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

flayed shade      of peril

         i
           gaze
   into
          the
     sky
        be it night
or
      day,
          and look
   for something

      i know not,
even the moon
         and the sun
     are famished

     and
         that is
why i still
       keep
     on
            looking...

i go out seeking a great perhaps
immenser than the void i know.

but you have left
as all the others did --
only a few remained.
yellowing letters with words growing thinner and thinner barely
hanging, loosely against the mouth
of the fringe.

it is not enough that you have left.
it is not enough that this room
shouts enormously with its
darkness pressing against the venetian and i cannot see you anymore.
it is not enough that i hear your
footsteps mince away towards the seep of the door where your departure has overstayed its welcome.
it is not enough that there will be no more mornings to delight in - only nights where i scrounge for light only to find that even the things that glint have no use anymore.
it is not enough that we have screamed, yelled, bellowed our names at each other in love, now on hate. it is not enough that your once callow eyes are now lion-telling and mine, vulterine.

the arrival is just as swift
as the pulse of leaving and now
in the next room are so many women,
and it does not help that there
are also many rooms fraternized
altogether, filled with more
and more people.
the fuller the earth gets,
the sicker i become,
and the more stricken i become,
the more i remember that i have died wanting more deaths.

soon i will find your debris scattered throughout the streets
made for me to walk on.
a strand of hair, a pair of shoes,
a dress you never wore, the telephone like a petrified train
in the station of my hollow being,
and that it would ring,
i know it too well,
but there will be a strange voice
at the other end that will
pierce me back to remembering
how you sound and i will take
it, i will take it for
for the indictment nears its brutal straightforwardness:
it will never be you waving
at the other end of the street
together with the ugly palms.
it will never be you
in the dress, it will never
be you on the passenger seat
peering out into the world with
eyes beating the darkness of the freeway with the many exploding lights of who you are
and what you've given me with
what was left of you,
and what i've given you
amid this thing of being me.

it is never enough.
it is never enough that
i know this, and it is never enough that unknowing you is longer
   than how we have known each
    other when our voices are the
    only once that dwelt within
      ourselves.

Like the audible wane of a train
  outside the dank night,
  or the faces in each carriage
  blurred by the most drenching rain
 the next clear face in the dimming
  fluorescent spillage is the face
  of another. Much has been ruined now.
  What is difficult to understand in farewell?
   The stillness constitutes what I know,
   embellishing the vastness around me.
   Of which spaces here you used to occupy,
   all the others that you have left,
   leading to a possible finding, or an easy trace
   of arbitrary -- it is a blunder to seek terminal finish
   making you less than what was preserved,
   perhaps more than what meets my eye
   in sleep and waking. A dream of some sort.
   The voice breaking when heard, resonates
   with revisions of what transpired, as if to
   always flatten a truth -- some voices do this.

done over this afternoon I only have one image
and about you were many other surly things

all wrapped in the sudden heat of happening
through the clear eye of a diaphanous world.

inmost spring of an unreachable bud,
a raw material for hurt kept in the after-hour

of a dwindled morning charged to dark
moving with precise instep

rummaging for completion
underneath an untamed sky

left for claim but not entirely as to be free,
no remnant of the hour’s expensive thrill

where I do not find you in me,
as I am still down on your able ghost

pinning it down to where it will never
meet its breakable place:

a wondrous dawn, or the fever of Maytime afternoon,
  in your most excellent clothes

or else it was simply desire

next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
     a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
     her body not even the slightest resistance.
  
after bathing when feet barely dried
      leaves pools, like an admission of something.

i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
     unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
     by the neighboor as you confessed one
     April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
         now aged, wind reentering a distance
     like i imagine your hand in my denim.
     spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.

  carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
      wasting its voice to no audience,
  when we crawled from one room to another
       leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
    and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
      across a tablature is music of creaking wood
      and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
     on the bedpost softly sings

              a punishment: now an urge to go back
     yet not knowing which door to enter,
           every surrounding object as witness,
      memorized a minute's completion,
  refusing to map out which way to go.

for when a season shall pass
   and in passing I have gone,
 only to announce have I arrived
      and am here,

this aleatory, the next face waiting --
   whom arrived but is in
  fraction, for whom she is that I will hold
  but is reluctant in her grip

  for my face yet unsure, is sure
  of its coming; hence the volition of fates
  a tight contest:

 for two of us we shall seek ourselves
   in places where we do not know where
   we are going, and as this goes on
   in a circle, we have been far too lost
   and wander-wearied,

  seeking rest in the next embrace
    awaiting.

I.

you would feel it.
   the bones of it.
   the drone of it.
   the arms and the fingers
   and the inscape of things
   and the sheer weight
   of it.

the mind seeks to inhabit all things,
nailing them to their stations.
indicting them to their prisons.
casting them to their sullen exiles
while the heart
       does nothing.

II.

   the hand's meager unraveling
    is its realness
   not its assumed truths.
   the parcel of the mundane shifts
  its weight across people-rivers,
  as light roves in secret strobe.

   you cannot feel it.
        the heat of it,
    nor hear it,
         trundling in its train,
   dwarfing in yonder light,
    controlling its rages.
   you can see it always speaking,
  as nobody hears a figment of
    a shadowed creature when it
     is cut in the tough ornate -
the body tries,
      the mind is asleep,
    and the heart is where all
  the frays take place.

