Shadow as proof of memory: the indistinct light spilling on the tablework together with smears of water. The smell of hair on his skin now is engraved as lesson. At the tip of her tongue is strange wonder. Said this inner life when it starts to crumble, you are witnessed in the soar. Bedraggled through the ***** of the street, a hand, or a vestige.

Her bony prominences of hand kneaded to retain as memory – to be swallowed by the full procession after; stroke as compromise: as if mapping all out. This is not how it should happen. It would happen when a safe distance is maintained by two bodies: the other sleuthing, the other moving in finite directions. An end will be revelry.

– took whatever it was that cannot be contained by the body. Remember first when you took the dive
     into the water, as if never to return again, together with silent fish and errant current.
                                Underneath the blue, light still casts shadow in interstices. Conveying weight
     in water – your mouth as conduit, my body as land for the till and clearing. Or my longing. Or a soon to be discovered ambiguity. Skimming through your moving imperatives, telling me you cannot
               commit to quantum movements. That in that event, the world will throw you
syncopated images, that it will give rise to your hiding altitude and lob you to vertigo.

Detachment as question. They must run. They must remain fugitives – to be unseen by the rest, and only themselves know their seams, symmetries, contours even in absences. Even the sky now is engorged with cirrus. Soon, like half-truth, or wildfire brash against green, the pallor will deface the atmosphere and give it unction of rain. Must they be reminded that they should run.
                               But you are in a city, and it is impossible to not be thrown out of line by another     figure. Names will be given. Directories will be solicited. Voice necessary to halve
                    this blatant quiet. And then to remind you of your sudden place, they will build a map
or a bridge with their arms outstretched into the sky, looking at you with life brimming through
      their eyes – the smoke of your departure once again curling in its fetal nature
       against their brows. Everything you do and undo is a forecast of some liminal finality,
  as if all of this is birthed by the same oblivion – and that all forgetfulness feels that same in different
          cities that may or may not know your name. And that in changing season, there will
always be
        a hand that will be held even in its tiniest detail – all of the shadows once
                      cast by your small body drunk in its proud altitude – we both
know   whose hand I am    thinking of

plenitude steps taken in those
    DMs. my hands in the tense wind

are two hounds in a ***-lock.
somnambulate if you may, in the pretense of this
   grotesquerie. sing to me, you might, lax in tune
and foreboding by consent.

on the floor now, aslant, like two dogs
   waiting in servitude,
  the detritus of shedding – outside to no windows,
I perceive an elongated white of moon.

you must have hurt the world
with your darling feet.
carrying the night, deciphered from above,
whose distance is this that switches
to impact?

from the look of your face in the drone
   of sleep,
I doubt my presence

but when the radio of dream soon dies
and your breath ****** out of you
like a vacated city,

the undulant breath, a fair warning
and myself simply, an aftermath.

the ides stupor
leaning into the wall of this
grave sunset.

give me once again
your voice
your shy voice
like a banca
waiting for the moon
to sink below
its dome.

give me once again
your *******
your lithe *******
like genuflected hills
waiting for the sun
to sink below
its dome

give me once again
your being
your agile being
like wild horses
running into the sun
striding into the moon
waiting for me to sink
below your dome.

light scrunched, a crouched shadow.
eyes discern heaviness of
ordinary places into various flows
   of gutted fish.

this world gives away a weathered image:
its wraith comes unannounced

lovelessly drags the stooping gait
of walls, obscenely expires
   a small clearing

this mundane home gives way
to a restless flow of other dimensions.

bird of the afternoon
reaches far beyond extensions.
discombobulated tendril of light
   flashes its fullness
to a bedrock of reality.

the kitchenwares start to falter
but all for the way, where once
gray hair graced this table,
her vividly tremulous hand steadies
  a fixed touch on bedspread —

on the wet back of freshly bathed fruits,
  a metonymy that continues to bruise.

morning's watery hands part to meet
the mist of departures;

quietly as we all are, seldom imposed
an overhung dark, and as quiet as you,

                                                do not go.

Doring — not much has changed since
you last spoke.
the children are still deep in the mud.
the bellhouse at Poblacion still rings
when it is 5 PM and the ubiquitous bazaar
   sit on the cornerstones.
however, when the white angels began
     latticing you to contraptions,
the furling scent of your homely perfume
      has gone dithering. grandpa Mario's
revolver is somewhere hidden wreathed
    under a wrestle of things we do not
use anymore — lottery tickets ( 4 AM, grandpa would fall asleep reeking of
    ale as the lady announces frail luck
over the somnolence. kitchenware longs
for the ****** of your tremulous hands. the Lazy Susan is attended by only a bundle of rotten bananas, Mario's old
nauticals: whiskey bottles, scotch, goblets, unrest of glasses. we still
buy pandesal near Beng's piano maestro.)

nothing much has changed since you
last spoke. mother held your hands longer than imagined trill of Maya outside tightwire. it didn't flood in the swelter of
the cataclysm — years ago it was deathly silent when you were sitting on the rocking chair waiting for the flood to subside, your grandchildren laying cold on the aged floorboard, rescued by
zigzag of newspapers. it was the lightest
of darknesses. nothing much has changed
    since you last spoke and in your
silence we heard the most immense of
voices. the streets remain pockmarked.
ocher pots festooned by wily flowers,
stems of hope. your hands tryingly gripping whatever
     was brought to their splendidness
looked like forever smiles.

