Staccato-***. Can you feel the damnation in the
    trickling water of minutes?  This fragment considers
   revising but in the next act, I will turn you into a miracle:
        a cloud of a sigh into rarefied air, and that is all.
   The ******* of women hang in trees. Consider this statement
     a ruthless compunction. Flesh in the market, I haggle prices
         with the butcher. I’ll take one in exchange for a love
   christened with portent, I gave it no unction – fresh as a fruit’s glaze
      in spring, or the crunch of dew somewhere along Baguio in the morning,
            intestinal roads frothing with excess of fog. Consider trees
   in akimbo past your sweltering window – the panes in feverish heat,
        what are you to do but splash water? Bathe. *****. Sully.
            We have no inertia in this feetless adagio. Wind is sandpaper.
  Pain is tactile. I am a ******, paving the way, crucified on no longitude-latitude.

my derelict third year in the drone:
a way to assuage what it feels to

function. to breathe mechanical air.
the rambunctious scent of morning appears

ill, confabulated, lysergic at most.
ladies in lithe dresses pose for pressing scenes.

taken photographs held up in loose light.
pelvises unloosening, ****** on the thoroughfares

fishing for trout as men, men as flowers,
lackadaisical graffiti dropping like simian jaw

upon visions of thigh. everything signatures a suture
so precise like a repair of the lip,

or the rapture of birds in impossibly blue skies.
news was that a fortune was coming in,

and I slept within the masses; dreams deliberately
vandalized and fragged.

they said it would be
marvelous. they said it would not ****.

i see a woman
in her 20s. falling subtly, a gingham dress

sexed if not pullulated by flower-heads,
she said it would be darling

my third year in the machine.

there is principle, there is mad luck on the streets
 but then again, i have neither one.
i assume the idleness of poles underneath the roof of a cafe in Poblacion
   and wonder where all my poems go,
 the value they impose -- only there's implosion   and not   so much sense
    so i go out to seek tenderly in the night,
 a cheap moon trapped underneath the bottle   of a pilsner
   as i hear one  of   the patrons call out
  my solitude like a ******* on all fours;

one afternoon pursues a following.
  i have wasted my time writing and stopping
 to   watch   stray hounds   pant   and
     ****    on the hot asphalt of Plaridel.
the   papers   retch  at tyrannies.
    hands   for  mechanisms  configured to
  a heady bias of  probabilities.
 the   house   next  to me is  being
     overhauled   and i  imagine  the incredulity
of   things  not their own  meanings.

  a pair of old Chuck Taylors on the bedspread,  a decrepit  bed for making love
    or passing time or  wasting the night away.
somewhere, someone  is  reading my  poems  and  weeping at the  cadence.
   most do not notice -- it was the caprice of things   not mine to  commandeer.
   the sound  of  stone masons hammering
boulders double the  melancholia.
   the deliberate sieving of  sand and  stone
      felt like   sandpaper air.
 the matutinal  sky split into dire condition
    much like  mine: becoming   and unbecoming.

all the   ******* are out in the streets
with ladies wuthering in high strides.
all the priests are in their rendezvous,
killing buddha heads.
the police have silenced the sirens
and behind pairs of old navy blue slacks
   and mobiles covered with dust,
the  captives scream mercy.
all the ATMs drone the pither of metal mouths.
a widow in Bocaue holding a picture
  of the departed.

i look up and see my face in the sky:
  if only i could **** the man and be the man,
fill his shoes with flesh, his movements my emulation, his enigmas my clarity, his day old denims my best dress.


more than beer and cigarettes have done me in and more to myself much no less
   than a cat hit by a speeding bicycle
  somewhere in Padre Faura.

madness hurries like a lover and hands me
   a picture of the moon.

i've got something and that's good enough
  as the police leave the grime of times
   and evict drunks off the streets of Malolos,
  as the priests step into the showers, naked
  and bloodied just like the ordinary man,
  as the cat that was hit
      by   a bicycle
   goes   back   to   the dark
  licking   the   salt  off the wound,
    bone fractured,    still alive on the  hot roof.

It should’ve been Bagan –
she always loved Bagan,
Myanmar.

look, woman.
I am a dog outside your home,
overwrought and disarmed,
hunting for bones.

inverse moon over Pasig
tonight and I am on
my 4th bottle of beer already,

barking without teeth.
raged behind the typewriter
with nothing but a visibly

veiled waiting
this stance so
obscure,
so absurd
like the abrupt life
of candle-flame.

I was the lover
and you cared for flame:
now the fire is dead
and there is nothing left
for the sea to lambast,
erased by the shores of feel.

symphonies out on the streets
like leprous children scrunched deep in
the mire of the streets for alms.

it is now my 5th bottle
and I **** on the stone-gnome
in my mother’s lawn
and she will know of the reek
of this pungent disbelief – scorn me for
my heavy drinking

but what is a man to do
when he
is as destroyed
as

the morning

outside?

the edge of green,
   egress — conscious permission
of some inundation or cataract

  and the raucous facelessness
  of passing figures. army melancholia
in situ — past greens of dread
    and red, some blue of course (in
    dapple of sunlight bordering
      sublimities)

  i submit to its silence and no longer
     ponder its requisites. draped
by fog, helm of pines. the zigzag of
      deliverance swindling the disposable
line of fast-paced time-hover.

       there's no god here. only the
wind, the trellis surmising a component
    of nothing and happening,
  and all ephemera cycling across
   seasons forever changing and their
obsolescence of ways to retain their
    positions until air frizzles
  no
     longer
   than a bated  breath.

