this is the loudest of all your silences
and to allow you to thrive and thieve
  the moment from beginning to end
    is a tremendous task.
  to let you pullulate from the first letter
   up until the (exalted) last, to permit
  you to brood and intrude like a stranger
  abounding the train at midnight and
  a shadow alight in the next, aching stop,
  to watch you move and regret your
     motionlessness as i hunt for a trace
  of movements in the last room that
    you have been in and to desire you
      still in the following room

  only to find that the voicelessness
     in all of the world is the loudest
    of all the silences.

my bones break from the sheer weight
    of the imagined moment where
  
  you trill on my bough
  like a wan heron
  or the immense warble
  of a bird

   or say,

where the eternal breast of
  the shore is touched a hundredfold
  by the wave's quivering hands,
  where the salt is poised in the bendable
  light swaying in the water against
    the high noon.

what moves the sea
  is what moves the fruition of
   my being to where you are,
near or away, still like a photograph
    close to my chest, nursing your
   warmth in me, like a fire to
    a hearth but you are not with me.

I saw the rest of my kind scour against the streets, hands calloused-laden,
wizened by erratic explosions – nondescript music analogous to silence;
terse sleep stiff in wind, homes filled with tension, arrow-headed men
quiver through the busy streets as tatterdemalion as stray dogs.

inverted triangle, sidereal vertigo, mutilated rose and the beheaded tulip.
the ambiguous spiral of the downcast climb. I see all men maddened
by wine over the rooftops.

                   choking in dank light – the night exudes its flayed machinery.
           an empty bottle of whiskey and a body stripped of skin melded with fright
        raised higher than the maladroit sky.

I, whose name is but an algorithm of formlessness. I, whose silence is but the contemplation of stone. I,
whose voice toboggans like a tender ramshackle of incantations
                                   filling tubercular pockets with spare hope yet none are we but only poorer.
    whose fingers are but tired girls tousling in bed lacquered by sunsets – whose nails are paler
    than a ****** of moonlight, whose homes are inflamed hemmed in by petticoats,
             whose eyes set affixed to no avatars in juxtaposition of parks
                                  falling madly in love with everything that glints.

this tired militia of existence.
the burlesque jeepney stallions
   its metal anatomy. its belch-***,
its slur of alloy clanging like hundreds
  of men for tacks buried deep
    by a cornucopia of strikes –

thus is the heart, a boy in his seventh year
  dragging along a kite;
the soul is a bus ticket torn by the conductor,
  thrown away into Novaliches.

to wish it true, its gliding silk
  of air – it was only beginning

when people meant we are finished,
  we were only just starting

tonight as the night wills it, a boy

   fishes for brine in the shallows of dream
padding the small of his back
with a hunt of green: his equal self.

   the day, loose in the wind, perfect as perfect
   can be,
   yet still not quite, like when mother said
   the light dies, its low wattage in the hour,
   the prize of the candid moment: dimmed. darkled.

for you, dearest, ever so shyly
i, (almost always) silently, sloshing (pertinently), will be like water
falling and falling repeatedly,
(like falls from felled rocks,
  this foreverness of the dive)
rinsing and rinsing multipliedly,
(like rain tainting the already
  stained glass in Barasoain)
freely, wanly, (like my hand
  seeping through the aqueduct
   of your body or
  traversing the source of this stream)

but there is a brightness unmoving,
   high rise of heat,
  like water
     i have dried out.