Doring — the nights are fuller,
my sweet old etcetera of chores.

we all lay quietly in the mud for now.

it is in dove's ways how i love you

and it is no common sight
to take glory out of what this
life ever so defiles with its
uncouth hands.

in the way that i soar with my
unnameable wings over your
territories finding shade,
clinging with the wind, my mothered world in the eclipse of a day's turning - where together with the fleshly rivulets i am unafraid
to trample the night with lithe sound: a wing's flutter echoes
through the caves of your mouth deepening in primeval silence. stones woven earthly, intricate as a bed of mendaciloquence where truth lies stripped to the bone of the very voice of it. oh and what solace waits for me yonder hills that recognize my stretch - even the shadows rejoice in their fill of my passing elegies yet, no love
shall die! night arrives drowsily over these planes that seek me, and i cascade as gentle as a pond girdling your ample fish that i viscerally own, thriving inside me, whirling in graceful fire.

the morning takes me with you,
its duty speaks where i was once
sterile without path - you take mine flight and hover past everything, spreading garlands that would name all of them, ours!

Dramaturgy

1

I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.

It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.

2

Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.

3

Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.

4

Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.

5

He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.

6

They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake.  A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.

7

Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for

Dramaturgy

  there is more to understand
  in this fire of a thing --

  hauled out of the dark is this
  lightsome body, a tumult
  of a moment shaping into something
  true and seizable.

  in the siege of this haloed hour,
  we, in the dark, ***** still
  these passing moments

  the rise of your heady perfume
  choking the smoke billowing,
  curling on our brows
  raking the tranquil in this moment
  of askance,
  wringing enigmas of their
  sublimities,
my body bettered with graciousness,
   etcetera, etcetera

  of letting you go where you ought
    to be and to take you as a useless thing
  demands to be blandly usurped,
  
  that no superfluous beauty could ever
      configure our analogue adjustments,
  and that there is more to this fire than
    just the heat of it, the drone that seeks
     with a morbid following,
   or the brutal truth that

   a pain may never be shared
    or equally felt, poised in solitariness
   and delighting with wine, lonesomely
      yet never despairingly,
   a silence that brands our souls
     with bounteous canticles of how

    love's meant to be done alone.

the lament of fixity
gazes on stone, its death-fires  encircle
the slender body of the doting Sun.

this is our time spent again
when our days obdurately say
that our inimitable skies smell of
wet willow—

our time has come to sleep.
the soggy horizon closes its eyes
and darkness enters like a thief.
aureoles criss-cross into
touchable delineations.
i am closer to the Earth than I was once
before you, bared to profile
like a fruit pared by your teeth.

what awaits in the gleam of one's
waking is the fruitage of nondescript music flowering in my ear:
the curved entry of your breath,
receiving it, my ear's bell,
shaking the cathedrals and by the pews
of my somnolence,  a trespassing whirlwind, a dewdrop, trickles of flame.

are there lips, with there power enough
left to clench in their growing?
this den of such tender love,
when i roar ardently dressed as
  an admiral in sleep's sea,

i, mounting the waves of your body,
  dream of lions.

i fear whose hearth
tongues a whetted fire of dream:

i believe dreams no longer

because dreams smith an immense, black
bell which mine cathedral cannot hold,

because it births an artichoke
strangled by seaweed.

it is because its friction, an allegorical hand denies skin, carries in it an origami
of shrubs and dense fires which smoke
chokes my lost heart.

it is because its machine that never sleeps toils all morning, making the evenings full and tender with scorned
sound of gnashing gear-work, sending
me to unsettled sleep;

it is because i wake where windows
are opened and only the wind touches
my cumbersome body,

it is because dreams slender like wheat
grow molds when striding past waters
takes too long for me to reach
your portico where you wait for me.

it is because i walk past ignominious streets palpable with the disgrace
of the crowds that contain no faces.
it is because when my eyes are lightsome,
such image blurs and i cannot paint it,
and when they close, departures start
bells in my heart.

it is because dream is a flowering
and sleep has no use of its senseless
crown of knives, and i, like a child
yearning for a mother, ambles slowly
in fascination of a hurt underneath the throb of an old moon's wane.

it is because when i am next to you,
i am stiff with the rigor of sleep's pallor
and in the headiness of my dreaming of you, i cannot move to even summon
the brash locomotive of the train

which stops a sudden when i am
a few steps near you.

