pious claptrap of hubbub
across the room;
you are some slender bridge
  over my waters
skimpy passage, bend so obscure
there is something
that i always take
away from you
and there is almost always too
something frequently given
back to me like a stare
even so you are eyeless
and still despite having eyes
and tender with movement,
our silence pointing out
the salacious clasp of shadow's muck
on the repugnant wall,

there is so much in common
to a body of sea and a headless sun,
where sometimes when you enter
my mind, i purposefully leap
out of it freely moving, hovering
in austere blankness, almost
cerebrally assassinating imaginations
and their claimed realness,
wishing you were somewhere far
yet within the eye to hold closer.

They took you across the home
like an uncharted furniture as the walls lost
gait and stumbled.

       Before I could shatter a word without
compunction, they took you before my eyes laid
lattices – they faltered, officiating over space that
fails infinitely when turning you away before

I could understand, say the day again happens
and my grievous art flails like a ******* child.
a deep dream within
a shallow sleep occurring within sundries –  miscellanea
  collected together, put to question but no answer folded

to be sure in its destination other than where they took you:
  the air minting the world on your face wanting to move
  and remind a fate of decay: to be malleable within clay,

and hunger for a face they stole from me.

through the lips of
the horizon
a purple parasol
of attenuated *****
  spread, flagrant is the crepuscule.

these are the exiled
  in the heliotrope world:

trees saluting the length
  of sprinting air to calm
  these undulations -
  painted are the leaves
  with blame.

lips sinking to find answers
hidden underneath the
derelict of sweat, noisome moan
after quieted breathing,
heavy with the undeniable boulder
  of craving's weight -
  tongue naked, freeing itself
  from the oubliette of flesh,
  finding what is still to be
   tasted in a covetous harvest,

it is indeed strange to be here,
  in this absolute hour
  of absent resoluteness.
to deny want and embrace fullness,
my eyes ***** these visions
   and then dive through steepness.
  no words have to be said,
  only their significations
   held secretively as roots
  are unseen flourishing in their
    obligations to this flower,
    your flower

  underneath the twilight
   of bodies crossing each other
  out, love's derivatives
    ensue.

you will only look for which road i have
  passed, with girth of oceans startled
  to hip-curve, bow-legged darling
  hiding behind pretense of rose frailty.

when words ripen, they fall.

from vaudeville of fools to silence
in all its exactness, i take my place
amongst people in stations, machines
adorning rotundas, courtyards to a flourish of twilight-bells, the men with retinas spry behind cloaks of smoke—

        plain, **** drunkenness assaults
the billion-blooded sea, each line fraught
with inebriation: a god is borrowed with
what light fruits from a slow nature, quick
to burst and torturously maimed in stride.

fated to arrive at one morning —
being in total placeness and making merry
once again, the dreary face waiting at
the portico of days collected.

when these words start to wind-hover,
a string of birds will appear clearer,
mounting umbilicus of lines.
as in hounds shear the metastasizing dark,
going back to chagrined kens,
i make truth out of the tragedy:
trace the source of this stream and find
my trampled body, floating with
   the sandalwood. when the still, clenched hand clock-punches,
   make real the insignia of my arrival:

words start with limbs to cross
  this scalped Earth which moves suddenly naked, leaning in, gropes you
in stillness, resuscitating the moon from
the working of insolvencies we rear
in derelicts of days.

drags it closely to ends — left trundling
in woe's wearisome vessel. and if in
this newly thatched home it screams,

let this voice deftly shred
so i may once more lie straight to your
half-illuminated faces, a call i
only hear.

there are many things trembling, disparate, conscious of their
     spaces. things appear colossal when near. rife as tongued word,
     an approximation – a misuse of time;

     dealing more for sight than feeling, things snap in a very short distance.
     fire burning glowers pale. lilt of a sentence in speech.

      a luminescence is nearness. its impact, relative – brands it a different
      form, recalls it, a clear warning as message.

      what is yearned for is distant. mostly what’s ignored is as obvious
      as want. you, both at the same time, undulating.

moseying on to senseless expulsions
the width of the hot, throbbing room

pulls away and cannot parry
   thrusts

breath stabs double angst
shuddering to speak only hands know
language, scent evicts
all names

goes   to   a   deathly  departure
  through sad, flittering windows

forgets    who   he   is

what seduced me into
writing is the veiled figure
of the dark that lifts
its hazy image through
the blinds of this acerbic life.

i annul the language of god,
   the normality of men
  and the sage of old.

let me pour water into this
pale jar, and in it,
high with hope, shall rise
a cornucopia of scriptures.

an inner sense of life
and a depraved longing
  for felicities,

these words test their capacities
and sprint to the length
  of no return.

i am no man's island
  nor a flame's hearth.
these promontories remain dearth
  yet unafraid of fleeting.

if i go unread,
if i am to be forgotten,
   these shall all remain
     and only eyes ready
to seek seamless lights
  shall turn the pages
   and start reading.

outside, the world
half-blind, half-illuminated
       i solder mine tremulous fingers
   to unsullied white and begin
      to pry the promised mirth;

joyously i and the smoke
   of fetal curve, rising like a hand
glistening my forehead!
   death strides past the juxtaposition
of scaffolds and i heed the call
   of the clarion void. the shadow's
pantomime comes to a close
   and the iron sea of curtains
move altogether.