Take cover underneath your derelict day
  inside the cage of this home

and thrive in canned laughter, delay my
  coming, commanding like youth that was

your ever place. The city stranded into a thick
   swell of rain, gush was stone flushed in corners,

distending a shore. It was your extension with
   what was given -- this climate. This weather

within the azure's finest crosshair. Take this salt
   and ***** fish in brine. Brightest day

a myth under your penance that was I, supine
   on the surface unmoving like hue or else

dumb like refusal -- the amount of what for,
   patented here a blink couldn't waste in:

a season so squalid you waged inside yourself
    contained in a terminal brow of a humdrum day

that was yours solely manufactured from
    stalling a refrain, which tide of song

rinsed the corners whole betrayed by access
    of us here emptied like a concave

this loss tallied  by  the  gravity effaced
     with a high price, take this to your disquiet

and be caught against a registered tragedy
      when parted, dearly remembered to a feigned

retrieval -- further your stasis, then after this
      a halt lesser than force when found who we

are when   we  find how things are done.

i shall speak in an enormous voice,
  seeking through the oneness
    of many beginnings,

    a period,
    an end
    to all ends,
    
     foregoing its
   strange intent.

     and to put this to light,
    when in multiples,
   a fountainhead.

light breakdances
   seascape as wave labour
     on no man's end.

there is defeat in common grasp.
  what shall we do to keep our
  hearts from breaking?

  to make tractable the creature
  or to cast tacit upon stone
   a noisome mutiny of cicada.

this is where no words shatter.
this is where no fool's beginning
is the end of men in sheer wonder.
this is where we stop our
hearts and deny them of their
    pains:
when the moon plunges deep
  and breaks into a song of star,
through trail of air,
    the morning - all friction
      yet no sound, shouts
heavy without artillery: frangere.

this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
    light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
    sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
    i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to                            

                                 ­                        vertigo.
                                           in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
         long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
    120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
  form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,

                                          are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
    and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
      of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
     to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
     after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
               that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.

Death among other deaths as the hour becomes moist
   by the rage of oncoming minutes. The scent of rain lingering
   everywhere – here from the end of the most sullen sight
   flaying the document.

This among the cheapest of things – to find the beauty
   gone in all things. I am reduced to turning moments
to body parts – people to signals, currents, beacons;

        you   are  the  arms  pressed   within   monuments.
eyes   crushed   in  glare   this very catatonic     second
      in   flash   gone,  whoever    lies   in  the  parking lot   with me
         the feet   that have gone     missing.

    name-recall passes as clearing. Close protocols
     to   guard a well-oiled machine
         beheading the avenue.    This anomaly

   is the common thing within stains   trading
         cleanliness among     fabrics we  are cut  from   the
      same      origin: now    let    rain.

Beneath   an expression

a       found     crevasse   that   was

    for your   body



Dear  ___,
   if by principle      you are to believe
                        the brevity of a word
   then should it be that

    there is much terror applied by your mind
    when this is being the reddest herring you can
   imagine strange and leading the body to
   traverse a line and get lost midway





and over it
    a    purpose    for    its   depth
  that is      for    my    body

I imagine        you naked
I imagine        you dead in faint recall
I imagine        your hands the gun metal
I imagine        your teeth the fence guarding flesh
I imagine        your perfume, your mother’s wake
I imagine        your strut a dance to J. Alfred Prufrock

I imagine       you singing from each to each
he puts    it like that,   and you have become overwhelmed
      by passivity
             as   in    a salutary
as capitulation
                      as the Earth surrendering to rain.

I imagine        you clothed
I imagine        you alive in the demise of day
I imagine        your hands studded to the hilt with lacquered sorrow
I imagine       your teeth gnawing my skin to suture
I imagine         your tears, the sea in front of your mother’s grave
I imagine        you
          ******* in the silver  head of morning

i like how your eyes close.
voluminous quandary of
a naked rose.
the agony of the brine
beating through the night.

i like how your eyes swallow back
to smallness
and then open
like a gossamer flower in bloom.

i like how your eyes flicker
their transluminal joy - i like what they do to me - so quite a new and tender thing. under the ocean-liner of your skin and the waiting islets of your shoulders, there i am drunk underneath the twilight of your wide eyes, outwrestling pains, and then closing, outlasting the nightfall.

smoke ascends
into a thin streak
hauled by wind's crane.
tacit coruscations peer through
the cityscape without lasso.

revealing
light's snickersnee
and then guts the silence
with it,
pares it back
to an ember's nascent form.
in the womb of death
is i,
lips puckering to blow
a nebula of a new world,
ingesting all its hell
and expires
a circumambulating heaven,
sealing all fates,
a sepulchral nativity.