It is     dawn again in the periphery.
   Slowly beings a rehearsal.

A furious want only brought
the tint of the sky down to its last trinket.
Glides over air – resigns under dissonant skies.
First angle: tiptoe. I admire your machines.
   Second: a song for no one to hear but your presence
          my adulation sings with.
   You are a farewell for no one.

The cotillion undone under pirouette of Suns.
Music still for the mouth to bloom,
awakened at the edge of the world
that tastes nothing like metal.

Housed in reliquary assumed by the hands,
   committed to duty:
  contain the coryphée – body revolving, breath held to count,
  how many days expire to bring

back    the  black of   night.

it is like the many nights

sleepless
intone of light
on the tiled floor
and surreptitiously
under the
influence
wringing out poems
while looking
at
8th and 7th street
fondling darkness
like virgins on
the absolute
a mutiny of
dead cigar butts on the
corner as "kuya Louie"
passes by with a wrench
half-drunk with "Emperador"
half-mad with ars poetica.
other sense of self
somewhere brash and brazen
awash with modern
sensibilities
as this night deepens
whiter like the color
of new bones
to fledgling movements,

just like any other night.

dinggin ang lagaslas ng tubig
na pumapalupot sa bisig.

handa na ang bukana.
kasabay ng pag-alon ng damdamin
ang
     p
     a
     g
     b
     a
     g
     s
     a
     k

ng lamig na dala ng pag-lisan
o ang init na lulan ng pag-dating

papalapit ng papalapit
sa nagngungusap na mga mata,
sinasalamin nang iyong banta
ang aking bibig.

bilugan, hubad,
   tahimik.

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

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

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

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

deep within
  this walled, scrunched heart
  a flower (a fool)
  whose mouth is open waiting for   the rain of words - we all are.
stretching in the dark as want outwrestles need in a melee
  of hands, of populace bumping
  into each other in an enclosed
  cage like two birds wary of each other's movements,

the threat of its gate, opening, freeing one, the other, staying,
  is the lilt of a song and the wilt of its sound dwindling as the urgent questions gnaw the bone of
silence trying to wring out light in the dark's tumultuous passing
  waters turning luminosities
  into liquid under my feet.

and now, the brew of unspoken
   petrichor stirs in the ground
and the clouds gossamer than ever,
i close my parasol with my head
    into the sky, waiting endlessly
for rain to quench the ivies of
   love's battlements!

because love is the summer
and its haze is the invitation
to winter

because it is what our inner sense
refutes and strips us of
our meaningless rationales

because it is what necessitates
our blurred selves to come
into a halcyon of so many laughters
weaving only what tears could
never provide - a diadem of light

because love is a string of birds
that continually searches for
a thick green home and atop
is where it perches proudly
looking down on new moon
and old stars,

because love is the pour of
something as luminous, crystalline
as a faint spark of frankness,
and that we, in believing this,
must have forgotten what it meant
to be obsequiously wounded closer
to the hortatory of roses and their
prickly salutations

and because love is the tongue
surrounded by the many words
of pain, and that it is its
refusal to wake in the day
of a language without a word
for winter and infinitude

because love is the chaos of
sound that it hears only alone -
unless unmindfully, rawly, we
hold it close to our chests
as it moves with its fledgling beat, ready to touch.

this marauding dark.
  a bleak behemoth ---
  the head of the chimera.

  integer by
  blind integer,
  life's
  absolute emptiness.
  a sidereal zero.
  caught in the web
  of a relentless
   tarantula.
  this
    dead end
      or this ***** in
   the armor.

  life's what you make it.
  i make it like this:
  intractable like a fiend,
  these words unsheathe like
  rusting swords in old scabbards.
  i astonish death with smallness.

belaboring hurt-bells
of twilight

outside there is a furious wind
sweeping the sour-faced pavement.
the helm of the morning
fits through the pinecones.
through the dandelion,
the diadem of some mystic flower,
the flurry of children
and the fury of the populace.

i know whence the wind stirs
cold flame from the many a dead
stones, sequined floor and the
dreary stillicide of night.
our bodies rise to the sun
that is a full woman
or a ripe apple
or a half-bitten moon in glare
and when her lips purse
there is pang in the wind that blows austere beneath the foot
of hills in ruin.

let the night come later than
a bird's secret sojourn,
or the cicada's enigma.
let the cathedral of my heart
quiver later than the unsheathing
of the night's bone
but in the twilight,
when the skies are bruised with
silence and somnolent without voice
my hands shall leap into the wind
and make do, the belaboring
hurt-bells of twilight.
no more than a crepuscular twining
of a sad vine on a melancholy hymn
that makes fuller with its tender
maneuvers, the trundling in
love's wearisome vessel.