  oh my mother weeps
  and so my father, the nonchalant
    always, my brother
and sister learning the form of
     early departures,

a long lineage of passing,
mustering the immense weight
of dying. we seek death not—
   living flourishes for naught.

never always the princely thing
  to do, but when i have death
   in between the fingers, berating
my smallness,

    it is either obliteration
or salvation, eluding inhibition.

what would take you away from place – a slipshod
   route of caprice, or was it, this silence in front
   of a pool, ripple after ripple, still the silence
   I have learned to love?

to have faced north and swallowed the Sun
  meant the desire for it.

spanning the freefall from a tall drop,
threadbare net of hands ready for the catch – unlearning
    whom to fall on, what else is there to be part of but lacking?

between now, this oceanic expanse, is a need
  for letting loose, a part of once only and never whole,
  unlearning what must not be held now, your eyes they

do not see, but entirely space  to clear everything
  and put my heart in.

A cresting wave then descends
and somewhere, distant bells toll.

It is the twilight of the palabra.
Soon word falls at last
when ripened.

Gild this image and come back
sullied. We have no use for memory.
Your presence less than total.

The mutiny of this calling is the
silent margin dividing the dark – how to awaken
the sleeping when dreams sit still as cold chair
punishes the floorboard?

This is how its ripeness was felt.
Surmounting what remains to be, a fixation
of a parched region. Grazed by the crosswinds
in front of the decrepit hut staring with some
kind of hunger for a visitor.

Failure masqueraded as conquest,
gravity of no gravity is but levitation – or the cost of
listening. No sound will be absolved.

In a short instance when to lean into everything,
the round vicinity of the ear and a plummet of hush
reaping underneath a swollen moon,

It was how it was felt, and began
a refusal worth mentioning. What’s seen by the eye
is nothing the hand cannot reach, say the horde of cirrus.
The intolerable sky tender with silence, afterwards we partake
    that one word still nameless.

in   a    world  filled
                    with    pain
our      arid     inland    whelms  over
  the   swollen   sheen   of  the    borrowed   moon;

      faces     in    transit,
the       immense  rivulet     to   home     rogue without
      source
        people      undulating  like
the  weight of  a   subdued   beast
      regaining     consciousness,
                           these    shoals  rimmed  with  such  whiteness
    give     way.

                           unheeded        are   dislimned
slaughters    voices   muffled    to   fatal  nuances
             fast  days  in
the    rails     spirals      and  cascades of   both
   twined     rain and     tendril
         in   our   eyes   see   the gravid
weight   of   the   world    accompanied  by such    grave  silence
            arranging   a  rendezvous
                                          at   the  next   unmindful   station,
   trains       are       sad   rivers
   belonging                 to    no    one
                                              a  long   conversing   line
    of     kinder  tides   passing   quietly
               think    of   the    time   the   bones   are colder
than      alloys    returning   with  such
      intact   heat   or   melancholy,    was    it
   when    turning   away    was  no     troubling  task
        
                        machine    or    flesh
   forethought       or     afterthought
          outlast     and  outwrestle   the   circling   moon
   surly    from   above  and   swift  with
        flayed     light,   these   things   that    welcome
us   home    
                             piercing   the   solace
       dredging    the    traces    leaving   us   bare
with    intone       the     day’s commute  
                                     sings            tenderly –

so many things wander
   in the night of the world - electric
  saw of the Hemiptera's wing uncertain
   of its path, or a hand like a beast
   in the ornate flesh, the sea of
undergarment with its saltine moistness,
limbless lips frittering onto squashed out
      softnesses that remember the fervor
  of grip or the pleasures of breathing after

     the tempest of beings,
   so many things in different placements
   displacing me here,
   savoring the impact just before the crunch of the bone,
   down to its last ache between the
    gnash of teeth and the miserly space
   of cerecloth to a body—

  they are many things trundling
   in the moment and i am just as much,
  yet a passing only, scouring the walls
   of graffiti emblazoning abstract unfathomably reachable and misunderstood, lost in ineffable translation — this doting darling
    contemplates death and
i understand now, going deeper
  as fish sinks into further blue,
wet with something else but water.

sitting underneath the dome
of the contemplative sky,
this much i remember:

shy as a word without
a song
naked
when i first
thought you to be

daring as the moon
accompanied by a song.
translucency of want
leaving no marks
on the soul,
braver than any honest light,
are these words
that hauled you out
of far-flung vision
and to realness
   solely my
    own.

i am amongst them - peerless stars
suffusing all,

in ethereal blackness, love
rises metamorphosed, winged,
  aflutter and a fixed glance,
  it is now the pristine moment
   to go:

   lured into familiar warmth,
  your *******, the breadth of
     your arms, the girdle of
   your weight that hurdles
    the gravity of being here.
  and that as we move closer,
   (in waiting stillness, we
  are the workings of something
   immutable like stone, a clasp
   of hands, the clenching of soul,
  or the always in-hiding dream's
    amazement) i can feel the
   heat peak, tip away and seal
     my fate, unpinning my wings,
     bracing the fall as the
   same stars yield the sonorous and the reticent altogether with
      anonymous eyes wielding
   ceaseless blue stares nailing
     the blackness whole into
   the night's tapestry.

