encounters itself in the presence of itself,
     the absence will be clear and the finding,
                                  a release.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                 with identities assured to match the thirst?

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

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

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

wherever you go,
i go — wind tracing the child,
warm, outlined laughter;

the twilight-telling
bird of mid-flutter's lightness
erasing the night

and here is now, you
trilling amongst the ether,
moon shimmering bright.

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

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

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

try to antagonize the not-so-distant
and remember the tonal bent of a father's
rampant voice causing a cataclysm.

in front of the hospital, the moon a blue nun,
parked are the scraps elsewhere but home
under permeable dark. i look into the eyes

of whose visions i own - whose perspectives
borrowed a causation, as in when he clenched
his fist i thought of cigarette stains on my

button-down shirt as we both stumble to
the ground that was our dearth grave. i remember
you in his anger as countenance collective

and my own rebellion. his limping strides to the
automobile approximate the sizable crenelation
of your fingers. now i am brought back to Pasay

where your light is bendable mercy.
this is the face of silence, incited by a meeting
alone, a variegated road unmapped, unnamed.

inadequacy contends what intent commends.
this night demands emesis: the moon no longer
flumine, but xanthous as autumn, or a bell in

leaden cathedrals. the longest journey back
to origin is the first step taken towards a foreign
home punctured by diffident apology.

we were all in waiting for unction, congregated
in the plenary room i have made white with
blunder. our faces pale as backs of moths,

our elegies able to forecast the future,
the climate of the home burdened by tropic,
our keen eye for movement terminal with disgust,

a hand scarred by the Earth we rested upon,
asking heavens, "Why?" Response: rain dividing
cities. i think of then, this film where a man

continuously passes arrondisments, where his
days are measured by softened landmarks pulsing
with blurred faces. it was his case of aberrations.

when it was over, perturbation of vast space
automatic. a relief over the clinch. beatings
sustained over dinner the next evening.

in any other bed, the infantile stance of sleep
a wry mark of confusion. i notice the clock's
stoppage, its arms angular as if death's geometry.

otherwise it was unfeeling of feeling. my mother
forgot the laundry today, now fetid, pressed against
wall torrid upon the afternoon,

left outside to dry together with mutiny of trees.
outside when yourself happens, a conjured image
of bluntness. immutable, fixated, reminiscent

of small statue bought from a surplus in Malolos,
tamed wildeness is sound of a slurred machine
sent to repose as in, gnashing phonemes the

guttural, and the distinguished identity of the
next word draws a line connecting a caricature of
your face, terminally instilled

preserving the imprint including you.

stretching to length of gallows
under faint light of moon.
the dead buries the living.

a thing is not a thing in itself
as it denotes nothing.
like a peripatetic iamb inscribed

persisting in drivel. flowers her face
this evening. pillars her arms,
  i do not have a wife.

i do not have a love undressed
as i examine a pool of shadow
in the plenary recess of silence.

the dead buries the living
within the blue-headed noon;
fascist birds bellow over haciendas,

tuba from the dustwell, from the orchard
decorated with blood. it rings for me
a guttural voice: hustling down

the avenue of the dead. better the alternative,
the guillotine, the small beginning of rage
through the thickness of air.

a marauder sleuths as the living keep
on keeping on, as the dead resign
 a hindrance under dissonant skies.

she is not with me as all the others are.
they have passed on expired limitations;
a flash of lighting at the back

of startled hills. rivers shake cool waters
 down my sleeve and i sleep -- soon fields
will be nasal with dew and the children

will have their place in heaven. the damp
landscape will adhere to stucco, fashioned
to cerements on corpses reeking, rising

to altitudes where some birds
in spring soar, left thriving in smog
as i bid you good night, farewell.

i bathe myself with
the music that i alone, hear.

i heed the flinch
of my heart's centrifuge -
gyrates purely without
a hand holding it,
in a lonesome,
contrapuntal waltz.

i lie naked yet untouched,
this aloneness.

even my words prosper in
the tumescence of speechlessness.

hurrying back to
dimming light
is my body ready to feed
the wick of this dark.
traipsing the
bareness of this pantheon
is my soul,
and no one else's.
solemnity scales the stars
and transforms them
into margins to fence my own universe:

  i am the only celestial here,
   spinning in a thousand days
     of restlessness.