Bellisima! ****
descending on the table, a crash,
a severance, a banquet.
   the linen is white
    aflame,
   a pond of light underneath
    sorry elbows and frantic
    fingers (thump!
               thump!
                thump!)
   a dry *** of inquiries
engraved in heady crepusculario.
   twilight's fingers chiming
     my heart - lute, mine strings
  outstretched to breaking (a tremendous pang!)
   but the sound it makes
    is a coveted amaranth.
dark outwrestling
     dark.
         in front stretches a
     white river of wine - we will not last until light seeks its
      calm home
       but we will stay.
    we will remain tasting the brine of what immense sea,
    licking the salt off of the
sweetness,
    gnawing, falling off the
   curbed bone,
   this p
          o
            e
              m ...

how i wish to hurry
  back to arms, hurtling

bearing me into the hollow
of hand full of hours rearing me prolongations of wordlessness —

   bell-jar, your lip,
  smashed into concrete, my lip.

  bleeding, your lip,
quenching the tractable beast, my lip.

  silence annuls, your lip
leaving the noise in me borderless, my lip,

wanting it more than
   how dead trees desire autumn
     light, your lip
  left nocturnal, pulse dare drunkenly away, slovenly from the ground, my lip

  i cannot have it
    anymore.

1
Corrections. You drew a straight line and noticed its crooked part. Arrhythmia, was it? Or picket fences for us to blame? The seismic consequence of righting out wrongs. To even realize the thick light
      shining through like some stray decision.
                               The hot mint of touch carved out by concern, and to forbear a slight chance
            at miracles. We have no concept of heaven, this strange wall between us. When I look at you,
   I see myself at bay, multiplying weaved tears for scraps and metals. A mirror of the sea breaking
            amidst the sea. We have no sense of what is right – we only have sense of feeling.

We twirled between the sheets and broke the circles,
   the air in between collision produced silence. Gossamer. Clear. Sure and exact. Where are we headed?
                 We are crossing each other’s worlds with nothing but heavy bags of ourselves waiting
   in stations rid of the populace. Implication: this is the part where I fall asleep standing
          and you carefully traced your steps back to the source.

2

dark swerves to more darkness. Faults. There is a place for all aches a finger, or say a hand where I sense yours, should be. It is here, in this finite silence.
                         I notice peripheries to give them their apt intensities. Say, driving along the freeway,
   you in your night-old shirt, and it starts to rain. I will recognize everything, pile after pile, fade after fade, quick to match this disappearance is your head out in the window
                    celebrating the world and you tell yourself: I do not know, and I care not.
     And I begin to say it without saying it, and you ended it without ending it – this curious case of contention, part yours and lonely selves waxing in complete space
              to the edge of our seats, brought to the brink of all fear but you were braver and I am much
to myself, a trickle of rain descending from inflorescence of leaves.

3

I am looking at the subtle insufficiency of maps, and the enigmas of things their own structures
     eluding touch. Somewhere along the way, we get lost
                    but you remember then, somewhere in the vast terrain,
     you remember where we set foot and marked it with some vague memory of origin,
               coming back to it still untarnished, knowing it was there all along,
and you took it in your hands and tore it apart – your face swollen with satisfaction, we
                     trouble ourselves in the dearth of feeling – what’s left is a naked word
        splintered in the pavement. You told me you will never come back to this
                                strange place.

4

a singular impedance of movement was all it took
       to romanticize what it meant like to be still as your brindled face this evening.
I always held you like a child would, a blanket in somnolence. Rays of sun searching
                 for mouths of flowers – heat becomes its negligible end: sweat pulses
   through open integuments drained of their poisons. The voice from the thickness
         of quiet translated: the moment suddenly hits its sojourn, and goes through
                   gradual dissipation.

   you have missed tonight’s highlight simply because
                  you were mum as a nurse in your camphor of white departure, and I cannot overlook
  how the stars begin to wrestle each other, telling an allegory of darkness and hearing a catastrophe
                begin its fusillade of entrances taking form in tomorrow’s tabloids
  you know not about.

         They say when you hold someone, you transmit something and might leave a thing
worthy of hypothesis. The sound was made clear and I did not flinch.
                            You were asleep the whole time.

beneath   her   feet
   her   most  daring
   feet
   that  traversed
   the murky waters
   of    dawn, past  mountainsides
  of  prayers,   stallions  the blackest mare
   love combined,  daresay   silence   annuls
   the    noise   of heart   and the  shadow
   casts its  darkest immaterial   stone

beneath    her   feet
    her  most  daring
    feet
    the    dead    continue
 ­   to   bury the   living
   and the    living    excites
    the    demanded hue   of another   blue
     to hold close   into the   sky
     whose    also    darling   feet   dangle
     much    like     water’s    fervent  collapse
    mantling   the   rivers,    miles you have
   walked   without     images    of I

beneath her    feet
   her most   beautiful    feet
    we   go   wind  by   wind in   excess
    of    days
    in   the night’s   blackest   dress    soiled
  by     light    is inmost    dance   instep,
     curated   from   machineries
   beneath her feet
    your     feet    I    adore
  which   bony prominences    hurdle
   me     weak,    ruined,
where    I    lay  
is   always  the   cradle    of   Earth
   your    feet and   I beneath
  them,   emerging   from   the  possible   life
    of    leaves   in   birdflight,

beneath    your    feet
    your     cold    feet,   unrelenting
on    the    unkind    tomb   of   my body
      your   swift   drop    of    feet,  their
superfluous   coming-and-going
   love    landing    on my  body – trampled,   weighed down
  beneath   your    feet,
    your    most darling    feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it is many things
     solitary -- through ripeness
    and rawness, through the
      locomotion of dancers,
     and sensibilities of
     quiet tongues.