eros: to sting the flesh, o ****** shrieks
sweetness steals from: this buoyant word
sinking in the gnash of moon on loam: awaken me quicker than cherry trees
at dawn: don me against lisps of leaves:
rushing the dogs underneath tightwires:
and sing me something heavy the litheness of verdure: make me cling to wind-hours a tournefortia: place me a placeness in untruths reveal: ****** the languor of pillars: sensual the cruise of caryatids: enigmatic the dark of heron:
    crisp the wind of your arrival.

sloping in a manner
  where outside the brindled
  world, light bends
  like all else in loose wind

  i can almost see
  and make out with what
  secret blueprint your
  body works in its
  mischief - or with what feast
  welcomes the bounty of
  your secret passages.

  take this now. a pint of ether.
  or something real like
  this look on my face harpooning
  your eyes unknowing of their
  consequences.
  just the subtle hint of
  what my mind tries to
  unclose in you makes
  all shadows of my body frenzied
  with tantric thought of doing
  this and that and so much more
  than just
        this and
               that...

  like squeezing juice out
  of the freshest fruits
     or watching the rain
   taint everything in picturesque
     detail - or ****** of
   butterflies on a clad flower,
    or what the sea haplessly tries
   to engrave on the shores with
    its frequent, frothing thrusts
  
    or making it all perpetual in
   motion trapped in the bona fide
      moment. say, i will
   feign a moment of
       colliding into you and
   feel your surrendering force
      imprint small indentions
  without confiding in the exactitude of this domain where
     i have you lured into my song
   like a child put
       to sleep.

is the world real?

clambering the wall, this inner turmoil.
a sensuous solitaire
of sorts
my 10th beer
reading 2 poems
in the total, stark blackness:
receiving me
like a fresh fruit's glaze,
the tumultuous hands of Ocampo Street.
half-mad,
half-believing

there are already so many writers.
there are so many Lang Leavs,
a choir of Pablo Nerudas,
a cacophony of Paolo Coelhos,
(never have i met
     Geminos
  or Yusons
      Arcellanas
Joaquins
     de Ungrias
Sawis — always the realer form
    if not imagined only experienced
       through dumb senses still?)

always their inner sense
     of self conjuring
   others giving back the same image
like a prayer's way through lignin cross
     thumbing are the fingers
small in rumination

   so many of them here
and there is only less of me
   less of my voice
   less of my laughter
   less of my caprices
   less of my whims
   (more of my drunkenness
    trying to feign sobriety standing
    at the edge of the fringe,
     more of my poems here
     and there yet nobody
     grasping anything at all)
   i go home
   chasing the pattern of this
     cosmic solitaire.

the guttural baritone fixes
the tone of the bravado.
  unafraid of the world's conspiracy
sweltering, is this fan of flame.

              luto
linis
           laba

  thumbing down a prayer
of the last leaf, this wondrous tendril.
   all the taverns shake still
in the spleen of contention.
       this is the penultimate tonic:
when the world is not moving
   and when all the bottles are drained
of their oceans, when the women are
   dull and our lovelorn duties double
  their weights, oh, and when we are
  at the edge of desires from what
   you perceive as "hairtrigger",

    we will once more savour the
  emptiness of all and wring
    the seas of their blue and guzzle
        a swig,
     drink or two even if you
know me not.

sa dagliang pangangalawang ng buto dala
ng bawat patak ng ulan.

ang pinapaling lakas ng hangin palihis
sa kurtina ng pag-iisa, itong kamay na palupot
ng pagkalugmok, hapung-hapo sa paghabol

sa pag-uumaga ng mga sandali.
napababalikwas sa tuwing banaag
   ang hinaharap.

hubad ang bughaw na katawan ng mundo
   ang kulay ng karagatan ay pula – dala ng silakbo
   ng damdamin;

magtatampisaw sa tubig
  hihiga at lulutang
      kasabay ng tagistis ng alaalang walang ibang hangad
                   kundi ang umusad.

exhaust of night's guttural snarl
  sleep, with its fixated eyes
  break the silence's dagguerotype.

edges of the moon fringe
  until its fingers sort out

      plenitudes of configuration:
  ignition upon contact,
      consummation upon acquiescence,
 pilgrimages within unmoving juxtapositions;
    suspended on intimation,
  void's hands swirl in depth
        lithe like a leaf, falling intimately on
    the ground:   my body's collapse
       to surrendering machination.
   it begins swollen to the full
         and ends, aching,
  yet unfazed by the untenable quicksilver
      of mind's pompous meander to a field
 where it so subtly blows,
              the wind in all spaces.

your furlough, even
across the world

so beautifully ****
made immense by the primeval crush
of light.

there are places in the world
filled with soundless bones,

women in their lifeless braids
and swell sheen of moon

this bane of such swollen river
aching back to its source.

it is that your departure has the
scent of olives crushed against
the squalid home,

    and that your presence never
lights an incense,

   like death wafting searching
for flesh, or a lone animal
left cut in the wild pursuing rescue
with a hue of damp mauves.