1
What do mornings regard but
  the night refusing to budge?

The Sun a progeny
there must be room for days in
   this revenge

2
I   fold   I
in this exquisite manner

I  dream of  my  fortune
    as  rash   before  this I  slid

underneath the cleft
like  an  epistle

   unopened,  stamped  by the dearth
of another

secured   in this  absence
  black like a cummerbund

3
The   bed shook.
     enough  to  toss me out of

but not  inherit me  into  a dull succession.

our  places  nominal.
we have   a sum  if  syndicate
  but  still  impotent

they   have  made  this a reportage
of  a miracle  read  from a  gauche script:

This is
the morning that
was becoming no
less than a champion
over you |  vacate your  body
      while you  are still  able  |

the body confesses
I am constantly awakened
  by  this  futility.

sleep
drops
on
your
body
gravitating
toward
the
embellishment
of
­dreams
and
then
running
off
into
a
reality
chiming
the
bone
to
ma­ke
sound
in
soundlessness
to
knit
the
walls
together
threadbare,
­loose
free
as
a
body
is
like
flotsam
sprinting
back
to
sea

it is the dawn of this inamorata.
  
          love is
          the dew
          dropping onto
          the soul,
          takes in it
          silence would,
          a cacophonous
          trace of song.
          love is
          written,
          for love is
          born
          to the
          structure
          of a
          rose.

it is the dusk of this inamorata.

          love is frittering
          back to the inconsolable
          noise, trickles
          back to rivers
          and onto
          the unseen,
          the fading out
          to smallness
          of which flame
          lets go,
          a solitary ember.
          love has emerged
          with hands empty,
          poised to cull
          this structure
          of a
          rose.

i have in my hands,
your round,
virginal fruit
and my eyes pare
all clothing
  reducing you
  to obscene ******.
all your juice
  trickling out of,
slow is the
      slither.
pebbled body after
    pebbled body. builds
its pace plastered to wall, and then swiftly runs
    with full gravity.
succinctly, a
   sidereal persimmon,
until your peels wear
   me thin and your flesh
  rots in compost,
my mouth
savoring the emptiness.

there are worlds underneath words
swathed inward, swirling from
rondure of moon.

of all that i have loved,
you are the only one living

here within the lining of my skin,
or thinning dermis of turpentined walls,
same as the ponds have their
   curved silences, i have nothing -
a river bled of its source, living in wet verses.

what the turning of days might
bequeath you, as cunning as the mayday
of evening with its susurrus, is what
brims over diminutively, a glint of star.

i believe in the empire your love
spurned from all that is ruined,
drained of their excess. how i have loved
to trail you, across the crisscrossed roads
and receive such fullness no purer than mine:

all your sweetness that is for me,
the implacable honeysuckle and the dew
of mild beginning, i believe them
   all
breaking loose around me, perduring
   still, lorn and born only of visions
all yellow and filling up trees so as the assault
   of light spreading maps through the  sky,
      looking for its home.

i.
on such frigid atmosphere lay,
a serene fugitive.

do not look at me with such lithe eyes:
the sepulcher is only starting
       to begin.

your sleep's regimen twice-folds
origamied on the quiet cloister,
hang there, puts to test the unblinking
certainty of we who bear no retrieval.

ii.
remember when
    all the fish you gut and all the *****
      you cleave were all but meaningless
       fill?

a mutiny of stench is released,
as men continually purged you of
your poisons — us mortised to this
vague mandate.

i have wished for them to miss the mark.
i have longed for them to mime only
  but your placid face.
they have ransacked the quarry of flesh
  flashed bare against mirrors riveted
   to split-seconds of hours.

iii.
when i was young,
much sleep was needed — a noonday travail to all fretting but a dream of dogs.

now this thump of quietness
may mean no recovery.
the speculations to gnaw for sleep are
lost in a blink of an eye:

the blanket that once smelt of camphor
now engulfs in a single blast of cerement.
        — this scrap of a thing that we
             almost have no use for.

iv.
a furious consideration of roomfuls
   disallowed by a heady ruling of
   emotion's precision.

that, of the most difficult choices—
knowing where to fecundate rest.
your body heeds
            no metaphysical reckoning.
  the preordained space for you to occupy, this unwanted silence that keeps
   on renaming things we cease to forget.
a sentence seized by a clause of wood.

  all too soon to wave as a single beat
  is thrown a hundred ripples into my
  eyes, dragged along and trundling there,
     left lengthening to leave, never to wait.

not with time, nor with a touch we choose
to contest — but an eyeing space,
   a moment to attract transience.

v.
i will only look at you once — lacquered
   with solace.

no ellipsis of breath could continue you.
no paragraphs would forgo of your
   punctuations. i deny my defeat
against one who brooks with victory.

    no hint of other chroma.
    a chiaroscuro of beating petals,
   left only to thrive and not swing
    with verdurous display.

how to tell if this is true?
i touch myself as words gyrate
  in the room that received your body
  like the lighthouse that feeds the sea.

—  or maybe sheathed with the untruth.
  this enigma yields no revelations.
  too late to ring yet still continuing on,
    an early drop of dew.

i see graves in centrifugally waiting
faces
     of vain.

    mortised to sleep, somnambulist
   of this prickly road,

   i kneel to pick flowers
   and throw them
  onto the face i long for
  understanding my eyes
     my mouth
        my body
          steelwork of soul,

   tossing as if a toast
     to our end-fate afloat
  in a raven's wingtip:

      we are all deaths
         wa
     iti
         ng.

dripping and naked
underneath the dome
of some outwardly pouring
wet measure
of lip-meander,
or
as if caught
like a hapless prey
stripped of freedom
fastened to liberal lattices
of a kiss and its lunar cosmogony -
and perhaps
a farewell to the gush of
wave carrying with it
gossamer bodies of tiny memories
worthy of forget, worn, lauded
by sepia hue
exiting languorous doors tired
within cold threshold

sweet science of love, unrelenting
afterwards, so strongly bold before.