Today you were

anguished, with what ordered sentence to fray
  into organization. Shimmering splendid thigh

of noon numbered, overtakeless I peering
   through a gray eye of storm. Ambulatory motors

whir double ballasting ground / AC Cortez was nothing like any other held captive loosely frolicking

the summer gone through a bat of an eye
   reimagined, engraved into / what for is this

inheritance but a dangling stucco of a home. Else
   the newfangled man will have skin ripe to borrow

denying  the  statement. I could no longer raise
   tomorrow and fall for, a form broken in

by a crossing of the river I smell turpentine
    bearing the casualty of paint because color when

seen as absence of something, a thing worth
    mooring to where we were and kept

for the next docile minute, mourning what but
    a closed preserve drowned by a hand

deep between what was once just once and
    a continuing strangeness, one's own rearview

but insatiable affront. Today you were
    spoken of, not to, once again this weather

is here heavy with debris, less than ash fit for
    return curious as perfume clinging to

soiled collar learning every breath a crevice the
   body seeks to fullness feeding on some sense

of abandon -- today's news gasp for clearing
    which you weighed in today as you were

        again and again and again just as sound is
   but a remainder of a tremendous leftover.

to hold a photograph in my hand
  and believe what is presented,
  take is at it already is – why not?

if I close my mind’s shuttering eye,
will you be as candid as before?
unrestricted, unsorted from the hullaballoo,

you, freer than what is imagined, closing
in like a bullet from yesterday shot out
of the sky’s contrived clearing –

to hold a photograph in my hand
and tug closer by the mouth of the fringe
as if to pour water on a broken glass,

slithering now, a shadow of moon
at the very dull end of my cup;
you are closer than any rehearsed moment

ready to catch the inner canthus of the eye:
this relentless picture-passing, tense and
fervent, avid like bankiva to air,

water to chrysanthemum: behind thick shrub
of crepuscular, an arboreal locomotion
shatters loose, your frantic figure.

to hold a photograph in my hand
and size it down to the dimensions
of this home – there is potential in this

comparison: flaring out like smoke from
where it infinitely burns, I seek an ache
and hence place a finger to shush,

to hold this photograph in my hand
and confabulate a soft blow to the gut
and feel it realer than any dagger or berretta

held at one’s life-edge: this delusory intimation,
a slipshod work of feeling. to feel it rejoin
me somewhere I ought to be back again.

these recurring fires,
   these moments blank
with stark, shrilling air.
the already memorized movement
   of the clocks
  and what these dictate us to be.
over life's ferocious waters
   and the undertow of tranquil,
  what is in it for me, that the world continually hurls forever
  a hand that is not mine?
a kiss that is someone else's?
  a glance that is not for
    mine unquenchable thirst?
these cities tender with foolishness
these sick, marauded streets
with faithless crowds
   waving empty bottles at the sky
  like a sordid army marching
    through the marshes of this
  empty life!

what is in it for me that the world
   continues to plod with inquiries
   but does not flourish with
     answers?
that when time speeds right on
   by, the youth is culled out
    of the gardens waiting forever
   for wisdom to fall like rain
     over these scrunched flowers!
  what is in it for me that
   there are forever the shadows,
   and the gamblers, and the
     brutal game of life that we only know in death, in hate, in love? these words start to seek
their fathering answers and now we are embroiled in a fortuitous enigma that in the imperious nebula of life, when these tender loves
and lives start to wax in the same orbit finding paths, we will continue to be stars clinging onto each one to form a single light that could beat the darkness.

words fail me as rivers do this town,
the sound of everything breaking   with a sudden onset: bones crushed
   like twigs, the churchyard a mirror of this hollow

   the   resounding of   a bell a category of  prayer
filling a mouth   with    filament – the   inglorious  morning
tired    of   its     felicitation:  chorus   vacating  the  body

paying   homage   to  a  nearby grave:   sound  the  body   outlast   everything

      take        sweat    for   wine   turn    this   variable  into  a    satellite
    let     it    exult     without    a   name


and   I,   for  once,    without a  poem   even – let me,    this   death

     almost   a   blooming   someone    to   remember.

synagogue bells jar and outside is the
  color of green, mist enshrouds moss
  macadamized in young wall;

beating back to lips, a paler hue of scorched red,
     a moment twists, hurries back to
the shell of a modest hour,

  rearing in its tender arms, tantric ***
of rain and tendril. tenuous wind swiftly
purloins sound
      submerging the world in picker-patter,

the moon fronts and the sun
     behind — this is my world and within
its breast, the riverrun stride in between
   stone packs its smell of mud

clotheslines full with heavy fabric
weighed down to intent and inertia,
  dragged down to sleep and dream
as the hourly siren tolls somewhere that
    does not have a beacon, a name
  even, blaming only the shadow frittering
  back to its console, pinning us
    down to the calm weather we sing
about in the afternoon —  reaping
   in the twilight,
        a cold-mouthed Hefeweizen!