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

what use is there,
  my nimble hand?
  what journey is there
  for my superfluous feet
  searching for the dead
  in the tropic dearth of heart's
  liminal forgetting?

  like famished vultures
  traipsing in the membranous
  sky and the illimitable earth,
  hunting for the defiantly
  ephemeral prey in the autumnal
  tang of the mild afternoon,
  my heart, my poor heart,
  no flame aroused.

(  to which temple shall our in-betweenness       kneel before

       reft in ****** dark?

   housed in parenthetical arms,
       graver than a tomb's rhetoric—

washed in red of flowers, a swarm
    of light arrives, waking the undeath
                                                      of stone.

  from glib strife to downpour of
    leaves — a morning unbound, unclose

the    sojourn     lay by the side of the
     river, the single-minded cruise


     to      appassionata,

                                       love.)

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

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

I have no interest in anything
insofar as a warm pitcher of spit.

there is a lineage of a plainspoken truth
that agonies itself, a slow ticking of clockwork.

all the pubs are filled with
the ugly and the beautiful.
so much the naked darlings,
so much the people writing,
and reading poems wrung dry
like unattended cornerstones.

when the flower dwindles,
the petals begin to shed.
I see people slower than drizzle,
tread the long line of existence.

as I write all words washed away by the shore,
all separated and lonely,
deeply departed as a parting hand of a wave,
all people continue their sameness.

inside me, a well-placed margin
divides flesh and bone.
overwrought the soul, untended to
like drops of water from a spigot left open.

sound of silence like the reproach of fires.
my mother loathes me for my heavy drinking.
my godfathers attenuate the smoke furling
above my brows back to its fetal nature.
somewhere, somebody is making a killing
in front of the billion-blooded.

misshapen. lungs struck harshly by a barrage
of quiet. i can barely keep my soul together
past the horrible billboards of EDSA.
the lampposts, the sun that looks like a lazy eye
magnifying everything that hurt.
I thrive with faces whose existences have nothing
to add me – damage further
I keep working up the old moon’s wane.

we will all fall to the ground,
we will all have our skin scraped out
of the body
and we will hear the paring of the flesh
sifting away from the bone
and it will hurt
like old haunts revisiting us

not because we are out of choices
not out of weakness;
the simple truth that teaches us
to be kind does not have its same potency.
there is an epidemic of death
crawling past hills crunched to the death
by the unrests of horses.

pain sends its
tired battalion of people
lining up across the turnstiles.
the ****** utter
the flimsiest of moans.
the soldiers beat their
wives to the ground with nothing
but bare-knuckled discomfitures.
I fear that soon enough,
what keeps the walls together may soon
touch the end
while I assault the windows

with photographs of slow mornings
reduced to slower evenings.
such falseness teems where
truth should have prevailed.

someone’s time is up
and death strays in the room
proud of its stench championing the perfumes
of boys and girls in the flesh -

we’re all next,
first one to go
finds the impasse all the same.

All bleached. Sweating a spindrift. Senses dumb like a blunt arrowhead.
It is time again when liquor cuts like paper. I have weak means,
weaker skin. Wanting to strip home of stucco. Fails to, is white like clinic.

My measures to fret an end: books unopened, left yellowed. Some old cigarettes
my mother keeps a keen eye on, does not hurl in the trash, permits me
accepted death, the body taking a toll in this house. An empty wine bottle
corked to contain the drone of this animal. Pills I do not understand, only
touch the symmetry like a wife. My own shattered histories throbbing,
operating in the hollow dome of this

   some words when fated, do not reach their fathers. I have
many sons by this. My laugh bends like metal. Celan bellows trust the tearstain.
Body curled to a note impinged by conductions of this electric music. Listening
to myself confess as walls watch my back.

toppling the gait
  of trees in the bluster.

we do not like it when it rains.

under the melee, kamagong lay
idly with the gravity of fruit ripened.
  at long last, touching ground.

in this knell

i regard you as plaything
take drippy measures and harness
  cues for thrusts.

the span of the shadow plastered
to the wall means   the silence is as deep
   as the rain outside,

all up from the unfurling corner
  of walled up tango-stride, ripping apart
the    linoleum with   dance.

  i may become a daub of perfume

   and you, maybe a smile on my face
   passing as it rained.

land's moniker
mulls utmost care

     Kalinga

branding the ox
      of men with glaringly

  immaculate chiaroscuro,
atop hills flourishing
with the fruits emblazoning
  reticence.

  chase angel-ward, the synopsis
  of meaningfulness,
    jagged, indelible accoutrement
    akin to the brand of
         chaste heritage,

   galvanizing this epitaph
     with aesthetic nativity,
  gallant mambabatok - fill my bones with the ache of your past,
   carve in me what the rippling
    shrill of air has toppled
      in the highlands

  you have us shaking the blood
    of this archipelago like boughs
   breaking free from water's ebb,
   frenzied by the river-warm
    serpentine embellishment
   the strike of the thorns
    mints in our untouched bodies!

   altogether in this numerous hike
   we go in pursuit, hunting the
   nibble from flesh to bone,
    revealing the rebel, body
       to soul.