it is the many things you
    give alone, its persistent comma, its continual ellipsis.
    the inundation of delineations
and the gravity of its punctuation.

  with its fingers meandering
to touch a soul's lifted ether,
or simply to hush and still
  repugnant waters - astonishing
all nebula with its largeness.

it is so many intentions,
   yet, a single iteration.
  inveigled are the white shadows
of walls streaked with black light.

  what
     is
       it?

it is perhaps an impending collision,
   to no soul's severance:
it is the meshwork of grace
     or foolishness;
  it is the working of the word
from so many lovers and singlehandedly nailing us to our
    stationed cicatrices.

love's epigraphic, weightless,
   no more than size of
      a captured wave in net
  of stone: concealed in an eye's
     limitless space.Q

underneath the throbbing roof-beam,
where no words
bend
sliver
fall
in the
subtly put
dark -
beyond **** light, i,
a falling leaf soldering to Earth
or a ****** of wind crossed
by brambly foliage and crisp sun remembers flesh in our arms and now, flailing to dance in fledgling
beat
  
      endlessly as a secret,
      a cajole of a finger
      into the heart of storms,
      or the rain's secret upon
      pried flowers about
       to set loose in the
      teeth of the cold wanting
       to make pale fire.

Nandito na ako sa labas, sa ilalim ng payapang ilaw mula
          sa poste kasabay ng pamamayagpag ng mainit
          na hangin ngayong Marso.

   Nag-hihintay sa kasunod na pigura na lalabas mula
          sa masikip na daluyan ng tao – ikaw o ang konsepto

ng    ikaw   na    ‘di   dapat,  maselan
   kagaya ng pagnanais,

       pagkakataong mas sinungaling pa sa
pamahiin – mayroong napupukaw
    ngunit   hindi kalian man mabibihag.

in the swollen eve of night,
we are light trilling on boughs
and the same bird that arrives
in the morning
is the same bird that abandons us
in the evening,

half-illuminated in flight,
surrounded by the quake of the world,
i take this edge of silence
and its shine-meshed motions
propping up the shadow and defeating
it after with no hesitation, no sallow contrition, no ravening contention;
the night's tenement is the
same clout of daylight's lulled out prisoner: take honestly by saying laughter
and its meager dance frothing in the mouth, shying away into atrial flutters.

feasting in the wind, unfettered, loosely
ambling like waters set free in the vein
of the autumnal world

we've gone where nobody else went,
scared of our freedom, our reluctance to glance back at our petrified images,
willed with a different fire we didn't know our hearths possessed,

on and on, past cathedrals,
     past synagogue bells which word not
  our names, only the mornings we have
   scattered and recollected, bannering
     through our lives, separate, joining all
  that has defied their deaths,
    the unscathed flowers of the garden
and the sheen of whose eyes lost
  their youthful glint,

  on and on,
  never returning, mapping
  a labyrinth of its own.

i have held with
fascination, when i was young,
  all of my toys.

a parallel universe of
  marvels. imperial is the mood
of these ecstasies!

i remember my cheap svelte revolver
  back in 1998 bought from
  the festive bazaar in the marketplace at the dreary heart of Bocaue when i was
consumed by the thought of brutal force and how swiftly, in the hands of men meant for twisting open
   the doors, welcome death
or the metallurgy of it.

i used to run off into the sunset
  toting my gun high with pride
   shunning the Sun, and the
reprise of my carousals is my mother
    soldering in her white hands
a "walis tambo" and summoning me
     homeward with a churlish grin
on my face, triumphantly ecstatic
   over my rendezvous.

now my gun has withstood the
   tatterdemalion of dog days
and in one corner i felt its
  brokenness as it yearns to
  be retired early in the peak
    of my youth. happiness wears down like a chip on the old linoleumed floor and i tinker with
  it to unsheathe the grime
  of the unspoken stucco concrete.

  i placed it in a box, my black revolver, together with the toys
   that i once laughed with
when only bliss is as simple as a juvenile love, or the easy picking
    of a santan over the fields
      where i ran off into
the viridian laughing with the verdure of the world that i once knew as something so beautiful
   and intricate.

i heard my black revolver went
   somewhere behind the macadamized wall where i dreamt of having a basketball ring nailed to.
   only i knew how to play
my revolver, and now that i am
   caught within the heaviness
  of all things that mean greater
  than all other joys,
   no other days could ever
surpass how
  i made
    a hero in myself
mighty with the tales
     that i keep.

good ole black revolver, 1998.

blank spaces sharpen the same way a whetted blade would
   in a dull moment of assault;

the sky above me, I wished for, over in and caving for,
  a gun doing its own sinister deed

of shoving into the highlighted realm of some peace-distortion
  when it is done, I will hear laughter shearing

the wind with its beautiful imprint
  unless it was always darkness and just that – a place for passion

and so much of it in the middle of nothing, I cannot
  bid well into these frenzied moments of tense

stillness – when it is done
I will hear you laughing, screaming into the wind,

    a name,   *someone else’s

naming my father's victories
past monoliths trapped
in glass case

and tracing my mother's tenderness
across the film negatives
we've no use for anymore.

yesterday was
a victory for my kindred,
while i still drag the augury of
yesteryears lovelessly
athwart the narrow corridors

yet this
man is still the wind

or a bamboo in duress
forced to
breakpoint.

the dinner clatter in the
kitchen mellows down to
wary dregs. my brother laughs
affording atonement
and everything at the verge
of palpable revelry,

i the unspoken yet
heard. my mother often wonders
from who did i inherit
such mood:
all dark
and trudging the infinite.