We fumbled within ourselves as how I came into myself purely coincidence
     a repetition of a fleeting truth, or an elusive thing in its flight,

   let music remain in echo
                                         let  real be a reprise of tenderness
    let this patent be owning up to, a conscious enterprise its own   frailty
           do so let this body
            sing:

I am cold-blooded, I am metal, I am completely aware of presence,
     this elliptical voice keeps hunting rendering it false, breakable – this machine

    taking place over  navigable portions   of  myself when I trickle  down,  awaiting
       a prophecy:   we   only have what is now,  aspiring  for  the possible
            a glimpse   of   a thing   hiding, approaching  an  anxious   story

taken  as  hand   me  this  structure,   haul my body  out of,   break into,
       end  it  beautifully.

with what sense does
this sea of read
pirouette on?

the soot leaving black
blotches on the ****** sheets,
lampposts do not complain
of sudden twitches
as cacophonously, a line
of machines with their ravenous
machinisms create a seam of
crimson to a slender
rose's architecture.

i leave my engine on
so as to hand this road
my readiness,
Ely Buendia on the tattered radio
leaks outside the ajar windows,
chasing the dream of rearing
movements
as my flesh remains dreamless,
stationary.

there is a sequined gathering here.
erratic simulations of
naked eyes pierce the musk
of the austere air's gravity
of existence.

all of us
occupying space
and our attendance is our
sigh of dismay as our homes
decompose in waiting,
as our beds remind us
of our body's aging clamor,
as our ineluctable senescence
opens the dungeons of our frailties
with its trembling, wrinkled hands.

we are our waiting's consummation
as we are left here,
wary of our precise proprioception,
left in
the tongue-tied dark.

To reach for the longest day was to drive next to
dithering the light of: is telling of a certain person
whose features memorized for performance in this
weather, this the climate again for some reason as if

would spin away – you for example, whom to me
meant half a tongue tied to some distinct secret
I cannot word it so for your own sake – in most days

I curse your fate done to me in another’s; to be touched
not by your reluctance to speak, but you in your plaintive
that was my domain you took from me – hesitant to tangle

or untangle the lapped-up shore that was our natal home
you take photographs of serious with its violent gasp, the
blue its own agenda – built from the lines of this hurried
translation: shape one's work now I have no use for you.

to reach for the longest day was to give rise to reason
a want that must be tried, must be let loose, sent back
to you that is its origin followed each day until you lost

your will to shape and start the end that could not be
that was nothing of your kind to be brought to acceptance:
as if fists clench to outsilence you whose face turned to clay
the next minute I held nothing more and wanted nothing out of,

almost prompted by saying who it was
I have no use for but I, freshly turned into you –

sly as intruder air
        piercing the helm of noon

when i remember you
        worlds come out of my beat

when i forget you
      these worlds puncture themselves in a slow unison of dying, reverting back to its
   state of unearthing

the dark holds itself back
   to wash me with light
    squinting through ajar windows.
  and now this,
     thrill-seeking hapless thralls
    of distant embrace
   and now this,
      the span of a wing's flight
    fans itself through elevation
   until nothing is within reach
  but trails of an elusive visage.

It seemed so much as no new and uncommon thing
   that what passes on as only a disappearance,
   is but a temporary postponement of something
   long withheld in feelingfulness, in treason of one’s
  desire or simply, a hand which is there, or kept in a pocket
   scouring for loose change, a hand which, somewhere,
    is known in accurate proprioception: refusing to be held;

  I swim against the current not
     for the water behind your river
     that dreams of fish

   I wake not underneath the bowl
      of moon slated by sensorial howl,
     whose wounds are white like
      a face once held in between palms

  and sleep almost endlessly, together
    with everything that twitches, slewing
  to avoid collision, alliterates to blur meaning,
     sways fervently to addle meeting

until we let loose a sigh, and unfasten ourselves,
   dropping pace and both our eyes meet.

1
There are more penetrating people if not the death of, as in living in this very livid moment of the unsure which is a surety.
Falsify me. Growing heavy with the absurd. To face you, me -- more mirror the blank end of a chamber, or if that you must **** me, do it at the plaza in front of my mother. That if you must lament me over the lapped up moment of some false life the invented and wrong, do it. Do it. ****** me the unassailable truth that is, I am capable to splinter this moment and that it still lives like a sprawled body spilled from the mouth in the bathroom -- it still lives: you have to be quick.