feet–dance–bounty–when–it–is
your–engine–that–sings–nondescript
music–shadows–left–wrung–out–of
drunk–in–dense–marshes–of–life;
your–gyrations–foretell–my–weight
as–in–the–home–of–verses—
strophe–by–strophe–endless–is–its
undulation–stamping—imaginations
two–fold–in–flounder—

it—is–like–you–are–deep–in–the–grass
and–the–wind–slurs–summer's–penitence.
    with–your–eyes–purely–the–tenseness
  of–days–like–dance–and–stillness
     meeting–at–the–edge–of–silence.

warm of sun through percolator cloud
      waft of wind stale, flat on surface
  all-fours;
   mezzotint of sky blooms like an aged flower across the skirt of the dawn
     lingering the acrobat hurtling
across hideous moonlight.

   there is an exhausted sundial
in the feeble aurora. one Wednesday
   yet all too many a day, tumble
of the calendar and the pompous talk
    of clammy water over the pockmarked
streets from yesterday's surfeit rain.
    
i enter the hellish car fostering
   the sun's fervor in the subcompact
like a tiny universe, constellations of
    sweat on my forehead, a crumpled
  carton of Marlboro in my pocket
   whiff of dried leaf clinging to finger
     this formidable silence across
      the lounging Mahogany, on the road
treading homeward — caught in
     wave of the next moment,
    underneath the rain of a once tear
shed facing walls slouching towards
  despondent sheets and scrunched body;
claimed whoever sees the
    face of indelible yesterday, tremulous aspen tree dressed with cicatrices of old,
  birds unraveling incarnadine wound from
     upheaval of scabs, disheveled dog
  naked without any reason at all,
         weak in dog-joints and reeking
in dog-flesh carrying on his back the
   supremacy of the sun,
  
i too, here, homebound and downtown
    sings sleepy the reveille,
   bridging the darkness there
    letting in all aches and dangerous
  playthings for strange men, open

   the gates, mother, the pearl
of detergent I smell, in my hands shaped
     cleverly, the rust of gate
and the saw-tooth music grating the
   afternoon frightened and small,
resigned to bed; dark's afterthought.

it is the dawn of the avenue.

          the children sing rain
and the fire i burn glowers.

o, it is when the twilight came
i was speaking then, to you,
all the trees beauteously bring
you to me and our hands handle
the hours full of moon.

the patter of the rain they sing
and the bundle of woe i bring
by the avenues traced by
girl-graces, strewn loveliness of
basket hollows and singsongy
feelingfulness — look at what the
wind does to the berries,
and ourselves in brightened plaudit;
hands no playthings, i touch her
silken thighs and death peers
no longer; only yawns in the speechless
distance, frequent dream-pauses
drenched in sweat of nightly heat
  your mouth tasting chrysanthemums.
luminance of voice blinds the shadowy
  corner, light lifts, god pulses in
the deepest, most final mirror of ourselves, supreme over all and i,
   in the most radiant green of all earth,
smiling at my lover's body.

your night-rose, sweet
yet such honeysuckle hides   in your
    girl-graces,

in the gravest mirror of my eyes
  rises    the frailest rose,

       its unmindful bend and its
return to my hand's deepest grave —

        o, the wind sleighs my hair
unearthing its roots — in this summer-gladness i am
      one with the morning's terminal
   flush, its beforeness is my sleep
       brimming with the waters of waking
    and you, whose eyes
             inevitably, the day in the horizon.

i rise early
and join
the conference of laughter
as my room is clambered
by dappled light.
silence
beats back to glass
and houses
a wild flame of dreams.
  it is like
  my time is up
  and the portent of approaching
  moments divine themselves
  in the rain as i peer through
  the window and see myself
  aghast and burning
  underneath a deathless parasol
  of hands.
to see your dream slowly
tip away and jump frightened
to infinite smallness and then
slide, slouch
in the distance --
to revere in its
fading, romanticizing it
with hendecasyllabic recollections.
to be left with nothing
but a sharer in the moment:
a day's end.

daylight frets,
trembles, falls
in a vertical climb
pressed against
pried open lilies.

the svelte upholstery
of dark vanishes

as i swim like agitated fish
through liquid measures
of minced light
through the small hands
of the world
like rain through the lips
of serrated grass.

daylight morphs
a half-concealed stone
into eyes sizably owned by
the spread of mildew
transmogrifying its secret
into a single beat
of flame.

Exhaled when sexed up a hole in a thing
particular is this day surprisingly surpassing

without end, if when volatile
consider stasis; ripples initial a signature

on plainclothes this Sunday. Silenced
his fist over dinner, this raconteur of beginning

splits to an end tracing a line between
stiffened    voice prior to   mouthing it so:

we have nothing to do here but absence zeroed
in like a marksman. Rendered it full

to a trembling gait stooping over parallels,
put it inside a box and hem it into a trundling vessel

send it to the edge of sun gruff with fever
   your derelict day inside this news.

Elsewhere it was     heard   and  then lingered

    if  not  felt the disappearance of:

for this to happen,    involve yourself.
   it is   the   natural order of things   not  even their truest selves
     but  when     unseen,   becomes.

  who   has  come   up   the vertical   but  has
    fallen,    who has  curved   into   the meeting
        and  has  gone  wilding.

today   you   were   surprised  by
     the    nothing   as    today

if   then  yesterday  was  once    a hand  clenched
    on  your  chest,   or  touching your face
a warmth   the frailest  issue,
    or         once    the   shape   of  the morning

   we   assume  freely.