I can only summon feelingfulness like the passing of a dove,
postponing its arrival mid-air, somewhere along the tucked
bramble across Poblacion, starting with metaphorical sensibility
or an insensibly bland space to procure wanted meaning.
Girls prefer roses and their bright foreheads diademed with more
flowers, and boys, their chiaroscuro or lack of a color thereof, seems
to be fitting in this maladroit contrast, and so I begin, as always,
with your very vague and caged memory. Your face, the whiteness
of snowcapped alps. Your strut, my slalom in a treacherous course
of words reduced to whisperings, to flutings. Your voice, though nuanced,
flitters with an overtone of arrogance: if sound was clothed, yours would
be flamboyant ermine. And the line in front of you before I, my arbitrary turn,
assimilates into a picturesque form of waiting somewhere in Cubao.
I wanted to smash myself with train-speed towards the metallic turnstile,
which, would then famish me even so, just as much as I wish to be a car crash
somewhere within the outskirts of your town, heavily vandalized by the swill
of squalor hefting itself like the rest of the world conscious of its viscera.
  This is how I start you – like waiting for the sun to emerge by Borobudur,
or the clandestine *** of mildew and grass, a hundredfold of images appear
before me and I cannot choose upon my whims and caprices. Are you a dove?
A spear of Sun? A thunderous crackle of an impending rain? A harlequin?
A moseying cirrus? Or just another by-stander in the crowds where I ultimately
seek your being?
      This answerlessness measures my knowledge of star, and my breath snuffed
out of me while I sigh from exhausted penchants, outweigh dissimilarities and symmetries.
A progeny from all superseding conundrums arises: are you a retrogression of a wave
back to its saltine wound, flailing in brine? Or are you just the vast sea and nothing else
on a fine and lucid day where children skip stones and chant name-callings?
                   I sense the peril in this undertaking, and much to my chagrin, I still
   do not know how to end you.

/  rivers pulse this house as if activity, predictable.
  leave this body       just like that.
  and heave the emptiness from the thrum
  of the streets         just like that
            the stars delineate an axis tilted by my means
  to live under frail coruscations.
           take this house, take the rivers
           with you, all the more my body
           anything other than my blunder.
   take even, these tiny and immediate currents
   as i hear this is how it is to be delivered from
   grace and expanse.
             you are what this truancy is trying to undo
   as you were by mine before -- this is how
   it feels to be moved and sidled again and again
                     this river that you carry me across and left with details none can supply. there
            is resolve in this, even when I am taken aback,

which certain things are left crossed and wronged,
   and how you keep the place guarded, possessed
        by light -- how it wholly hurts, this invented
       life all mine /

1
What is to break if not another word for
       impossibility, or another phrase as palliative
    for suffering each other

2
What is so sure of it to arrive
     in the densest minute, say when if already
out of sight, I implore you to
     unlearn my body

3
This and the deep and hollow end of it.
      Visage voyeurs as if the past is just next door
      sleeping with my woman, laughs and then cuts
      open to free itself from a slammed door
      and mosey on.

4
As statement to refute my coming into,
   I am already accomplished. Turn this day opaque.
   Lens to the world my found
                    imperative of what was given, a knife
    to stalk a heart so difficult as if known to me
          as a path home, or unearthed bus tickets
    from Longos to Tabang. Say when it rains,
        forgive me. I remember still.

5
To believe in touch and its memory is
    obligation. The way I see this, a palimpsest.
  I attempt to discover something, witnessing myself
  pass mirrors, body found as if rivers do drift
      me to the brink of a high noon wishing
  to swing downstream the words I have
       no use for, if not documents of haloed hours.

6
I passed by your house.
Silence annuls azure skies.
Balustrades gone. They took everything down
    evenly to the last inch of paint,
balmy this oblivion only for me, catatonic is this
      peace as my hands lift a piece of the soul
   to shred. The day burns like a forest in my hand.

times like this, the plenary moon
  tonight wearing many faces,

the white-washed truant at bay
    white-hulled still, the brim of the sky
to a full, on such a bright night leaving a trace
   of say, prongs of fire on the kiln

the skin the soft breeze molests with a chill
flung from pinecone – the blackened spires of the
very heart of flame and the mullioned wood that understands
  what the heat of placeness mints underneath
  our skin – what silence remains a translation when the smoldering
  remains are bitten repeatedly, aureoled in the moment of vital meaning.

we hear its threat, retained in clock-whirs
like a primordial word or the fluting of  light’s bendable
   rondure harnessing a truth we let in.

I fail behind the walled-up lip of laughter
because the weight of passing
is heavy on my back – like a bough dragged
  by rainwater, or sound elected to drown:
the smell of poinsettia assaults,
lifting its slaughter against Kiltepan and Ambuklao,
  past mountains lulled to sleep: the moon sleuthing
  like a well-oiled machine.  what do you hear?

  we are aware of its full absence,
like that of our undulation after a fall,
  or the wild sibilance of breath trying  to  utter something,
  going back home with a song in between teeth,
    without words.

(i, continually,
      in the terseness of
         things

     seek gentle reminders which
        when it comes,
      straightforward as a gull,
        that i cannot
     utter completely,
       speak into beating,
      about love then i shall
         write about it)

say, i shall plant a kiss
   in the landscape of your cheek
    and gravitate like rain towards
       your soul as we are higher
     than any hope that in the
      reticence of our mouths,
      our eyes would gain courage
        and converse a secret
     nobody knows.

or carve the words onto your bones as they tremble backward when we alone don moonlight and
    dance sprightlier than
   parting and when it
    comes that there is no music,
      your breath is the sound
    where my movement is born!
   our lips shall grow wings
    and flutter into the
      starless evening and perch
     at the boughs
        of love aquiver.

  the silence promises all of this:
     let us go!