2
Once have you been startled by the form of absence as a letter slid underneath the soft and warm pocket of your mouth like it was the first time to have a naked body pointed at you, all with it trying to predict you in a sterile room, and is more shattering than an aggravated twilight.

   Who, at first thought, was there behind the trigger, and was he/she drunk with any other pretense apart from the face that he/she hates that common meeting within the day’s fine-tuned crosshair?

3
If you listen to it carefully, the music is a mosaic shifting the hypothesis into a pallor of a question back to it again with its basic agony of becoming so bent and so small on paper – which is to say, that we are, if to listen to a droning sound, becoming of it delving deep into the center, checking our own weight like our name after a fall from a high place, they said they would.

4
I have left something in Baguio that I cannot take back – a monochromatic caricature of my face shoved into a crevice waiting for a revision. What have I furthered into?

scent of the newly-bathed
hot off the ironing board clothes, pulse of radio

  your smooth, round
  perfume   wafts

into my  distant home,
  making your absence

total    
                         keening
  through   the   anger   of   the feeble wall
  in front of   me

your    smell
   I     love, my love when it is time
I will    be   less than
    soul  when it   meets   body’s  persistent
     pleadings,      

lay  down    eloquently   bold
          for   mine   to    stray   thinking,
    here     engraved   to  bone
like   pompous   woodwork

again    and    again
   your   scent
making

your
   absence
total.

my timid tournefortia,
whose peripatetic scent matadors
the mad men.
whose laughter veers away the impossible,
of whose flame will gander
like flotsam in a sea of aloneness,
you are a danseuse in the
misty moonlight.

     perpetual in the night illume,
    perched in the deepness of
      sad walls calling out the
   azure. my little tournefortia,
      it was such joy to have lived
   when you have blossomed.

--- as all flowers go, you too, have gone - flagrant grows regard, like a prancing flame
    of blue my eyes are frantic and
    anew --- i seek new flowers.

i might have awakened
you from your
unperturbed sleep.

i am sorry i do not know
my way around.

i am quite unfamiliar
with everything.

only with you
a couple of times,

a hundred moments
briefly myself.

That was when          my body reached for, sensed its limit
then drowned    in careful trivia             of   you   who always sat

next to      him    in   your    denim jacket       |      just  before


this     is   a   poem    or   an   admission    of:

I now


understand


the           common     day

               shelved and      collected,    is  like   furniture,      organized


to      pattern    your       life    I   have     no    place      in



months    of    this    order
still     never    reaching    for.

trees sunk in dolor as i teach
what i could to the flowers and what they
might say to me in seismic lunges
of dark upon quivering fig
   will tremble the environs.

the boughs mimic the serious mien
of sundials — men have forgotten
the primitive yet go rushing murderous
waving bayonets claiming the silence,
  the ruin rising above the phalanx.

my glyptic words rise above the foliage
telling all macabre presses against
choked light. the heron,
  the  nightingale, o'er there yonder
hills tryingly enunciating something
   in the hollow: they have traded
us for mere soil.

a finagling
       conception

faces start to blur
past dreary old Manila
and scaffolds cool to touch
like one of the many daggers
of love struck relentlessly
against the rib
mercilessly genuflect
as the rain mocks
the tears of a woman used bone-deep
wolfing down at the door
heeding these transcendental howls

baleful eyes ****
past the throb of the strobe

remain wordless

i taste it in the moment
yet why kneel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10  Disappearance.

stillness moved  the  air,
   and it was neither a lark nor a flower in my hand
but the Earth within the trees that unmoved
   and the hand that unrest. is it not that petals our folly
and that nothing are we when we live? are we
               not our own brookwater
   which silence metastasizes
       a source or a dart of water
falling  and  falling?
is darkness solely our own light?
  is it not the shadow that we carry in night and day
   but the weight of our own darkness?

so much the weight of our living
  that we, amongst ourselves, are but stone atilt
    on a river – the birds sit well against
the taciturn afternoon and all the homes
   transfixed in wonderment as though we recall
our first storms in the eyes of the old
   and the debris the hand that has carried us
through, something the wind still is a mother
    or a father, gently motioning through the world.