I, whose sleep gloats
searching for answers, steering for a dream

I take my place amongst men
in parks, in alleys, in trains,

and the Sun unmasks itself
like timeworn skies of linoleum.

trees their bulwarks realize such oneness
and birds start to rain

where time wounds all feelings
and lovers innumerably lay flat on their bellies.

mountains ***** as tall as truths,
and the sleuth more than my body’s engine

turns less than a seraphim – dizzy with the
night’s utmost haranguing.

I, whose soul returns not with garlands
but with chains as my phantoms go with them

swimmingly across the blue Earth
and a man brindled, tussled against

space that so distant the star becomes so near
and all sleep lose names of dreams.

We have now become this bleached wall exposed
to graffiti; you and I, lost in a vector dwindling somewhere
between flight and ground-woven footing.
Like only such delicate secret opens to tongued up
and thighed upon space – only nightscapes the air dares elope with,
but isn’t that what absence hands over, a roughed up winding
moonlight suspended in crunched ether, or something else
that bade sibilance of speech rammed in preterit?
A blossoming descends in Maytime, besmirched with dreams
collapsing on obelisks. The moment in which I thought you
to be devouring space, nurturing a whelm of heat squalled and
intent, fanning a spleen of intimation, riveting a conflagration.
Else it was before, sulking in the finagling quiet: truths hauled
out and carved to foists,
      much room it was to differ a voice and fragment message,
      staring at this world the first time and the last – all at once
      in that rampaging instance, the rest of the world pinned down
                                                        befo­re me.

the mere bookend soon became the fury of beautiful beginning!

death so small when you
have the world in your lightsome hands.

the way your face crinkles
at the glare of a word's
furious light

and the way your eyes
widen anew like tapestries
and the bird of syllables
stills itself in
the woven shrub. unwrapping with utmost care is your mind's calloused hands, revealing a spar of darkness and light.
unsealing you is your yearning's
fingers, like autumn to snow's enveloped remnant.

oh how the world
sinks in its solitary axis.
oh how the comets intermingle
in orbit, greeting each other
with flamboyant punctuations back to loose fluidity
for us to drink and revel in.

what joy is the sight
of you, reading.
what bliss is the sight of
reading you, as bold as the word
is in sensuous print,
yet shy as a daffodil shivering
in the wind,
unheard of as a hurl of a voice
in the zenith,
trembling in your hands,

the word of the world.

the rest of the lights before you
slid into erasures. we have become
everything the city is in its precocity;

from the wind that gallops, the dog
howling into a crossfade, even underneath
the already dead lampposts that give

in to the velocity of such departure,
a divisible line. a border I cannot cross.
I dip my body into the thick dark

and become bendable light through
the crevice of doors. the gnawing silence,
your leitmotif. something the wind is still

all beautiful things passing and I become
nothing more but a dank memory in the muck
of forgetting – whatever it was, that I conversed with,

stars their dereliction, all across the flagrant void,
I am beating with more life than ever,
dancing around your leftover moon.

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.

days when all you had to do was
arrange the furniture and watch the passing
of shadows in mellifluous slowness – ready to catch
you in heft of mesh.

nothing keeps her in place.
that is what you said. you said you were
always moving
from the north up to the south,
and at times the north of no south
that refuses to be held close into straight paths.

you gave it no unction – this abstraction.
christened with the water from
your measures, slipping out of grips,
from where you are and where I found you in,
retained in some sense of placeness,
almost cuts with the sharp dagger
of wind in mornings when you peer
into the putrid landscape of Manila asphyxiated
by the rise of smog.

her sorrows remain untouched and intact,
given urgency by the emptiness of her
hand. he had to be elsewhere and you
were in the midst of nowhere but the hollow
oblivion of your home, and I took it, I took it
and I fragmented it to gather from it,
a sacrament or say, the looming of dangers for
  mine to situate in defeat,
and I placed you somewhere like a new truth
that you’ve grown fond of,

like the only voice you hear in the night
is yours, and gathering that indistinct sound
from the stray of light was the
lover having left an impending need.
my father proposed to watch a film
with my mother and I see potential
in something that had gone away even before
  the empty din of the sea played its exhausted
machinery, telling me something known and familiar,
which I refuse to utter because it would double
its terror.

we ought to meet somewhere, you said,
a bridge, a tangent, a straight path
or a perilous curvature. you will never break
as the sparrows close in,
as the disparage quavers,
as an old man stops his engine somewhere
under a bridge beneath rondures.

we ought to meet somewhere,
you said. a word tamped into shape,
lugged into narratives,
so easy
breakable
and false.