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.

Dear You ---

you and i -- and only two,
under the lightsome dome
and spurious light.

let us write
and laugh. let us not be hasty
with our speech.
we have immense responsibilities.
let us, wield the words
as though maiming beasts
in their predatory sleuths,
let us make them our own
and let them go
in paper white with pains,
awash in the delusion
that only our sweetness
could give us freedom.

you and i.
let us watch the rotund of
our words and their silent billows.
let them start the bells
in our lonesome cathedrals.
let us be unsafe in the dangers
of our boldness. in simpler connotation, naked - not in skin,
not without drapery,
only in straightforwardness
that they will all, who read us,
be brave enough to laugh too,
and start with their own words,
the impossible.

in which surface shall i dwell?

  all the silences have broken loose

  and my body is unhinged by
  the bookish dreams of fingers.

  the stones tumble and fall
  in purer silence -- this distilled hour,
  where all the voices are webbed
  into speculative schemes, abstracts
  the truth.

  found ready and welcomed are the
  shadows that eat away in ******* light.
  no words succor me,
  no touch soothes me,
  no waters toll to quench
  the tragic grasp of all the fires
  and their murderous immediacy.

  the streets feast on the meaningless
  refrain of recall:
  such lines,
  i cannot remember the sound
    of my
        own name.

-- dizzy from the silence
     as the rain translates
     the sky's pain into the core
     of a leaf's inflorescence,
     tucks underneath a stone's
     tongue a secret, springing
    from a cornucopia of questions.
    if it rains more over
    the tormented town,
    will God show its face
    in the puddle out feet trample?
    will an angel collapse
    as a single drop of honey
    moves through the lambast
    of a monsoon's arm
    in the wayward atmosphere?
    will its death grow wings
    and carry all of us,
    girdled to its chest
    like how the infantile morning
    is painted in the quiet
    mausoleum of our pains,
    and into our tender lives
    waiting to be examined?

dark as dark — held secret
in TV's hoarse static. lining up and
scuttling across the thoroughfares,
vineyards wrung out of blood,
stomped, crevasse pithless.
willowed and scrunched up, a camouflage
of sorts to masquerade proper terrors.

ripe for Decembertime. magnanimous
assault of buses athwart carts jaded
somewhere between the bend and the fang, shadow upon *** of shadow and
the jiggling of loose change in mired pockets igniting a cadence of dithered flame. later, the lights will cross-fade
into criss-cross. x marks the spot
of burials. content with locks secured
by keys and vice versa. hermetic word
sealed shut in the eyes of the sleepless
children. naiveties suckling our mothers.
songs stifling our fathers. bamboozle
of radio intensifies to raw warfare.

our dangers go to work,
unfurling age. septuagenarian is rare,
and in any common rate, death teems
full in the disappearance of mornings
promising river-flown stories of
how everything was once in our hands.

milbrightlions of December —
you come announced in multiplicity.
even the night-herald blooms through
the beams of astounded simulations.

buoyantly uttering a word
of light, stilling itself in the sky,
unasked for.

surmounting the Narra and the mangrove,
sieged to a halt in its exactitude
like the uncomplicated machination
of what makes fire simmer in a wick.

all of its brazenness hearten
in easily toppled altitudes — even our
battlements scar our unexplained
liminality we grieve at first glance.

airless are the spaces we lean on,
testing their capacities. shrills bloom
clearer. our mouths plump and glazed.
our flesh hurtle all incarnadine, all true
unlike the twining of roads lit like
faces in the marketplace —
       a dynasty of brokenness.

swift inset of love's Sanskrit,
a thorn of contestations.

make cadence this sensorial music.
centrifugally waiting bodies
to cross Earths.

a plethora of annulments.
lion-telling Sun singes through intersections of infinities:

we cannot wait to quash
the morning, the scent of guava leaves
and the cerement of flour on chicken.
earth-hewn mounds of meat pressed
against beholden kitchen clangor.

declension of memory past wood
and pillars of home. lattices of light
forerunning fingers, let down the curtain.
wind swings with maddened turbine,
afternoons high with deadlock.

of all that is not here, the force
reawakens a long-stumped ******,
beating us back to edges ruthless
with angels entirely curved, singled-out,
wings clipped, dancing at the tip
   of the candleflame.

quite drunk in this evening tender with rue – there is a gentle hand
that whirls against the bougainvillea.

things remain to be constantly in the tranquil as I am not
yet shaken in my fragile frame –

the leaves rustle in the 19 degree cold moon,
the beer bottles emptied, stacked beside the receptacles.
she and I could be dead, and it took me 3 years to know this:

there is a photograph of her thrown somewhere
behind scraps of metal, caged there, like a jailbird
in a jailhouse, screaming blue against redness.

I had love, and love died.
you neither flinch nor move at the very slight of me,
passing over the porch of your reading.
the thing that once moved now festers
with stillness, and so many vibrant explosions begin in the sky
and there is nothing discernible in her abject eyes.