"In a room where the truth naked, shining"

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

     and rising from salvaged metal
   compressing everything to scrap;

         Every single one mum as water in basin --

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

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

how when I have arrived at a distant place |
sleep beheads an animal when dreaming

           is in search for its body somewhere
        and lies over barbed coverts – I am that
        animal  again in, over and over, lost within

its hubris a dream forecasts with separate proof
near the end of this investigation.

what will they tell me when they see me
after all these years when it rained almost
every day? of what continued trace must I bear,
and may not be mistrusted yet? what evidence

is inflated, with nothing to report?
this long stumbling night
contorts its own version                 of being lost and again in,
                                      the same covetous body snared.

how   when   a selfishness manifests   itself   in complete   peace
    is when a dream, a piecemeal apparatus

you can feel even the resting tremor of it learn my structure
and are these now infinitely throbbing highlights  a  part

of  me  starting  small  convulsions   anywhere it goes

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

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

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

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

1

   flumine stretches to the small of her back
as the    clock  slowly    runs off from
         twilight    to   midnight

     perfect time   for    assault   but  undeclared

say   when   tugging of   hair  to expose
     the jugular --  that is   where you plunge
           the  message

          when  biting   the   lip   becomes
        predatory,  when sweat    is   the telling
           trace  putting  the  clandestine, ******

        or  easily   when   hold   becomes   grip
     else it was just   estrangement    face to face
           in the   dark,  cannot  remember   features
              only   textures --  walled up message tongued    in   all   fours as if  a crucifix or idle
           penitence

2

        whoever  was   steering   was   just
    teaching  how    to   hate,   treats as   open and
        easy target,   mapping  out   what   to sequester
           and   authoring   silence    as    acquiescence.

     first trust  is   given  and   is thrusting deeper
   in   hollow   grievance. we have   no   use  for  it
        and so    we    take   it as   the first  step
            out   of   the door  keeping  love unharmed
     only  to be   taken   in  unmindful of   its implosion.

3

       we  then  have   damage   portrayals  as   if
   we   have   a   long divide,  or  a grueling  history,
       hit from our   blinded  sides.  

     a  man   from  another  country   could have  taken    you   from   this  juncture,
        but  he    is   somewhere lugging objects
 he   has   no use   for in   a haul  that was meant to
             drift  him away   from  sheer possibility

   and so   we   remain   here, a promise that things  will  start to exact  relevance, until  then
          we    remain, waiting for    our   smoke to
  dissipate when the last   fizz   of   fire   is sounded.

4

    you   do   to   me   what   i do   to   you
        as  if  polarities   are  clear   reversals
   and   then   back  again   with hope

       so i  drink   from   your   mouth   what i have
given   as   your   body   depletes,   your   fingers
      crenelate as   you     rebuild   your   stronghold,

          my   emptiness a  catchbasin  of  all the
   rain   growing   inside  you,  your  body  swollen,
       ready to burst  and   after   that
           perhaps,      forgive.

our old appendages are our contemplation of our peripheries.

these minor playthings we do not touch
anymore. rusting alphabets moored
to the toppling refrigerator door. we have always been the curious kind;

before the sun sets, stills itself in unperturbed solace, we the lonely hunters of ourselves sift the word
and the ordeal: the last aureole perishes
  and here flowers the nightly pulchritude.
our age are servitudes circling around
  with elliptical utterances. we have no crutch but our brittle bones slowly chiming in the music of something we
avoid: only too well a mercy we cannot
  bequeath nor receive.

  so breakable and false, this what we
do, these that occur permitting desires
  to speak blandly of themselves.
the hazards of the existing numerals
   and their foreboding syntaxes:
how we burn bright and fade out,
   all of this briefly shattering
after a colossal fall – its trenchant elegy
   repudiates with contrapuntal music.
eyes, the contraband of visions and
   stifled breaths reared in capitulations
like tailgating a beast on the tractable road
     to snare it to its death, yet untold.

i pass on a story to empty barstools and
     cathedrals -- that i will remain as
      inconsolably so

  and ask, shall I be free so as to
      suffer myself?

 admitting i am shaped according
     to your demands,

    where, first there is you and the last
 always the prime of days;

where mapping out or telling a thread
   is inclination to never mind

our place. the need to bury you
   in my own Earth, willing to make you

meet a darkness which you once
   were as if to swallow the entire verity

of common peril. this perish, this drown
    first before displacement, to conceive

the evening within stories you have
    created beginning with a sharp departure

making your silence and abandon final,
   myself less than total.

that when i look at you, i want to burst
    into meaning like stone being taught

to speak, as much like your study as comparatively
    a bluer dawn rising from your feet

you passed me on as someone else, a makeshift freedom underneath an impalpable source,

that i am sick in your densest volumes
    when you speak, all the more when you dont

realize that I am trying to gravitate you
  into something, say to allow me into remembrance

and you, an insistence to function in void.
    that whilst you remember, you forget

   that in the tense moments I am trying to unlearn
you, as if there was only I,

    the city we were both in underneath a senseless moon, and whatever it was that i saw in you

 in such an imperfect night -- taking all your debris,
     the body of all this sliding into reticence

  as detritus, the unflinching weight of yourself
     as time stumbles to shuffle absence.