it is like you have
existed before i,
and in the darkness,
your lightness beckons.

it is like
your bright body has
mapped the secret roads
to unearth my bones
and scale them
to love's density.

it is like
the wind under every flight,
girdled to the height
of laughter lifting in moonlight,
never falls
never shatters.

it is like you have drawn
a line between
body and soul and every night,
when all lights have swayed
to their prisons,
you cross the border
where we both meet,
body
soul

in the
equinox.

i see him straightening the
ruffle of his native clothing,
putting words of truth
inside the empty parentheses
of mendacities -

it is through his leonine eyes
that i see the pointlessness
of men. through the
TV's hoarse static i can hear
his voice occupy the space
of obligation without swerving
to paths made available for ease
without clear trudge.
    sir, you make it painless
to conceive these cutting truths -
death trembles in these taut attestations. in half-lighted periphery i can see the shadows
threatening to cast us into damnation, and it is in the bright ray of your speech that i have started to uncover the beasts
  and their diminutive language.

dark as dark these ploys could be,
  now that they are whiter than
  ever with their transparencies,
you have handed these people
  flames to torch effigies
   and use their glare to light
  the intransigent paths
    to this nation's true calling!

    spare us from the debaucher
of this once sacred land, the contortionists   of these ill fates.
and preserve our just tillage
  over these archipelagos!
save us from the vertigo of these
   mangled, twisting roads!
give our speech obdurate
   magnitude so we can hammer down
the lies thrown at us and cast them away together with their wretched demagogues!

    let us once more, be brave
    to withstand the eye of storms
    and emerge wizened like
     trees in the summer of
    our old, resplendent memories
     where everything is
   and nothing
         is speaking loosely
   of something far from our hands
     to hold, like
   prosperity,
        or effulgence - altogether!

Eros:
the days leap as they should,
over serrated blades of grass: brightly,
transcendentally.
i open the voluminous page
of the twilight: it is October bruised
with brindled water.
white is the color of your laughter,
nourishing the noise of heart, crumpled
over the virginal sheet.
in the staring mirror dizzy with life,
shining with a sudden image
in sempiternal fume: both of us,
twining, entering each other
even before the world was complete,
heavy with your hair, lithe with
your embrace, eyes gorged with
  naked visions,
hands flayed, full of hours—
i make your ample sea my scarce wave's
anchorage, erasing the twinge
by habit of shores.
i weep: you are filling the world with your own light now drowning the shadows
in the depths of their caves, choking
the silence, wringing out the leafage
of your body's inflorescence.
in vivid decree of your smile, you have
made me the cargo of minutes
rummaging across the dunes of lust:
the tousled sheets,
nearing, coming to me, swarming
soft body: we fell into the hollow of sleep.

Thanatos:
here at the lip of the bed
receiving our smallness, the days—
felled into the night, stilled,
in this finite hour a darker blue
is given; i speak not of love.
how are we alive here?
raining inward, above the brim
of an open window, do you wind-hover?
your voice has escaped the dungeon
of my mouth, and the twining of
our fingers give birth to a forest of specters and a moonless love demanded.
i beat through your harsh curve;
i go tracing your eyebrow
engulfed in the festering fever
of half-light marches and the faint spark
of autumn leaving no tawny scent—
there is only silence peregrinating
in the room before you and after I,
it began to pour in our room,
both of us struck down to mortals
together with a feint recall i cannot parry:
we fell into a bottomless hollow of eyes,
chasing our chained breaths, wordless.

rain glistens the gray face
of asphalt in this lurid eve

as the trickle-song thumps
the chords of metal,
the frequent hum of a passing mobile, a trembling moth in sight
pursuing the stillness of this
      eve

i remember once my hands touched
multipliedly the work of bone.

this too i remember: when you
were hesitant to say anything
yet eyes were as consenting
as a portent of rain, and as crude
as any language shouted
in between the rift of river
and hill -- there is much to remember in the field tumescent
with aromatic carnality.

it is without speech that everything desperately tries
to signal me something incipient
like an unknown flowering left
to be unearthed.

tonight it rains endless
with memory. the moth
unfolds its fictile allegory
without having to cocoon
around an unfazed inset of hot glow
in this eve of reminiscences
summoning you through
this flight of esoteric moth,
through the rain and its ephemeral burst of bloodless ripple,
through the sensual globules
of lampposts telling me of
a once familiar batting of eyes
and disappearance of darknesses

when our bodies made fire
during the eve of our discoveries.

it is not the tier of enmeshed leaves
nor the zither of green. none is their duty
to discover the lunar hook of moon.
   — the old bamboo is the mistral
danseuse tonight.

whatever the etcetera
of it, whatever the birds demand from it.
a sling of breath is far-flung into the sky
announcing merriment before the child
beheads the tulip,
      before the creature chokes the pistil,
        before the light enters slow-churn
           of synthesis.
  
  hearing the giggling of bush in
  the mire of wind, heaving in all kinds
  of sleep, the children, the weather,
    together; synapses drunk in translation
  and we feel no longer the secret
    of a guerrilla behind the foliage.