lighting with my eyes,
this inward sanctum

hair, her black river; my terrors
congregate. strobe of aurora
strokes auburn conflagration; my
secrets aloud

her eyes now are birds floundering
in vast oceans of tawny bodies;
onerously present like the
gladiola

where warm-blooded stallions
gallop the sinews of this
straightforward physiognomy.
******* are islands thick
with fleshly origin,
  
navel's cave oozes foam
of brine, sweating in the heat
of this frail moment where
my tongue conquistadors
exploring varying perfumes,

caught in the latticing shrub,
this gossamer pearl, furious
with godly ecstasies no heaven
could tell within the bat
of an eye or the heave of seascape

relics of soul hidden in all,
mine to quarry in my hands so
little with uninterrupted thrill,

  i love thee, all darkness.

take this sea and multiplied wave.
rid of ripples or cerulean announcement;

when you lose something
you chase its sound.

fleeting, sometimes flaring
yet far yonder deep in void
****** in black.

i hear it.
i hear it walk
the sea
as the sea walks me to
its
    brink.

anything    that       is,
must   bear light —

transitory, translucent: perhaps, winged
  and conscious of space, mindful of turn,
sizing down height. vertigo of all that,
   shining no ambivalence.

this   is the way my world will end:

the room still reeks of sour mash —
   Pablo the dog, oblivious, marble-eyed,
yet some pitch-black hound's awakening
   from steely sleep.   the pages will
fall flat on the doorstep unannounced—

   it is difficult to   imagine angels.
  it is difficult to    deal God's infinities.
    they are each to their own
           faults.
  heaven is    meant to scar. still drunk
     in fearfully fretting butterflies
     tilted in slaughterhouses   screaming
       ****** against the crowd.

    there will be no falsetto claim to
  sovereign —    a drop D, e minor chord
      on the guitar, strumming, swimmingly
  discolored    and only resounding.

Air left to
rust when we speak

it now is the time
to postpone

gladly over a shining,
retaliatory absence

in search of a space
to shape a volatile figure

that was
a bridge

how, humming our steps
a valedictory

making staccato.
hurry before it catches

us mid-flow, profuse
with sustained harbors

but they cannot
see us here when they slit

us from our canvas, how?
all that radiates

expels us out of this
when no more; absorbed their

breaths boldly stuck inside
a body: a cage: a meeting: an encounter

a path dollies in perfect capture
frame by frame almost an ellipsis

the world tonight blackened
a gutter squalled by an unseen figure

darting across,  eviscerating
the bargain: that in-between produced vastness.

electric — conflated with
the doldrum of once ignited feeling
on the russet table work
and the stringing aroma of flyblown
coffee painting the morning something
earthenware;

i imagine
  
     women lounging
and displaying their flamboyant dresses
confessing a dull promenade
parading their attenuated *****. reveling
a queendom on recall and this bane,
  merely resolute, gives itself a new
meaning as a hand of forgive

   men resigning their bags on the corner,
grunts, heaves deathly serious disallowing tomorrow's arrival into
  a throb of being in place, folding newspapers to a club and smiting fervently along with the endless waiting,
  
   verses lying cold on the froth of the tile
and the wind ripening the brew of
     contestations — punctuations in their
cupboards still and reserved in hermetic
   space curating silence, giving dins
     their polished ends,

   open for all: churlish boys,
   naked girls, faith-used women, strife-torn men, usual suspects,
     rebels and the overwrought –
  never closes like a hand in cold
      or a rose, its face occulted by
identification sideways torn, inside and out struggling,
      scrunched to squint on some pale light through chinks on the battered
     wall, sipping coffee,
   mmmm, that
   morning ripple transcending the
         heaviness of the city before me.

there is much to remind yourself
of other's dazed concepts
like coming to terms
with your own madness;

The Smiths
    and this cigarette
reading Life Alone
     by R. de Ungria smashing
my head blood sprawling
   across the page
blasting in my ear a fecund dark.

what am i to do

  with a hand,
           the spindrift by the sea
  blowing against the windows,
     with a thigh,
   this palpable quietude

all mornings arrive
     with a hatful of shadows
vulgarly obtrusive
    
with the night,
        a den of thieves.

     Caligula rearing the ******
to Nero, and I to myself
     in front of the mirror
still
       clawed by the same
beast maimed
     behind the bush.

darkness excites. caliginous walls
    flounder. deepening are the blue grievances.

i should have killed you
  in the stale air of nothing; when it was said
that it takes less courage to love.

a hoarse cry in the obstinate woodland
  insolvent, pressed against the foot of hills.

the quietus in spite of artillery
over and over the deep, droning sound of it.

tirelessly the flowerheads swing forth
newfangled skin and engravings of pious woodwork

tremble in the maladroit wind. the indefatigable purple
   of the very twilight – its slow onset, flays from the air

once it gets into the vertical; I will not speak
  in front of mirrors and curse the fragrance
of camphor and its foretold departure –

everything that is not much of its communion
   living at the small altitude of my feet;

blood rises clean, emerging
  from the earthen womb as I am not hers yet,

I should have assaulted you as a marauder
   arrives in the deep, blackening night

                        of total surrender.