We rarely go drunk, or perhaps that is I, when I told Marc that all people are nearly up on exits
   and barely exists now is feeling – he started swinging a running joke between the two of us

facing the planetesimal – lights their strobes of secret I am on my 7th beer and still nothing
    when being listened to by frantic fret of fear because indulgence is key to demise

when it is said to pull apart but didn’t, I halved the 7th beer and felt my gut cloy itself with
  the muck of fat from pork rind and stale chicken

I deem myself incompetent in the slug, gild of attendance: freckled wall with dotted red,
    linoleum plastered, defaced somewhat, Marc moves to Hannah and I further

the dark with my groping hands – I do not smoke inside my car.
         Ortigas is unusually dull, minutes trickle slow like *** or un-***,

whichever it may, I quickly said as I stole the mic from his hand the words I imagine
    to become filled with the purpose of frayed upon exactitudes.

He always brings his knife with him and I always ask him even if I knew
  that it’s somewhere in his acid-washed jeans – I have always been fascinated

by the lives made better or worse by knives. I remember Gabriel and I talking
   about Holden Caufield when all we ever wanted was to fall

immensely in love with girls we  chase around   in sophomore year, Gabriel
I do not know where you are and listening to Radiohead now reminds me of

something   strange   with   unwilling potential; perennial silence permeates
        Ortigas and somewhere a couple is hot and *******

whereas I, asleep on my 9th beer, probably my last,
         willing to give   up  for  a   laugh or   some     sense  of place

  while I hear them all
    laughing   in front of my parked   car,  poking fun   at   something

I   can   barely identify.

because love when cut,
lets loose
an empire of blood:

i have in my lips,
a treaty of oblivion—
releasing an embittered lemon.

in the throne of the sea,
waves repeat the crash
of perfidy.
by the mountains they ride,
the thick air of strobe.

rocks receive the genital fire
of lighthouses
exposing intones of shadow
one by one.

the beast maimed
behind the zither of trees
makes no sound like
  an aleph.

i herald the collusion of night
   and children
and weep at the solicitude of mothers,

because pines swoon in the dark
and with its hand, the gentlest war
   threshes the flesh and blood,
raining on us forever.

hostile eyes bypass the silence of things
  and lovers closing doors repeatedly,
disrupting the vale from its slumber.

   it is because when love is let loose,
it releases both of us — weary, inescapably ripe with the wind, looking
   for each other as doves do in flight,
  separate and obscured, opening gates;

                                           nightfall:
   the savage aroma of wood
       on the leaves that sway fervently
          tippling away from boughs.

I am,
  yet one never complete for
much ado has been said
   when the span of the world
ends when the sky-reaching flowers
  plummet inward, breaking shoals
     of fettered clouds dusting themselves
of the ether.

I am
   never a lie nor the truth beset
by trivial happenstances; there is always
a sound heard from a body's eventual fall
   into sleep's threshold—
the  dreams are all imagined realness
    and tomorrow detests, all the
  muses by the river gone harmoniously
     escaping the hands of standstill time.

oh, let red
   or blue define the Sun and moon,
      lunar harlequin bleeding white
  all the gemini! pounded against the harsh blackening wall of eyes sealed shut
    and far away, i go, to where no sound
      lengthens, flames to reach with
    its flumine hands a furtive life congealed,
      singing where no hymn shatters,
       returning to the Earth with words—
            a made man.

silence is sage
and no gold is betrothed
to the folly of words.

wizened of old. i can taste
the word's iteration as the pen sees
the dreamer, as the paper
dictates the fate.

bespectacled, sizing down
the most fortuitous of spectacles,
in the pantheon
   belonging to the supremes
     destroying frailest caryatids
and awakening the mortal flame.