  it is only the heraldry of the world
  when the morning unclips its wing,
  as monsoons continue their bushwhack
  amongst petty citations.
          past oceans gleaming and
    away from hills dreaming —  by the
river, dead of heart, riveting silence
    of land, past the battered bridge in Marilao tracing deathlier waters,
  
         all gone in recall, something
i scour to find only pining away from
scarcity of remember. it is never their
    duty to bring back its image
  to dance with me again.

and so you go
emptying the room, Evening/Morning
playing on the small, grey radio.

it is not in the way you navigate with the most immense
of eyes I have seen,
whose lips torn with shade have said always,

this
was meant to
fall – when yellow trees outlast greener ones,
i cannot.
we cannot.
you cannot.

and many before me, all the doors have closed
shut, voices cornerless searching for flesh.
i thought it would **** when you first moved
back to where we were once trapped,
like an arcade fire waiting to confide in smoke.

at last, the books can now be read –
first to go are words, and yet in the next moment,
we will not let each other be
strangled with days,
            years, spurning, striding out of windows.

our discomfitures are made clear
when I dug my hands deep into the grave of your own,
and in pure wonderment, neither the lights flinched
nor the darkness congealed – it is only enough
   that when you closed your eyes, they will never
open to me any longer: our waiting has only become
  our most obvious limitations and we have been
  held    we have been taken in     we have fallen in
      we have learned each other    we have unlearned each other

and somewhere in the next room,
   a door slams – someone is tiptoeing masterfully not to topple
  the Victorian, not to
startle the oncoming  shadow of the transfixed   furniture,
        careful enough    not to still the voices   that I long for
and fracture     this man,    this being    myself   and all that staleness.

it is the wrong  voice in the evening
   and only the silence impales with   surgery-precision.
they   all   have feet    thighs    calves
   drunk in merriment   looking at their lacquered   nails
fixing their    stockings   and lamenting their men
     in   all the   roominghouses    of the world there   are but
  silences    that ought    to be     fragmented

   but     not   tonight – there they go marching like   a sad
  army waving farewell   with bayonets in   their hands swaying   like
   light from a candle’s  anxious  flame-tip – and they promise   me
   kisses    and they tell me    temporal   splendors   I have no use for
     it is    not your    tenderness     of   your     being    here
     but the    assault    of your     being     somewhere  else.

all i see now are the silent ruin
of words teeming with wisdom
in every trail. you are gleaming
in the moony boondocks,
Ibabá remembers you as you were -
timeless and ruminative,
pursuing the source of rivers.

our sublime versifier,
the crucifixes now tremble without
the fullness of your flesh.
each page is turned without
the hover of your voice yet
stills its resonant message in my mind's premises like redolent graffiti.
striding river-pace,
once in moonlit Orfeo
graced by your sibilant being,
leaving only the strongest of impression
on the surly couch, a toppled glass
of Shiraz remembering your attendance
leaving the clamor of the audiences
real to touch, elusive in thought.

before the war was the ever-present word, and after the fray was
the armistice of the Sun where in
humdrum Sampiro, your fire's genealogy
is in the hands of the muse!

idly go the hours, wading everlong past
Calle Herrán - the bells of Paco Church
tell in this imperfect hour
the roads where you once traversed,
travailed and perhaps beer-maddened,
putting a face in the metaphysical!

in your banquet i partake
the wisdom of your wine
and the reason of your flesh -
the gods delight in you,
  o, Manila of all Manila.

every dog has his day.
things are good
as i am not dead yet
as the people are homebound.
the same familiar palms wave
the same dogs stray
the same birds dart in the sky
there is not much left to look at.
give me a few more years and i can
unlearn this gambit,
give me a few more years and i can
learn it again

i have a voice in my head
and they put shoulders in there
two eyes, two crazed hands
pale fingers, and in some evenings
a palpable laugh. so real i can
touch you.

and you say a manifold of things,
and apart from all of them,
one that will never leave me
even with absent eyes:
   something in me laughed
   in your arms
   and in your arms we have laughed
   each other away.

that laughter soft
that laughter raw
that laughter warm
  like light
  like life
  or a hand on my chest
  with blood running in veins
  together with the days
  across hills like wild horses
  and then
  gone -

i yield damages—

"On a marble bench, dreaming:
    I can never hold arms of war
   but i can cradle the artillery
      of love."

some excerpts of boyhood.
some lines written so long ago as
a distant dove hovers, postpones
the herding word,

yet so near to me as a crouched dark
clenched in corner, knowing all the bends and turns of the road.

if i am braver than all — imperative
enough to toss the fear out of night,
or to wring broad daylight of birds,
why must it decree me?

remembering it rearing all the stillness
flown in the wind, the storm of my
younger self crossing Earths in all sides,

treading the tightwire something still
i am the wind and the peril knows my name, making wounds real again.

Answered, thus labeled because views a similarity. Who had this in the hand of the eye’s compact? If presence shifts to absence and believe it is safe in transit, what contract aspires to be an object used against it?

Here must be another present, moving thing for this nonattendance to take place. Its duty need not be nominal. And when it takes place, there is a guarantee for a statement: almost, to a certain extent. Had, adhered, temporary.