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

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

a word, haphazard
   by the thwarted world,
for the word
     and from the word, springs
beyond extension, a cherry-taint
    of tongue and its exquisite redness
yet never what our purloined voices
     hold, falling quick the immense
roundness of the bedlam;
  such is still
in war when all the burly men
and the hubbub of artillery
  make only the commune
this is our utmost, deepest,
   wounded memory.
our life's entrails crouch no longer
  a striped tiger by the door
redolent of the many ebbed deaths;

  nights i lie awake
  and see all language lift,
  leaving in the night sky,
  an array of temporal splendors,
   famishing all the Earth in the dark,
  abandoning it, cross-eyed!

kung ikaw lamang ay iba sa iyong
   sarili at hindi itong anino
na may hawak na balaraw,
  mala-dagitab ang bilis ng iyong pagkabig
sa akin,   sana’y naririto
  ka pa ngunit

ikaw   at    ako
ay hindi   ikaw   at  ako at tila
  ikaw   at ikaw  lamang
na sana’y dalawa; waring kumpisal
  sa harap ng salamin,
kung mayroon lamang kasiguraduhan
at walang bahid ng alinlangan at itim
na katahimikan,

puspos ka ng pagdaramot
kaya naman
sa init ng paglisan at sa pagiimbot
  ng distansya,
ako’y tupok
    na
   tupok

each tempered by slivered moments:
slovenly on the floor lay tethered,
both, separate,
honest light.

when it is time that you do not
see anymore, the shadow of my passing,

when the twilight gives rise,
a felled star in the world,

when damp kisses are beleaguered
by the driest of lips,

out of merely, a wide-eyed vainglory,
there will be nothing that all my songs
send a dancing, tiptoeing light
careful to arrive at one day

when you face is held with utmost care
and my hands not its owner,
but a handful of names.

when it comes that we are two fish
struggling in a current's dream —
not a single twitch is born. you will slip
past the interstice of love's net
and i cannot see you anymore in the
depthless blue.

the intelligence of stone tells me
nothing but silence, hemmed in
to a great monolith of daylight.

i exaggerate, the sinking of ships
and amble blindly with the whole of
my motion, like flotsam weary of its
  preordainment. portraits sow themselves
battles, cleaving them minutely against
  the simmer of quiet. when it is time
to let you go, i will watch you leap forth
  into the ripe air like a child seeking
home, reiterates in flight a height
  i cannot reach for.

when it is time all of this,
    mote it be, clenches in thinned streaks
of turpentine, all of my walls will be clear
  and not a sign of your colour
   will scream pain like a tortured vandal.

there is no stone sewn
   gossamer but your heart;

holds captive, the leaves
   trapped in white teeth of snow,
  gnawed at, abandoning the boughs

   quivering, never still.

  this immovable fire heeds no void
    standing in between us,

how you die in me:

all things twice over,
told, hushed in the senseless
  brush of wind,
  petrified like the tree
heeding no autumn's till,
a feeling
  flailing inward,
  climbing out of yourself.

a word from thy mouth
is the spectral arrow
from nimble bow.

risen are the caryatids,
unsheathed are the swords,
molested are the gladiola
by the night's harsh *****;

the proscenium dislimns
as the iron curtain sea drowns
their blasphemous orations!
the thespians alerted
by a wordless hunt

   as i rise like the dew
  lambasting the autumnal grass
   bedecked by glistening wheals
    of ripe luminosities;

  this damp hour, the mercurial
     assault of declarations,
  fastens every word underneath
    tongues of river-deep stone.

past wavering lights
  B. Serrano and Bagong Ilog
love struck us down — sees no votive
clearing of the fog or a word sharper than any blade wrought from frays.

i have a photograph of you
somewhere in the ken of my silence
  and on it paints lightsome hue
and sometimes pale when it rains.
KM 24 on a blue alloy and underneath,
   a Baguio — some memories we keep
almost left by the last carriage homeward
   from too much fire in our hands
  only tremors could extinguish both
striking a balance and counterbalance;
the frequency of the electric and the
immense decibel of lions drowning
    the disquiet. some places or some
looking back makes you want
   to lose yourself in slight wonder and when

a memory comes back with the dreary
   weight of its forgetfulness,
we fall asleep traipsing the steeples
   of our dreams of each other
all-telling, still dizzy with the pirouette
  of some distant longing bracing
the fall, triggering our darkness
  and shooting out

   ourselves, small,
love striking us down. arraying a triplicate
    of hazy trails forking all roads
and we cannot find each other again;
  throwing stones rippling
multiplied waves by the sea arriving
  at separate mornings beneath
our feet,

   bends on the bludgeoned curves
of love and hate ascertaining something
   so unsure as a door agape and swiveling
  in tense wind, tender is the night

  and love continues
to smite us down, locking in, predatory precision,
            running away, and away, and away
   from the ache of it all.