 strange now as the morning peers through
   the wide aperture, there is only I,

  faced with rivers as transit; when there was once
I moored in place and you have learned

       how to walk, and further away.

i am never travailed
by all afternoons
goading me
to

the door of poetry.

all of them sleeping heavily
shelves, these gods
where i imagine my fates
far-fetched,
perched atop an illusory cypress
like a dove oblivious of home,

Villa
 de   Ungria
        Joaquin
            Gonzales
  ­    Tiempo
  Dalisay
       Abad
          Lumbera
     Gamalinda

  these imperious tyrannies
   sovereign in speech casting
   my storms to drizzle alone,

  where all these words go
  where all these fates wander

  i know not.

     all i know is continuing.

i.
  this is where all wars
  are born.
     when the mind starts
  naming its possessions
  as the heart is
  silent with its
  sullen iterations.

  this is where all
  the forgotten revel
  in the song breaking against
  the premises of remembering,
  or say,
    dream's erratic fabulation.
  this is where you lose
  name and touch and relevance
  to things. this is where
  around me, all the mouths
  shrill in commune and i am
  left baffled in cottonmouth
      reticence.

ii.
   it starts with a syllable's
   ebb as it tries to paint
   in the canvas a face,
   or a mulling over.
   or the reel around
       the thorny fountain of
   desperations and youthfulness
     dried out in speckles of
   river-run laughter.
   there is only a candle there
  but the light splatters everywhere like true blood of
    murdered flowers on walls
  thick without sensations.
it begins when the heron
   of your coming trills on
  the ganglion - cathedrals start
  a bell and the resounding of it,
  the shattering of it,
      the music of it!

iii.
     death of a man is the
   life of another, yet shy in
  its genesis, brave in the exodus.
this will soon grow
     arms
         and feet and will lunge
  out of each pained window and
    then sleep in musical beds
  oblivious of a body's retreat.
   and from whence it started,
  it shall end here,
it will blow out the candles here,
sometimes sing to itself here,
    and perhaps pass this on
from here to another's,
     without promise.

the dawn of another
tempest and the twilight
of another's sleek extinction.

i roam freely
without fences so i could break
free with even speed.

this is where no men
traverse.
this is where everything
remains limitless.
this is where all fires
raze whatever has been uncovered
and deemed vulnerable.
this is where i imagine
realness and put to realities,
whatever is imagined.
this is where everything only
amounts so little,
and that in its smallness, i only
weave an immense thatch
for the asylum of these words
and watch them come to life...

it starts with a pencil of light
torching where silence beckons
and words writ strongly in
bold intent

and ends
where all of these syllabications
take their sojourns in one's mind,
pulsing with life and one with blood in the sinews of mind's faculty.

this is where i meander freely,
and everything exists
in illustrious wonder.

words, forever,
and their pressing occupations
of living.

the multiplitude is something
that crosses a territory.

say a hand where, somewhere impermissible, still ganders over,
warm to touch. a filigree of
fingers reaching to where
enlightenment is something so small
like a match-flame.

they inexplicably dress themselves
to the soul's penchant
and their redundancies are recurring most over tongues of flame.

sometimes when there are no
words, silence continues to
resuscitate them in their
stations. a mutiny of stone
under the shade of a nook,
or migratory horses seeking
rest at the foot of hills
where their crests look
at them painting them white
with blackness.

where words go,
we follow. even in the tracklessness. our pursuit
knows no ending, like the turning
of a day's page and its finality.
like tasting truths for the
first time, an old moon's wane.
lights athwart where they
cease to fade, a confection
of colours where all men see
fairly, what words inscribe
to riverbed quietude.

our most frail signals surrender us to movement:
eyes and their gesticulations carry us through foresight and after-sight,
   sometimes the latter, which takes on space yet not so much space,
     and the previously bestowed upon unction that supersedes
       reckless meanings.

    syntactical is the source of rivers,
   concatenation is the body of mountains:

      clocks mean nothing to predate and antedate – now is the time for
            such realizations.

  I do not know what is it with the trees that moves me
  to bend, and I do not know what is it with heads of flowers
   that makes me fall in love repeatedly as if to make no sound as a thief
   is entering the premises, or an unsuspecting cat dropping
    just beside the all-titanium bicycle: desolate, on all-fours, no metamorphosis
   happening, just flagrantly stagnant in form.

I peer out in mornings in search for a curve of a face,
  or a flutter of an eyelid, all but marvelous insofar as they all remind
you of a picture painted somewhere beyond the mausoleum ******* clad
    with pressing scenes but away and moving, always on alteration,
permitting to speak clearly something so breakable and false: a day’s turning into night
                         sheds its skin and now without gleam nor white even, a child smiles
     at me without      teeth.

tracing the stone throbbing in silence.
they're just shoes.
they're just letters rid of ripostes.
shades fleeting tell no significance.

again, they're just (more than) shoes.
insignias emblazon carnage.

the Earth is prone. it's just land
seeking fill. supine on bed,
it's just
a
land
seeking
fill —

they're just shoes
worn by
flesh and by thinning air.
light toppled on the grave of my fingernail. it's no paroxysm of macabre.

they're just
there, sitting idly,
like beasts in final stands
limned by sudden emergence of woods.

just some
of its non-existence,
my mind's concept of I and
all things refuted
    its sorry
plaything.

it was blandly your image before mine,
     such fern-like hands adjust the moon’s fixated shadow staring at itself
in the mirror before death: who would not linger in such voice traipsing past
     the staircase? whose woodwork shall I seek the fragrance of spring?