This was taken as an insistence of its exclusion as an avowal of its state: when a thing ceases to move, it has named a boundary all within a venue with already christened boundaries. To rise from its nomenclature, a question: what for is this mode? The unassuming and deliberate twofold of its chrome is indicative of something. There are only two possible answers to the question, but never warrants indemnity.

If amorphous then suitable to bend or assume over and over, a confrontational: to hold it against walls everywhere, its color only when dual fixing not a shadow, but the possibility of a shadow. To spill light over the malleable – notice how a body contorts.

If distinct then determined to traverse a straight line, a sanction: to furlough the idea of its controlled variable which is its many possibilities, its shape now not only a name but a force that deals with a believable architecture of compressed options. There is no need for appellation when related to dislimn as a shade is necessary for this disappearance to simulate. But the treachery is that when light surrounds no longer, form somehow a myth as if pausing all lightness to declare something: this is of two explanations merely a single.

the explanation of it
sinks deeper yet it is rare without
any manifestation.

it is difficult for me to
unlatch the locks
and throw away the keys
into an unknown abyss.

the hot star and
the apple of moon
now rise in the distance.
tonight, there will
be all that is troubled
and no solace could ever *****
us in its promise.

it is the ending of things
and right even before
its emergence, you can feel
it in the way things play
themselves out like a
premeditated plot or a fool's
unchanging ploy.

the wobbly table, stirring all
glass and fluids -
the soft rumble of the feral
over the rooftop -
the remaining enigma of an
unfinished epistle
teeming with infinities -
the door left ajar by
the tenor of wind -
a raked tumble of singed leaves;
the swarm of cocooned light
over the bland asphalt.

i have seen hands lose their
taut grip upon things they swore
with ease to never let go
as a dog is wan without its
asphyxiating leash,
as a bird is free without
the conundrum of metal,
as we are both
free
as though we do not know each other - fretting for answers raw without
questions, or scurrying through
the fixation of so many pleasures
just to diminish whatever it is
that remains insatiable, or holding back the flight of things
and consigning them to slow exeunt.

let me fruition this now
with emphasis. There will be noise
disavowed, and only the full metal of silence
would indict the plenary moon.

       whatever you say, it shall will
itself to the ground, obvious of its
decay long overdue. This time, precision
of aches outrace light – only this night,
and in some other nights when there is
only the blue glare of your face in the
nauseating vertigo of words intimated.

     now, in the barenaked room,
everything will enter as if the first time,
the last ones too – all at once so suddenly short
and handsome with abeyance.

   you were out into the world and I won’t
flinch nor blame. Soon when capable,
all of this will whittle into one fine laughter
pivotal towards the wary sides of mercy.

soon nothing, as changes
were inimical, silence will champion our
places, remembering you in the unclothed
sunlight of the South when we faced North,
watching boats wade in speeds of your freedom,
   in the boulevard where at one point in time,
     I have left you spaces to occupy,
   only mine errors found.

Take wanting for, abandon – and then one will begin.
Who is approaching close enough to devise an entrapment
will not see image clearly: him, as he will offer you a face
and a hand to desolate – put a lacking so you can flinch,
and a hand to brace you from it. Prophesying that a body
and another body cannot be singular. To hypothesize
an effort as a sharp encounter. To be given the world
to know its limits when a border has been reached,
to slowly unravel a form and a shape from the scope
of its representative and bend a spoken dismissal precisely
to generate content. To take wanting for, abandon then,
so you can begin to reserve a function for the body to elope
with and thin into an arbitrary.
     So when you begin from an instruction, reshape a simulation
so your actual body could hold you in for your yearning –
to begin again, so you can abandon a want to remember how
slivering a house is when two cannot be one and does not admit
it so to be true – facing each morning delighted the walls
each moment when together  to untangle, meeting, surprised
that we have still become remainders.

hear    me now as i say
  pilgrimed is the image
  unloosen
   yourself   into the wind
  as i *****
      for some
  sense of
     placeness in this
 vaudeville

      no more are
 the birds that
     sing and way past us
 already seconds
     in waning
    is the same permeable blue
tracking    up
   our curved  spines
and when      weakened
    falling at
     last

as multiple
    cities do -
i see   a line
      for  a stream uncollected,
 as      rain
     over     genuflected
  hills      will.

we have fallen right
through the hurl
of this inner breaking.

    it is like we have collapsed
    into a twine of hands -
    spoken before the flowering
    of the twilight.
    we have awakened before
    the petalled corolla of the
    moon yields the peril of
    this void's statelessness.

in your eyes,
  so much in you is stellar.
  a florilegia of waxing images
   burning at the tip of this
    lunar flare, derailed from
   their orbits and left trundling
     in the vacuity.
in your eyes are the moon
   and the sun, the twist in
their shared iridescence,
   birthing out all your stars.