o, anomie, the gnash of train-gear
its locomotive song
a non-metropolitan shadow carrying
the weight of all:

life in grandest scheme—
nothing pressed against
nothing,
like a boulder dragged to the
pinnacle of no preordained vertigo,
to be watched to fall down
in rampant perpetuity,
o, Sisyphus, the world spirals
in an indifferent universe.
must our lives tilt to be nourished
by the water of despair,
   this is our fate yet still
i refuse to believe. there are finite
truths to accomplish:

the lucid invitation of the desert's fever.
the deepening dark, the fugitive pastel-hued sky, the intensity of rain
     in complete darkness.

it is the dawn in the Mediterranean festooned by supple, tawny women,
    as sunlight moves past
    the fused shade,

  my, i have died!
     in this exact moment, or the
ordinary yesterday,
     i know not.

you are slow like daggers or
        cancer.

this is what it feels like to travel
on a discourse:

something about you metastasizes
in my mind whenever the silences
are no longer beautiful;

and just like that, I thumb a prayer
to the fallen obsidian,
this harbinger of marvelous calm.

sometimes all the rooms are white
and I am immersed deep into pallor –
when both our eyes do not meet,
I wring out a cockeyed miracle:

dragging the blood of the trees with me,
these bushy polyps,
   these benign volcanoes skin,
ashen and dull like a heart – these agonized
appurtenances, I gleam like light
   cut from the mirror and fade out
as my visibilities hide.

something in me smiles when you
are flattened out – cross-legged, interconnected
  unloose a star fettered somewhere deep where
hands cannot reach for the inside of a tomb.
  
  this suchness that when I feel your sensations
press their threats against my skin,
      you are a salutary squelch
in this pure-iron condition, or a heavy-earth machinery
   moving inside my marrow, that deep

  into death like a morning waist-high
with tears, walled in by requiems.

I WILL CAPITALIZE THE
EXCLAMATIONS OF LAMENT
AND KISS YOU WHOLLY

as if nothing happened,
everything rearranged with
careful hands like furniture
in a household

I WILL SURRENDER MY
SUPERLATIVE ARMS
AND THE GUILLOTINE
OF THEIR REITERATIONS

as if everything is ripened,
everything repeats with analogue
flame and reappears unsullied
as a chastised vestige

I WILL TAKE THE SUN AND
EAT IT, SWALLOWING THE
DAYS AND THEIR APT DELINEATIONS

and whisper to your ear,
the night where everything
emerges fresh and anew, glazed
like budding of fruits hiding
behind brambly walls of leaves,
as speakeasy as a salutation,
as formulaic as a synthesis
of light,
as unprecedented as a salvage
of lightning at the back
of silver hills,

take you in my loving arms
and tell you
everything i feel.

suds fall on black like endless snow.
tarnished paint to spry—
engine's diminutive breath
clout of metal coil, ballasts of portent...

defacing the fog and giving
it a brand new meaning. beside the rice fields in sullen Bulacan,
i ache for the frog defecating
on this tortured piece of land.

birds in migratory V-positions cleave
the azure, vanishing behind the tough ornate. to whence they flee
   and to where they shall land
on their poised talons, i do not know.

   underneath the dermis and over
    it, a long stillness of waiting,
  trapped is this
     man of Earth.

Earth fosters all
    singing upstream
        the affect of
green — certain
    thingsthe
g
allan
Try
         moreover once
and folding the ineffablewater
    d
ownthe
            hill
the hands of the world
     fondling   t
he universe
      like a totterin
Ganimal
     doused in an amalgamof
     fire
   tucked in our laughter
       sweet summer
    surmise of all warmth

1.
I am optimistic enough this day clings to the highest mast,
is now born out of prophecy.
                           I pass by the old mirror: see myself: blear myself:
is blot to canvas, slit from the wrist of this home:
   I witness how it is to sustain beatings.

2.
In the empty lot, age 9, we wrung frangipanis and ruined
   the pedicle somehow a map of a history where this ground
  shook that was once an old cathedral. We blew

               bubbles out in the haziest of days, pallid and droopy
    the clouds identify in their short collisions – the stream that was
   the sky
       the  face of  my mother when found news of my would-be death
    1996, Kawasaki my mother's clutch on the soiled linen
                 beginning an autopsy

3.
I conjure a frayed upon image of death in its colloquial.
       a fractal of mistakes taken as righting out. I sense prognostication
when potential for a satisfied framed encounter or out of luck that was
       a night making all of this less than total.

I     remember the discoloration of the many lights – the sky beginning an
  erratum: this could have been your last – what is exacted here
        like a tarot, the culprit a newfangled man in the rearview mirror.

4.
How can I forget you – all of you? You wear light like karsunsilyo.
You are all flowers I arrive at a contusion of gardens.
  Rinse me with light – abandon me after.

5.
  Made air staler. Dew my maiden when lit
  from the matutinal – in tow, a bedraggled kite soaring in the heat
  one distinct summer,
      wish it pure that was I, almost touching the vermillion,
my faintest image of freedom was a bird trapped in between
   the venetian.

6.
  In a dream, I am pursued by a train in an alley – in the next scene,
I am being forced to take a plunge
       into a chasm: the fall did not scare me – but my acquiescence
made me flinch: standing before space, anesthetizing
       the skin so it made me more than metal, the clangor

   suggests a tragedy. Awakened by violent nudges
from       my mother: it was the New Year. Pyrotechnics paint the sky
over and over an ephemera in the bleak behemoth of this:
       a makeshift home ruined by untranslatable music

the sound of rain at 11 in the afternoon and a nearby funeral.