also in strangeness there is a glance dizzied into liquor that yearning
    is drunk to: mazy now in the arms of attendance, before they squander the light
and shove it back to its home, they drink as though it was the most final
   of supplications,
     as though a wounded rose is pulled, a hair-trigger that is its call,
or heavier like hair, something weighted down to its empire, eyes that dread
   the dreary glint of the slow, crystalline branch outside my window in the rain
         of all watery beings converging in cusps of the Earth readying to be made loose
  amongst     breadth of  mouth  and shallow  moulds thriving  in the body
   whose house is but oblivion in half-light,

                           nourishing your heart as though it were starving
      for the cold and not your warmth, for the flame and not your embrace,
         for the flight of the azure and not the trance of your tenderness,
         something still that you are not who you were before me, when all mirrors
                       conjured the image of deaths.

-- a drunken reprise:
   sound of bones crackling
    upon stretch on a limp chair.
   the continual attendance
     of the dark:
      the bottle is streaked with
       pale light.
     unquiet, remorseless,
       thick in secret:
     to drink alone, in unmistakable truth, as i gild
     the immensity of impalpable
   currents moving in swathes
   sudden without weathered image.
     the table's pressing mysteries, the barkeep's maledict eyes. the vagrant wind going in
    and out of panting doors tired
  of the coming and going.
      the night fans, and then flames with auburn fire, and around
   it, miseries fandango through
  the crepitation of drunkenness -

i singe brighter than any
    conflagration, and in the belly
  of the dark sits a god, grieving,
   announcing rain earlier than
     the heaving of trees and
    acrimonies:
  there is ease in between
   burning and ablution
that pass on the soliloquy.
  
       this is the recurrence
  of new familiars, forging without
    hope, rid of blame, rogue
      with only little identity.
    true-telling roars bludgeoned
       into infinitesimal voices,
    to drink alone,
        the wine
            of
              the forgetful.

Wilfredo

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

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

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

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

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

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

within my retina, a woman
   sits cursive, writing in the flesh,
  words i could no longer parry.

preening through the brightness,
   its extensive turn, spanking the curve
  of the elbow room decrees

   - we are
         to each other
   and away
      we go
         arriving at unknown places -

  yet her
     multiple gestures array.

  woman
your full fathom's depth
      souses the traceless flame;
  trapeze from
      hate to
          love formless, crossing
paths limbless caught in the spar
     of enjambments

    our then aberration of lips
   sutures something bleeding
      profusely; this morning
   holds a torch passed on to
      your body's shade tossed
  out of nascent states:

     we are young
   yet never younger, chasing
    in circles enclosed in dome-hands.

Flower – crouched, crowned in its color tender, entombed, sees the moon.
     she has ten thousand things in her mind but only one heart
     for the life of her. She looks away from light
     through her spectacles yet only has her eyes on one figure, alone.
     somewhere in the mountain, drunk with the clash of land.
     she has her quicksilver of mind. Intoxicates when willed, talks,
    expires heaven a manifold. Supernal silence when nothing
    excites – she has mouths for kissing a hundred things but only
     the kink of fire for one. A wrestled shadow taking form of
     towers bigger than cities. She has two feet for the world, yet only
    one destination – to herself, and herself alone.
    She is much of herself the rest of the world shorn out of wide-eyed
    ruin – say, small bird, wishing her luck through wet leaves
    shake cataclysms down our sleeves – she does not know how to swim,
    yet has the blue of sea; anchored in the weight of unborn laments.
   No more moves the sight of her, but herself in the mirror.
    Stripped of sense and naked in a fine-tuned near-death thrill
    of hunkered ravening, we are left to our own devices, mapping out
    labyrinths. She has heard so many farewells, shook her not,
                steered her clear into the immensity of a wider room,
     her hands steely, pried open and precisely the span of bent tapestry,
                 alive in the receiving dark now, she has her eyes the size
      of Moons, shining on one alone, that is not I – furtively the distance
    calms and there is truth rising from the depths of deceit.
             The palpable freedom makes the Earth wider and she has only
    the world in her hands, trying senselessly not to shatter it.

I  know  the  world    has only    space
      for    a woman   and  her  heart,   her  ******* emblazoned in  the trees,
her  depths  in voluminous   books – let only   the   saltine  water
   touch   her brindled   body   atilt   amongst  the lilies   in the  silver  dawn

         and   that her    cusped   hands  demand  a softer  hue of  love    whereas
the   salacious  wind  continues   its   grasp  championing  things   both  fragile
      and   sturdy:  the   world  slides  in the  coloured  curve of   a woman
         and  the men dare  too,  follow  the road  where they meet first  with
  death   sitting   still with  the  roses  like   a    splendid   fragrance   stilled in the mind
      leading     you   to a  garden  which   thorns   are ensconced
          in  a smoothness   that  sings    salutations    to love – as  I   remain  to be
nose-deep   sheath   after    sheath,  ****   after   ****,   stalking   the
           perfume   of   the  world  a  woman   owns.

the world around me, in the world of men
   studded to the hilt with green (scorches silence, the time-corroded
     hands that mean to caress) – it is because in birdflight and bird-knowledge
I am with them.