i am the father of these words yet,

these mischievous children
run away in the loquacious dark
chasing lithe-clothed, supple-limbed
girls whirling up and about the prairie
of these versifications without home
     in mind or remembering —
(the home of my mind wary of
the past and its old cobwebs,
or the slaughter of ordinariness
with a dull blade poised to cull,
these mindful creatures assassinating
diaphanous muses disrobing themselves,
serpents shedding their integuments.)
   oh and when they return home sullied,
after a day's squalid scamper past
  the muck, the twitch of atmosphere,
    the horizon ladled with clouds
  in white metamorphosis, i remove their
  clothes and send them to the fences of sleep — impish dream-callers,
  yes I am the father of these words
and they flourish, swelling up, learning
   to harangue their own father, sending
    him to borderless retreat.

father arrives carrying lovelessly
the weight of his own shadow
across the furniture.

throws his socks missing
the mouth of the laundry bin.

exhaust of television static
as his mouth opens agape

receiving the dizzy fizz of
turning channels

like spindrift through the windows
moist, wizened on his resigned couch

he falls asleep like a pin
dropped into the heart of the ocean—

life, what have you done?
mother lacquers her fingernails
as the dog wags his tail furiously

the mirrors ache as dead moments
grow roots in the viscera,

as shadows curb themselves
perfecting their disappearances,

the madhouse women
rehearsing their discomfitures

time swiftly passed
through the very past of things

that we have forgotten,
late to unsay the day struck by wind
and too uneventful to even plead
for undivided rest.

let hands speak what mouths
   cannot prattle

                 let eyes dream what sleep
               renames with its tranquility

let love undo what
hate has wreaked and

                 let fingers saunter infinite
                 strides when feet sojourn

let this quiet bellow
a hundredfold of sound

                  and let soul dance when
                  we have departed,

enisled here underneath the
brow of a terminal day,
  
                  its numeral tasks unfold
                  in the night full of silences

and let the world feel the cold
of brookwater when we cannot swim—

figurined affectations
weary on their pedestals,
high-pouncing in their
formless wind,
whimpering in their places,

like a woman imagined
in leitmotif - chords
outstretched to symphonic wrestle,
lissome fingers touch
gossamer ground
lips wovenly shut to figure
out in silence, its language.

this is a showcase of longing,
yet, wildly it goes
with its urgency, into the
   unrests of my cerebra,
imprisoned there, slumbering there, thieving and thriving there.

slackened armature where
flesh once was,

brought by the
moment is a flurry of once kisses
dampening this limpid bed

  that we will once again paint
  with the lacquer of the white noon,

  leaning closer
  is this heady fate of stone:

  i must

     unlearn the work
  of your hands, this clay molded
  into something ominously touchable

  forget the rudiments of soul
  that i once fastened still and straight
  with the weight of my tongue tasting
  the sweetness of losing myself
  in a thick crowd of intent murmurs
  and then finding myself still
      down on you, ships anchored
       to pure linen of sea with hands clenched to a taut grip

    drown the silence and seek
      roads in an uttered word's dwindling
      light - this gladsome dark now
   spreads its wings and then sings
      a frightful muting each to its
    own questions owning up to
     the answerlessness of all that has
    left me still
           down on you,
       clambering my way up
   yet deeper i am, felled
      and only so
      ineffably little, like a moment
   still heavy,
   still pressing on us both
    and separately.

pointing easterly,
azure skies of course
   this afternoon.
washlines drenched in
  high-sun,
precise contraptions
    deter spread of
anomalies seen daily.

  you tell me
hare's the fool
  you had once in your
 fledgling hands and died.
hare's foot
   is luck more than
imaginary.
  when no one is looking but
always i, keening in the total
    image -- it cannot
be you, impossible
   under ineffable skies
and twilight-erased  mud;

moments are   disavowal.
   you    like   the sound
so withdrawn   from  contestation,
  so easily your accurate self
liking   the   captured  dissonance.

you know   a fine day when
   it happens,
slow ****** of the vertical,
   highest  time to quit, bid for
a sequestered   place   free
      and absolute in variables: x is the lie.
all the intimate
    dark   you   pulse  with   the life
of   beautiful  horses

          gaining lightsome distance,
an approbative signal of technicolor
    painting   your   face  with   all
       things basking.
                     truant.

(everything happened while
    unloading laundry from the car,
  a speck of light flaunts.)

daylight penetrates—
saturnal globule.
exeunt: flicker of firefly.

when i look at you
to say something in pace of rafts
on rivers,

cadencing
claptrap swerve of wording
in tongue's avenue

         is its nature—

    spreading contagion of ill pride.
seeking diadems in fields of night larks
   singing heavily, unapologetic, eulogizing
   mornings none we could take,

  whirling inside our bodies like
     stirred poisons in vials. past the unreadiness of moonlight waxing
    stellified are the waters now, clear
in first light,
    
      like fish underneath our bellies.

i desire for your
  inner light to awaken:
itself, a budding flower—

growing roots in my silence,
  foregoing the panache of air.
your petals assist my peril
into a curtain's closing.

what transparency does my hand hold
clearer than any day when you
look at yourself within my eyes,
dizzy with the image i give back,
  a startled child?

the Earth's jar topples, waters breaking free, loosening its girth wily against stone, rinsing us both with purity.