dark leaps when
there is the frothing light
beaming a sizable aureole
on your face
this evening
and its palpable brigade.

dark is having your
inwoven dress free
from swaying
pressed against raucous
facelessness of things
rogue and renegade.

and when i have you
not, shining the light
and its intone,
wind felt like
stabs or
i in attendance
of a crazed vaudeville—
trapeze is the hinge
of the void
afloat, upstream, space-hovering;
a display of love
   and not so much
is shown of the vertigo
trapped in a square,
a face
impinged in the seamlessness
of this fabulation
when you've gone
quickly fading out;
    
     light is my remember,
o, dark my
     forgetling.

in   my   side
   of  the Earth
I    was   not   tilted,
   realized      and    emptied
my   eyes    are   spigots
   my mother    left   open  to thaw
the glaciers   of
        supper

   zenith   visits   the   Summer
most   often   than  the
  wind blowing    through   the
curtain     of    my    eyes
   where   I   always   see   the dead
smidgen    flowers   all   over
   the    ricefields

             this   measure   of
tomorrow –    to  have been incarcerated
   in   the   past that   bears
no     arms    to
       this   very   Saturday    afternoon
fish   breathe  now
  in    enigmatic    means
    pulses    of   rivers
tangle     joys    with
    naked    boys   of   brindled   youth


    see   once   they   jackknife
into   a   memorized    depth
            pellucid  like   my   memory
of
      uncollected      afternoons

Bare-breasted this afternoon facing the Sun
   northward

   there could be more places for heat like this in homes
so shattered, their faces of malaise – a hundred days of gambol
     boys in their sanguine shirts; the myth of sun
                     is truth of soul, or moon

            clear vantage of something – neighbors leaving
radios wheezing in tetchy static,
  dogs panting in dry ***, lawn the verdigris,
                   the marauder in the market, all moving towards

even sounds shorn out of the daily are pure:
           the prattling neighbor again back in the foyer,
  the revolution of an old van and the dismay
                                   of a septuagenarian, the harangue
  of a mother, or somewhere, the marching of
                 soldiers shot dead – sun’s always painting pristine
  the milieu, so we can see now past the papers,
       the truthfulness of atrocities;

there came by you,
        in your full brightness, blotches of sun – untouched
by the heat, you’re passing and passing – in transit, nothing is snatched
    as the neighbors beat through.

Help me shatter this day. Our bodies make
transitions unbearable. All of us here hiding secrets. By design,
we are silent. It takes me days to fully sing.
                 We think walls are our doing, bridges our undeniable shame.
  There are things following me: the bird soaring, another one flat on
   the roof, and the other atrill on umbilicus of powerlines.
  This day is composition – let this day atonal. From where I sit,
  daily pursuits key in difficulties – eyes closed deep but not aslumber,
  are purblind: gauge me in this order: feel the world scabrous like Braille. In a world of continuing
  breakage, what is there to hold together.
                If not, a debris pattern. A held rigor in suffering – there is that
  crisp, sweet taste in the air again like some air winding out of ***.
  Look at me through dappled windows as reflection of an oncoming storm.
    Help me splinter this day. Placate my tremor of, and fasten me dearly
set beyond the grooves of this day. I teach myself a coruscating example – to reach for
  and break. To stop you climbing, plodding your way to a conclusion,
   waylaid you in your place and summoned your fiddling of chance – the duration is
lined by obeisance towards an endorsed situation issued, not accrued.
                  We are somewhat conveying this burden to equal our weight. Must we
  be afloat, what hoists our rebellion? What must we be
       to endure,    to witness these wondrous beatings ballast our gravities,
          no warning of, and against reliance. Is our being here what we determine.

this machine; a father on the front porch
of the universe reading existence's papers lunging at the printed word,
meticulously punctuated ebb and flow
of silence across the giddy trees crossed
by sunlight — the universe knew very
little of the incertitude of tongues
until the pain of all exactness worded
the void into a singular nomenclature:
a stifling and precise, simple, quiver-maimed often fighting through panicked streets and gory waysides. a hoard of no less than silence like a stone dropped
into all that is the world: living.

the word admits truth
and the feeling confirms its ruin

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

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

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