    their beaks excite, the flair in their physiognomy retain importance,
  it is    in   their   vague   meters,   the measure of    roads  remain
    undefined.   the world  around me,   in the world    of men
        flayed    to the    bone    with the   color     of     green
  (its   congenital     quiet,    its    growth   like  the   sea,   a mound  of
          island-woven  muses rising    like   caryatids )

   in    such   loftiness   I  can   endure
God’s    hand   through    the    rind   of   the limit   testing
    pain’s   territories   with    His   bare   word;

the   world around me,   in the midst of  all men,
    perished in  the   voyage  heeding   His   footfall  outside,
smiling tenderly     proved   through   incredulity,   His    masterfulness,
  and  I,    in the   world   of   men,   have ceased   with  birds.

the eyes and their drone
seizing down
a vision -

this jar of clay
  is molded to its finite figure,
and when it is done,
   we delight in its exactitude.

it is just like any other
  languorous toil
yet i am less of what i am,
    and more of what i see.
how penetrating is the mundanity!

  these conjured appendages
  storm over this lockdown
  of phases and transitions,
  and the next thunder of words
  shall hoard in their immense
  hands palpable presciences;

ah, without eyes, what to make
  of everything? their boldnesses
    go unseen, their reticences
  remain to be something lulled
   out deeper trekking no contrivance,
    and i, livid in living,
shall only saunter through slackened space and only that -
   passing quickly, even the
shatter of moonlight and
   no words are born.

Someone will cross, kiss as if it
   were rain and tough stone as if
  it were love,

and all futures stir, taking prescience
     away making all wounds dumb
   in foretelling, time taken like an orphaned
 child from abandon

the frivol of rescue is the promise
     of its danger

making nights stranger than they were the
   first time, room made bare and wider again
with its shy deceit of furtive silence

  you, conversing in that moment of sleep's ravenings

the terror of its lightness: the frothing sea reaching for salt, circling the toe for words
   left in tongue's misery, clasped and irretrievable like the vanity of naked principle
    rushing like tides in between
   bone-spaces;

my frolicsome feet can only
imagine with their bones
the dream of what venture
requires me to go
farther to reach you.

it is with each step that
these passing trembles
conclude their premonitions.

it is when my hands wind-hover
in thick space that my mind
levitates itself and lifts to
draw with a shaking hand,
its own topography.

(x) is your place
      (y) is mine
   and somewhere in this
  haphazard equation is an
  algorithm that makes sound as
  all the circles are small
  without sides, and all shapes
  continue to break without form,
  encircling us now are the shards
  of this equation's
        fervent stridence.

   all of this is stellified
    without mind's authority -
only a heart's persistent longing
   and a trifle of courage,
  when these sordid amplitudes
    flounder to no swaying,
  there will be bridges for me
    to stride on so as to
  close the distances and
      silence the enigmas
  with their sought-for answers.

have we not stood
under the grasp
of one trade wind?

i look at you, and you return
a broken image–
my eyes have lost their irises.

i speak to you, and you give back
a mouthful enigma–
my mouth has lost its language.

i gaze at the sky, and it relents
an anguished star: it is you,
in the belly of the dark releasing
the moon and its lunar tail–
my days are fragmented
and all there is,

the night and the fall:
we are,
we were;
away.

oh, what darling things live
   in me continually announce her being:

   the indent of my hands
   the grit of my teeth
   the ache of my bones when i move
      far away from you
   the intimate commune of my mouth
   to the supple fruit of the world
    and my mind wandering
   what to make of nakedness when
    you have displaced my weight
into something air's deft hands dare carry!

  we are only afloat in each other's
   fervid atmosphere.
  there are spaces i yield when you ******
    forward, killing the fires that live
      in me,
    the silences that confess the
   mild affliction of the bed now void
      and impression-laden,
   how swiftly i was taken away and how
      plodding my return has been,
   not so much now myself denying
      the imprint of such sharp moment
    weaving your truancy

  that whenever we make love,
    there is something in me that dies
     repeatedly, even now, alone
   underneath a latticework of dark,
   for love clung rather ponderously
         stifling all words quivering
          and panging and there is now
   you, rolling together with the continuity
     of these words, thralling me to
      one more embrace.

the world utters few,
light treading its way
through scrunched up space of tension.

inimitable
as all images
burst a flounder in colour.

spectacles of past
pullulating retrograde,
moving past our photographs.

look at your
    familiar edges
    as i open you
    s l o w l y,
    delicately as
    autumn kisses full,
    the ground of no
    pulchritude,
    and smell you
    burning with
    indomitable perfume.
    page after page,
   leaf after leaf
   and so it goes that
   my love fares
     moribund tides
    of unrest.

       and in steep
   silence, the unsettling dream
   of dust in the stolid dark
   repeats like the many spires
     of day and the troubles
    of night - in my heart-shelf
    i shall fasten you to mine
     chest, dream mazy into
    the paragraphs of your kisses
     as my eyes end to read
      in their gentle closing.
     in the morning, i shall
       come to being, and read
        you again!