girls in lithe dresses
  still in photographs

they hurt like daggers—

being this young
  hurts like a dagger, too as
their eyes divine something
  in me,
or their hurtling way of being so
    ineffably in place
  and i, placeless,
  skin flushed hot
   like receiving a multitude of tongues,
    this juvenility,
   everything around me is lissomeness
     just— tryingly closing my eyes
hoping to be awakened by the roaring
     of blood in vein,
  put to sleep by a lapidary brush
    of hum: a delicate soft-petalled song
       but i am a child
   lost in a field
         of various flowers.

she goes             freeing herself
and stops            to break her fall
suddenly            to gather herself

and begin again    with such brazenness
was it        the moon
and not     the far-flung bird of song?
was it        the brigade of shadows
and not     the heady kisses of night?

     she keels over like a vast wave
stretching    her   arms   into   the sky
once   again,  permitting    herself   to be seen
   not  by  the moon,
not  by   the   hale  of such  night  that struggles   not  to
   tipple   over   her hair   that demands    a   different hue
  of  silence
   but    by  herself     in   the mirror
the   metamorphosis,
     true   to  the   claim   of   the   world
  except    she   is   not   to  flutter   away,
                             just     yet –

dissonant is what it was.

that foreverness of din.
criminal—
  aloft, eluding some captive way
    of emphasis.

  scraps of papers fold
and truth is rarefied. hammered
for its malleability is its common trait.

truth and always its never ever.
the men mumble words as if
  oceans whirl in their palates.
the women hide their thighs
  and think of fornications.
the children learn to pilfer
      stray coins in the keep.

dissonance is what it still is.

there's a slow moon over the aubade
     over the culled garden.
     over the cloverleaf curve
    in Balintawak. over no trove of truce.
  caterwauling noises flailing
      belch of automaton metal. mendaciloquent glower of lampposts
    to die early, abandoning EDSA—
we cannot name figures any longer
    of the same axiom, equation,
    salt, crossovers.

I fear    of becoming an animal to pin within the
       forest of your silence yet a manifest

   If I said once your accidental burden

       was my presence, which cage shall I occupy?
             To accept that  being   is   sure custody.,
To the inundated moon to a full that was only light
    when everything shook within the height of absence,
To have you a rumple on the thousand-fleeting foliage
     and have me wronged as the green is cut from the

throat of dew-soaked grass

                           a    mistake.  Now the fear of

you almost peering through the shaded hall like a fugitive
waiting for  an open space interfuses

                 with my burden. The geometry of our
   setting   has become the    shape of ruin:
      a descent. A path that arrows
                 to a consistent departure. A trajectory
    lost midway,     murdering        the forest.

in the rain striding past closed stalls
and bottle shops, my head the
flickering lamp, my fingers dead candles,
my eyes the last flare of splayed days.
i roar like a lion — stubbled, prowling
the deserted streets but flinch at the
first sight of shadow. revisited by old
haunts mirroring strange voices, distorting their claims — in my retina
is a woman sitting idly sewing lissomeness strings to bed and we sleep.
   i wake up quicker than any light.
lift words, chain them and sing steel songs, carry volcanoes, herald ravens.

i can't stand the populace, can't live
without them. i squat next to the fire-hydrant and imagine hounds *******
at the world. once, the sheen of the little
sightings festoon, borrow the moon and
i was once levitated into meaning. now,
i want to hang my head next to the old cypress and scream, "Forever, the peril."
   but i am the thrall of the sea.
immenser than the leviathan of ache
  the last scream of the perished hills,
forever, a clout on the grey-faced asphalt dazed into the lenient whiteness of paths,
    i still sing steel-songs, solder volcanoes, chase the salutary ravens—
  i see myself cringe but i will not cry.
the woman sleeps and i am awake,
  a gentle hand will whirl upon her
lithe figure and then gone. i am the
   tear of the cloud in their exhausted tier
but somewhere here, i am as perpetual
   as waters, tracing the end.

let us be contained
in our squared circles.

and join the many
forgotten things.

let us revel in the
flight of misfit dust
and partake in the soiree
of dancing alone.
let us only hear the words
that gnash through the teeth
of oblivion's gaping mouth
and like a hollow jar,
let us be only that - flowerless,
waterless, aware of space
and weary of forgotten capacities.
let us startle them
if they find us in unsettling sleep
and in their somnolence
we will saunter the avenues
of indecipherable finitude
  and not shrink
at its accompanying terror.

i hunt for a sign
of you in the vernal sky—
all summer and breeze.

this is another form I would like to lose
   but what is a man to inherit but the empire of sleep after
being caught in a virulent web of dailiness?
                sometimes dreams are as empty as Manila
  on a Sunday – requiring things I do not understand,
  so as the departure of leaves to bring back the same existence,
   the parallel rawness, and the exact hundredfold inflorescence,
   a blank synthesis of light is another conundrum
                  as sidewalks remain steely and squalid
  holding themselves up to surrender; when another drone breeds
      sound from a distance, one is reminded of how gently songs in themselves
  break inward and release fully, a cloud of regret, leaving things and renaming
  them loose sobriquets;
                  and when all else have gone into total darkness
   I will sit beside everything else that closes its eyes to the world
   and rejoin them in the familiar and see nothing but the rest
      of beautiful things ignite to show scars and leave
       us all wordless, losing
                          this  strange  form of living.