I remember driving past your home in front of
a little, quaint house and I swore that the even your voice
speaks to me in evenings full with the thought
of never knowing you again.

you are so real like the horse that grazes the field
underneath umbilicus of power-lines,
yet so fake and feigned like the truth that tries
to assess itself , crawling mazy back into my drunken arms
like a child startled speaking a thousand things
I have already no use for.


sometimes the sun is like a house on fire.
sometimes the simmer of onion smells like ******.
most of the time, the look on my face, half-drunk and half-believing,
looks like a night distilled and fractured by voices.

I will never ask for your hands to touch,
I will never ask for you body to make heat,
I will never ask for your footsteps to chime in grave music:

I have my own defeats to keep me
that way: toppled and scrounging for light.

let me be.
I have seen many warfares and not a single shot of a rifle
has broken me into the man that I once was.

I drive back to you and it is never the same:
it is banal to say that you have yourself
and I have my own, deep in study.

let us drive back to roads whetted with kisses
and from there, start to disentangle
like leaves from boughs
deep in December.

there has to be a way
  for a defunct quiet
to find its life pilfered
against surrounding scenes

   when i have your silhouette
plastered to the squalid wall
  when all else kinks in the squall
of the moon and
    everything is small.

  say, when i have you
in my retina and you hear
no communing display of text,

   that is my defeat:

a long night
wordless and slipping away,
   you, going far
unhinging from the verity
  that none has been left cold,
brazenly damaged,
   going farther and farther
streets fat, chance-ridden
   riddled and all too secretive,
verbose as quiet
   still and idle.

says the neon sign gleamed,
refracted on your face
that sullen evening – I do not have

many nights to remember. If from a high
place I imagine you flailing,

what would call you back? What for?
You, coming toward the light – the subservience
of the next face

chauffeurs us. Unfazed, will me to pretend,
if not, then carry on the next meeting.
I will whisper to myself: this is how I sustain beatings

You have no use for poems.
Neither do I. You, dressed in your best,
I, submission refined by sartorial. Notice how my hand
continues to displace geographies. The thinning
  horizon of a candle, almost a faultline.

Slumped on your back as if comfort were a burden
to say: keep this time together with its fever. These often times
the last moments seal them shut out of histories.
When we came into,

I had a falling out – there is a straight line we could
run into and this instance might enervate

into a single drop of honey into your mouth. I await that
prophecy like it was the final thing before I resign
to incompleteness.   Delicate essence

the    neon sign says, glaring through the
  glib downpour outside. You laughed at our
unpreparedness, but the readiness that was obligation when
  separate had no omen of rain.

I am watching myself again. Everything was slanted
by rain as the living err me. Even when together,

       feels like emancipation. Going disparate places.
Outside it continues to rain. You asked if this rain washed
   this city whole and gave it a new name, would I still remember.

It is June from time since then, the skies still attentive.
I will not come out until it rains.

wind goes ballistic.
the farther the birds are to complete
    this absence, the better

quicker exchange of easy avatars
   in Magsaysay, where no strobe
  roams and only alternations of taxi
      zigzag in stolen hours.

remember you pale,
   forget you raw with blood.
 eyes see all what silence divests.

in some dark place, we must
  all have many cicatrices. blue is the hand
whirling outside, serious with its narratives
    and tenuous notes.

lightening up
the fleeting truth of togetherness,
its ample weight something virtuous
    in perceived realness is

that      all guesses wan and wild
     exhilarating the    words we   utter
  riding along the strange   Sun,   our
  headlong  chronology of    rue.

At noontime, it is severed,
just like in any other time. The walls no longer flounder but
                        crucify the ground or vice versa. Sunlight floods
   bodies of rocks. At the height of illumination, there is no process
   adequate to describe. The bramble of illusions swerves to allure.
   Drunk in the surprise of the founding: the rusting roof from the nearby
   school still there. Solid as entity, fluid as trance. Deep with the phantom
   pain of it, I feel its drone marauding with even-inflicted sharpness of memory.

This is how far you’ve already gone, towards the invisible charm of falling apart.
   There is an opening that is left behind. I found it here,
   in the chasms suspended in an open field drawn together
   in the alternative. This is all that you’ve ever lost.
  Reclamation is a sure defeat. Retreat, you said but didn’t.
   Straining towards this ruined object.

    This will not wait you out. It casts its weight over my hands
   struggling to take picture of, imperiled as if these unsolicited quakes contain
        the image within a broken frame. Strife deep within a sense of responsibility
  is to show you what was left – everything but wasted origin, demeaned by
                             the disintegration of, to suffer the penalty of decision.

To face the wall than each other, revealed in some place known.
                                      All the junk of this requiem reused as deficiency.
   Elsewhere it could be another thing, but to me nothing but a net
   to falling, limbless creature, or a basin to the water of surrender.
  It aspires to be something, to be another story of, to be a room of disappearance
    is what it is to me – across the kitchen sink mapped out near the cupboard,
     or the tiny, mincing steps to your room, the posters scattered everywhere like
   avatars. The partitions still exist dividing real from illusory, far from near,
     a luminescence or opacity – still dragging along the detritus, strophe by strophe,
                     rearing the intensity of artifacts but none found.

How does this breathe with no life? How do these ghosts ambulate
      in the bare and naked space when horrors wish to be unseen? How this wishes to be
  unperturbed in media res, and how it dissolves to be now, infinite, is substantial
                to tragedy. To be consoled by nothing but the pure sight of a once dwelling.

Hang a picture of you in the wall. The wall the bears no foundation. This recall.