Imagine   hot
water           music
            traipsing  down  my  throat
when you   had  your  sharp   tongue
      shoved    down   my  throat
with   contestations    simmering   in  my   sinews,
  a  few   of    them   scandalous
some    true    like   the   sudden fleeting   of your   crepuscular brow
   to   two moons   paler   than   the love –
or   the    long    traverse   to the   treacherous
    roads    of   your   skin   mapped   out   in excess
your   lecherous   debris   sprawling  everywhere   like   words
   to   a   book   or   silence  to   an   early  morning    commute,
your     undulant  bursts   outmatch   the weight  of   my
     steady  anchors,  imagine   this   cold   wind  sinking  deep
into   the    bone    at  4 o’clock   in   the   afternoon
   drunk    in  front   of    faceless  crowds
hunting     for   purpose,  discombobulated   erudition
      in    sodden   corners   and cheap  thrills,

imagine      the     scrumptious   twinge   of
     the  Sun that  mangles   its   arms   to paint   a new
moon   for   us  both   and    think of  this   as   a  consignment  to
  oblivion    when  the twists   and  turns   of  the road
     remember  only    measures   of   steps that have no  names
       and   not   the passengers, where   one   wrong   forceful
  shot   at   fate   could   mean   the   end  of  all things down
   below  an ocean  of muck   or   just  stale blackness and  ravines
      of    voices   bellowing   to call  out departed   ones

where   you   are just   as trivial    as
    driving  in  Kennon Rd.   at night   without  maps
and   beacons,  only   far-fetched   city buoys,
    the  frigid     wind,  the collapsing   bannister   of the night
cloying   the   turns   sharper than  how  it was to   first  see you   leave
    in   the morning,      bringing   in  the  fog  for the first
        light   of  reality    to   burn.

he is inside out. no time to catch the thrill
   of a ripe morning
               knifes his way through a thick airport mass
   and captures jet-fuel perfume,
      collar squalid as brawling for yesterday,
      in front of the masses is waltz, music is    threadbare, as if left with no choice,
      extricating the sound and all that will remain
      is silence. no more will move the
           body of you, take this river.

  how do i name this assault?
       by remembering.
  how do i exact my revenge?
      by renaming your terror with something
      i have outgrown. say, a roach on the wall,
    or an intense wind turning trees shearing
       the lull.

  you should have disappeared yesterday,
   yet now back with forms these pleasures
    seize. if i were given a reason to abandon
           everything,
    there will be no assault. there will be no revenge.
        only a separate day celebrated by the vital pulse
    of a moist hour, this day, when everything
       should have fallen in place
         but refused to, rivals through settings,
     and slowly begins a rupture.
 
     you are this assault. sounds draw
     naked in the sequestered silence.
     a pigeon darts. the short bus whirs mechanical
      exhaust. hinges twinge like guillotine.
          it is time to go. it is Saturday.

if    you sing a moment   of  transaction
   or  the sudden  influx  of  a face   conjured
    to so many an  enterprise offered  for

    protest.   A hand's  insisting  tremor
   an   emptying  from  over  and  over  an  indication
   of  askance.

   A  counterfeit  I  cannot   grieve over   and  over.
   Its   renown   a  nearest   position /
               a   silhouette   from a  smokestack
      about  to be   sensed    out from a   customary
                strangeness.

         stranded in    a   lilt   of  a  becoming  word
    or   question   subtitling  a  frantic    enemy

      you --  panicking  all   across, a retailed
          fugitive   thing. You can   become   a plaza

     if   not   sing  but   exist  in the   district
  from    a humdrum  projection   fated,  tagged
       with  a  purebred  amount.  You  can
 
   will   it   so  /unbecoming of/ a   plaza   minused from     and  adhered   to   as  cacophonic
           only   in   newsprint here is  your performance
    of    a numbered  caution. Permit  you  to  be

     nominal,   going   into   without  purpose

            you   can   become   a   plaza
     if        I     pose    need  from     (y)earning

A.


  drone this    day empirical
  from where we were once  the we
  rained from,    a high excursion
   which savvy the drop, weighing in, a fault

  trying to convince   the day when Sun
  embellished from the   ravine  of your hand,
  a catacomb   secured   by the  rolling
     of your  body like   a boulder   keeping
  a minute   sacred, christened an evinced noon

   that    was  your  repetitive finding.   onto
  
    a netted    frame   caught,  dripping out of
   a felt   space in    need   for graphs  to measure
        from,   a well unnamed  which  presence
          resembling  your body,  resounding
   the     fluency of    what  the  physical  ascribes    
        an   iamb    of    a crowd  inverted,  diminishing
                 and inflected in   a day's livid sigh

     housed        in  a  jar that   is  a mouth
        words   assemble    an  ikebana willing
    a     delayed     color  that  was   a   lack.
                  held   a  device  that   was    a  sky
        or   a  gleaming  face with   a high price
    claiming       a  solstitial  --  when    I  went
                   to your   home  it was   Saturday all
   week   inside  my   ribcage  chiming  worship.

   plastered   to   a  sheen all is  equal  underneath
           equatorial   tracing    a   sphere    when
     I    found  stroking   the   innards   of   a calendar
               it   is   November.     it  is   Saturday.

B.

   he   comes  from
   low  wattage this  night's  post
   a wonderful polyp
   to   begin  a
   blight
   apparently  so from a cut blackest gutter
         carrying an ample   water  virulent
             when  taken  in  and   again   in

    a  savingslight  of     metamorphosis
       climbs   vertical   so  the winged moon
              
              is    a  black  bird   in   the   blackest
       cage /  baltic  a different  fraternity
       of    land    with   the    same   pictorial

     this   lovely  stillness   calling   it  work
   a  flood   could  mean pernicious   is  blood
              brewed   from  this climate
          it   is   here  past Mandaue hillsides   dreaming
                 if place were  rumored  as  same-silent.