Ad infinitum*

embroiled       in another
waking            moment with
a bated            breath nothing like
this day           inclined only to obfuscate
its meaningless      joy of seeing yourself

in a pond        swimmingly doubling the inertia
of the koi       the day constricting within the verdigris
ready to          seal shut in hermetic   this vermillion eye
to wake up     into a long-held confrontation

       of   what this system closes in a document
       why bother this validation when valedictory


Ad nauseam

why bother     this   confrontation
when disappearance     this  space much like a long-held performance
   if concert is hermetic     in front   of a nonchalant audience

laudable     with  no sound,  an untranslatable music
      unhinged from the inherent risk of felling

an    inert   day   struggling   like    koi   trapped
  in a    pond    seeking  what it is   to transcend
   or   the  multiplied   joy   of seeing  yourself  meaningless

   ready   for   an  eye to   be   caught in  a  monotonously
     claustrophobic      *****   of    a   tremulous   middleground
   with   no   possible  agreement   other   than:

   this    potentially   demands   an  end
       when  beginning   you   are   lionized

  to    a   fault,   repeated,    trite:    *what for?

the lowly moon
verily traipse still
scalding hot light on ill-tempered motor hums
the snare of the muffled sound
the ecstasy of its incandescent flare

streets fat with fools
streets fat forever
streets squandered
by tiresome motion
in perpetual hymn
the wingtip of candle-flame
swaying like
a skirt of that one girl
i kept looking at
in a pub in Chicago

moon bellowing yellow chorus
singing flat tones
of death
mine to hear pining away from
its cunning edge

i've none to offer
anyone
but
despair.

the children with such earthen hands opened the book burning in Sanskrit: twilight of  Summer.
now to their own accord, they must persist in daylight, with the overgrowth arrives
           new verve to rising tendrils.
one by one, leaping out of the unclenched hands of faith, pelts of the world give
     them a renewed bounty of laughter; even the days ring true, a consortium of bells
in the nearby cathedral of Barasoain or wherever perhaps, in the streets where
   a different kind of ashen is imparted: I speak of the languor in sleep.
a gossamer canopy underneath the guava, whose leafing fingers signal them like motherless
   beacons to the sprite of the lissome afternoon – such bodies hemmed in inertia, stay
  there in search for light. blacker the wounds of trees yet insignia the name of memories,
      a river of stallions is the blood of fetal natures and I sing freely with them:
         we are the children of the loam!

Amorphous, dove-form, on rink;
I was once as free as the wind,

and I consider the day’s unremitting reminder:
bent light – falling flat on my dull skin.

Wryly enough, the mornings are pried open,
remorselessly, like a note discovered obsolete in secret

gaps: why would such unopened unraveling
be secret? A persistent memory?

I gaze by the barricade, children fluttering
almost in flight at the city center’s space,

possibly conjuring themselves up as birds
or words freed – such scene requires several audiences,

whereas adjacently crooked, I stare inanimately,
which requires no spectator, possibly dreaming

a shadow, an old man wiping his reading glass clean,
or the squalor of the heart decanted in the heat of transitories;

acute on the night-watch, I will rejoin them
like old haunts finding new-fangled skin to scar.

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

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

Ad astra

1
From the city I know you were from,
building up the perimeter in summer – it was plenty searing.
Must when I found the town already, triggered and almost accomplished,
searchable signs for searching parties involved like grass on the lawn,
scraps on an empty lot – when in summer it got very hot
and your salt smelt of the sea crushed in between my territories, start the word.
Flesh deems it so in frame, walking with us this very evening crafted
   by a waking remoteness.

2
When it rains, build this city from here on – relieve it of its terrors.
The memory of an old cathedral being burned down to the last cross,
the volume of prayer genuflected within pews, or anything that was hieratic. Rain in the
afternoon was what your entire ocean meant to me, crossing its span of promise,
   sure of its weather. Rasp the skin tight like gears fine-tuned. Borrow its heat when
   it drizzles. Do you remember my face when you pass by familiar pavements, stalls,
   hospitals drenched in prognosis? The even flutter of a bird? What does this question seek
     but your truth – like an elastic map stretched to infinite directions.

3
Here is where you were named darling. Taut your name had it belonged to someone else.
Sharp were your features. Your definitions smooth. Your textures visible with difficulty.
                       When you wore denims rising from the cuff of your knees you showed
  me a blotch and other fraternizations. Moles as variables. Your body as graph. My senselessness,
     somewhat a trying delineation. Thousand fingers mesh altogether to formulate rescue,
   mind a garden of salvage enough for two. Or underneath the sphere of a body,
         neither rain nor sun could stop to flourish me completely. Yourself full of
  symmetries – the universe cut inside and out, trimmed to lasting – ubiquity, inhabiting the temporary.
         I transact with this darkness yourself containing light, like a window to your home
when you’ve moved on to a different continent, I myself staring right into as if the whole space,
    in search for a singular glint I could make up for a cluster
                            to make an elusive thing such as you walk backwards, from the entry, just before the guardhouse, to meet me.