What of her, bags packed and then unpacked later on
when they denied you of entry. You did not make it past
the deadline, or before it was purely yourself necessary to
incidence. You intersect, moor yourself to the center
of transactions – the force and shape of it, your tired image
sauntering past weathered windows.  The sound of tickets
being torn caused you trembling – doors held for body,
    hinges a hand-signal, error communicating through neglect
you didn’t listen to him, because he did not tell you
of its necessity. You were a day late as many others are,

almost a bullet hitting,
a crash postponed,
death by biting the barrel.
      Two lovers hinting at each other through open windows,
  hands are doves waving, parting the evening, almost this
  paled technique of fate to put you in a place you do not want.

But what to realize after, when all of this is nothing but
a disorder. They cleared the throat and gave you something
to remember: denied. Loose without a threat, even.
   A sensitivity so endless felt through volumes of people
  walking past metal detectors with smiles plastered, framed,
  crawling deep inside the mouth of it. The idea of   towards

a destination that is now far within reach, beyond the order
of things. You are one brash mistake away from assault.
That promise of a waiting bed in another country. Let alone,
the taste of the land burning what leftover Sun there is in the mouth,
  made you lose sight of, and now it is raining all over the city
  without umbrellas.

from the doctor's lightsome bed
   after being examined in the bone
to my side of the lenient road

  we are in the heat
   of assault.
  no dead lampposts
  no macabre of alleys
  harbinger dampened silence.

only this thing of us now
   deconstructed to you
  and i with no relevance
  believing nothing but the
  instantaneous rupture
   of any thrown word
  in the neighborhood of parks.

slam on the dashboard
   and the groan of the engine:
hurtling at speeds faster
   than any ******.
  across the knobby knee tawny
   slivered burgeoning words
  escape compartments ajar

  objects unkempt
    dissipating on the svelte ragamuffin
  linen, faded masquerades of feeling
    trying to destroy the riddle

  lunging with uproarious wordlessness
    like a den of lions set loose
     here speeding 110 kilometers
    in arbitrary roads finding each other
    again, this time
       making furious love.

Precision is everything. Bodies will be accounted
  with accuracy, one by one, and then all. Buried
  in the  chaîne opératoire.   Aplomb simmering
  in the sinews, cold as metal. Daylight will collect
  all that is disposed. Twilight will erase the monuments as cathedrals gorged, fat with prayer
   but before this, what impetus?

 Shot from the in-between, hip and pelvis.
     Surpass something from the peripheral:
 There are fugitives   conquering   secret places.
     Behind tense trees is the sought-for  enemy.
  Blinding light as   shot from  a hollow chamber
    the size of a dilated pupil: in a flash, 
             paraffin smearing   the  languid   visage.
   Hold   your   breath   and do   no harm
    to statistics.
               Nothing is  sure in   the   blotched minute.
    Stepping    on    bones    like  twigs,  names
        identical,   faces   disguised by    elements:    fire         as   sweat  and   blood.
         Air  pernicious   as   unheard   call for  mercy.
     This is   water:   the  one   who has  crossed
         the  river, close to   touching  the hand
      of   god.   Earth    a   trembling    grave.

      Words   roam as  should there  be  always
  in a  body, a  dazed  ornate  for a tractable  beast.
     You are here    for  passing. Prayer  is  intolerable,
    mind  the  sound  later  in newsprint. We  are
       the  same  muck   plastered   to stucco. It  rained
    ballistic  somewhere  between    the   sure-footed
         paper and   the   drawn line:

     They word it here as aletheia.
      The victims still unidentified.

In between,
     nonplussed   punctuations. Home  will  be  empty,
        if  not    for   candles. Carry   this   diadem
    across and    place  it  over the  helm of this
       broken   skull. Save   later   the  days for
     remember:  let  elegies perform nomenclature.

     Counterargument   was   day  if blinded
         by   intrusion. It has  happened,
    indelible.   Marked  by coordinates,  likened
    to   where  body parts  must be.  Unchallenged
       to  dismiss  the  derelict:  never to   return to
    geography.

          Dust on the ground.
          Rusted this  morning:  a bond broken into,
         the alloy  of an unknown   body
        breathing in the austere air of who   defied
            the incidental.
        It  will
     never     wear  off.    There
         is     only     reminder.

From the dream you
were |  emerging from  the
    natal hearth |
you go, shedding from the sound

Change the currents |
   their immediate implications |
surreal to touch, a smile stilled lucid as the eye

Sees more than air the nasal
grass | trying to
           speak to  trees |
connecting inner consolation

   Of both waking up |
to a dream so realized, and |
   sleep’s confabulations no less

Than joy | wordless|
  beside every
                      widowed morning.

the dharma
       burns
       in the bone -
       love is no synopsis
       to our caged delusions.
       death, why, only a dearth
       diorama of the
       incontrovertible
       denouement.
       the unsinkable truth
       so avidly assiduous
       that if dogma bleeds final,
       our beginnings stem only
       from the rose of
       ephemeral loves
       and in the end shall
       we meet god - only i,
       in the seethe of these
       phrases, have burnt
       wilder than any light.

“Today, we make a man out of you.”

  Was what I may have heard in the pitch dark, blindfolded, hearing a mechanical arm swing and in full force, smash my hamstring. I was made that day. And for that, I thank them not. I celebrate myself this way, in the full-turn of a dream.

   Was what I may have felt somewhere in Bocaue when Sonny brought me to a ******* in the middle of the night. They wore the same, seductive dresses in the crimson night. They had their flamboyant maquillages. Bodies like curved spoons. Heads billowing and airless, their hairs frozen, held intact on the skull. Their skin smelt of berries. Sonny took two and I took one for myself. How am I made that night? Never touched, never held. Fair enough, I disappointed her. Her name in the Filipino language is asusena. A man’s a man when you cannot fool him into the trickery of a device that does not appeal to him.

  Was what I told my nephew while whetting a switchblade. The grating sound made sweet music to his ears. He was intent and keen at observation. He just got circumcised because the much older, paunchier kids made fun of his boyhood. You are the wind, Calvin. He smiled as I maneuvered into the blank, corpulent space and swung around, pretending to stab someone in clear air. He lauded me and believed that I was a master at that – which he may not have seen, a master at pretending.

   Was what I may have noticed when you and I were in a cheap room staring at the white ceiling talking about cheap lifestyle. The nomad scent of your hair wafted, almost trying to describe the difference between inhale and exhale. To inhale was to take you in, and to exhale was what you do best. The word “****” lingered by the cold metal of the doorknob and the hinges seem to collapse in their trade of swivel. You were taken into the thrill of the void and I was caving in at the edge of my world. I wanted to kiss your beautiful face
                   but a man knows a device he cannot control.

           and  so
I     heard
      myself
sing      into   the wilding   air,
                        let     myself
                         diminish –

Impugn* shall if not your eyes are meager coruscations. Self-refuting, explanatory of its given berth.
              This is the unsolicited onus of addressing it: heart rears static splayed, intercepted by
                                    this question.

Stigmatize this if performance of, merely a concert. There is rigor stiffening the veins when ensanguined
                   from much gnawing of the uncontrolled sharpness of impressions. I think of ways to mend,
                           and when unable, means to bend.

Settle this once and for all and here is how. If perhaps an admission of something, let me see clearer
                      than this makeshift fog. Pave me a railroad somewhere, or house a station.
                        All of this waiting, all of this silence chastising what noise needs to be freed.

Pretend to be carrying a statue. Curse in a different language. Show what it means to be wronged
                           when the incompleteness of evidence merits a conjecture – this is your punishment,
                        to see me in false light and dislimn our quite fate:

                     it will be long  before there is the clearest answer, the apparatus to straighten,
                         to muffle the sound, and put light into this beating.

driving at Kennon (treacherous zigzag
   resembles hopscotch with death)
as i play Morrissey on the radio and the
woman sleeps, sometimes waking up lamenting the death of moths I ran over, splattered on the windshield, "Poor little creatures!" she said. no, baby, i am the poor little creature and so are you,
    relentless against the dark
  past Urdaneta — her being mineward,
i play with death as i turn the headlamps
off (pure blackness, nothing as if falling
into a bottomless pit as void sits on its
throne waiting) and on (all white as pains
  now, trucks flare up and down the bend,
  the tumbled boulders keep meting out
   some forceful way of disturbances,
  our collapse, the afterthought of it all)

i sensed from the beginning that the
old moon will wade out and soon the sun
will throw dissipated shades all across
camps with bonfires dead and stilled.
at the height of all, it becomes so
hot that the birds leave the trees together with the flowers and the Cordillera cannot cry any longer.

my woman wakes up as if rattled
with different pains, her face floating
past the mountains dreaming at the verge
of birds in the morning—
and it is twilight and still the same birds,

now it is the night and you
cannot see the birds anymore,
neither a hint nor a trail of
where they have disappeared

like the glory of Rizal in Luneta.
the lightsome globules in Paris.
the lions of Manila, now a town full of cowards as alleys fill with ******,
the kids laying flat on their bellies
as the lawn takes its revenge
on the rest of the surrounding,
  
         beheading the tree, and the
       birds fly farther and away.

in the lighter steps of yesteryears come the name of which
I cannot remember insofar as I am awash with the delusion
of what a poem, or what to make out of a poem, or what use
is there, to heave out poems – I was then raw, supple if you
may allow, like dew on blade of grass, face front
   against the blithesome matutinal, heart somewhere displaced,
beginning to look for something the inward expects,
  as though things happen for the first time again,
  with wisdom of what to look for – resigned, young,
      inconsistent with the word, fetal in my hands: pen and paper.
a well-guarded secret
   swaying in tune, curtailed by some sort of split-second inhibition,
    trying to save face and give this blandness a whole new meaning
and arrive at two intersecting points where the lost self will be
     redeemed in finding – monologue of sorts, dark it was,
  dampened by such bleakness, this leitmotif;
     all around me purged of sound, strip to rogue without
       senses, suddenness at the tip of my body, lunging at any
feat of light that succeeds to champion this behemoth of blackness,
    to complete this impedance, a singular impetus to fruition ekphrasis,
yet not quite, deep in the study again, as though
     yesteryears are all but the days starting to disintegrate
  into tiny segments to wreak something devastatingly vague, as in,
   a language curled in the tongue, relentlessly flexed against the wall
     of me, losing yet no little piece.