    how well you understood
the postulation of cold.
    how vivid, how precise
is your concept of the void.
  how seldom imposed
the crutch of loves,
    how mystic is the enigma
of the wide-eyed wanderer

    sifting through the word,
   the will, and the way!

a gentle foreboding:

bidding salutation
and a formless farewell,

into a toboggan of
a bottomless memory.

when things begin themselves
as fine objects, i see their
threats of fading. refulgent light traipsing back to its console.
a tangle of words congealing
to become a forest infested with
voices passing through and perfectly occupying space.

or when you open your mouth
as if you were to say something,
its almost perfectness,
its straightening out the fringes
of my soul to rumple them again,
blue head nostalgia peering
through a soft drape of water,
something as untranslatable as
the shatter of a wave with its forgotten foam slowly making its way down the stairs of jagged rocks, leaving no marks on the very core of thinking this.

when you are about to claw your way back to a memory's drop on the silence of still objects,
reducing all wounds to scars
and there will be no commune
to still its message or tuck its blaring clarity underneath tongues labyrinthine without anything to say, and that what remains to be
conceived is

that this silence
remains to
be something familiar,
like speech - or departures.

getting real, no mere,
yet first, we shall

utter the unspeakable,
sculpt with our eyes
the faintest image,
hear silence's roundness
circumnavigate our mind's
trying verseliterations.
dream a dying thing;
a facelessness
nor a jell - thinking the
unthinkable,
so that in our desperation,
words morph into
anticipated things written
in lighted calligraph -
and with these, things unmoving
shall grow hands and commune to us
through transmogrifications
and cling onto us...

like a thing drowned in love,
or startled, whichever.

the sun is a gentle hand whirling
  softly past the opened windows

and I am a lonely furniture
sitting still beside restless shadows.

shall I give you my silence and
  come back with fledgling beat?

or be fastened with the riot of the masses
  pummeling the iron and striking blindly

like a palaver hurled in the middle
  of the midnight riddled by stars and

   nothing else? stones enisled conspicuously
like the hands of a mother have well-placed

   pavilions into their order, the careful crunch
of trees in Summer, filling the brim of ornate eyes

  with such redness hazily festooning the avenues
with the lissomeness of the Earth

little girls dressed  quaintly on Sundays
   the fragrance of mildew everywhere

     you against all the surrounding scenes
that break vases, pound the halls and leave doors

                      opened, yourself crawling away
dragging along the weight of your own shadow.

lightly, in the indivisible dark -
    without
        sound.

i wait for brokenness
    to spill your name
    outward, like water
       from broken glass.

o, good lord of the streets
where a phantasmagoric sensurround

banishes the scream of youth –

a carburetor snarl taken
   as unction of name. was it

your name that you whispered to my ear,
   him dearth in the quietus.

first to go is grace,
  what soon follows is bravery. a makeshift moon
of course, hanging by the earlobe of

her; I’ve been wanting to bite to break skin
   her truly frightened symmetry
of a  storm which is an  onus of  pain -

o, good lord
     help me weave way later
     when I’m down on my contrabass.
Scout Albano tonight’s a dark
   expanse of    regret

resonating a deep and hollow throb.
    women on flay, cigars in mouths chucked
like busy streets on a noontime sun, the soot clambers
   the billboards and their frozen, extant smiles

      wring out the poison and drain:
    we have no imposed god, an announcement to ear
  shot into the flay of the bone that persistently
      aches - like some unreal drumming of squalors.
            
         we are ruined with echoes of many names that haunt us
  with their gaping mouths
              in   frightful  angles,    but

when we’re drunk, Marc,
   this will all be over.

i need not your voice
to sway or dance,
  just the mere sight of you
   muted still in distance

a bamboo in the
    wind

i need not the air of you
  to float or wind-hover
  past the trellises that separate us,
   just the heady fragrance of your
    entrancing thrall

a call of wild in
   the elaborate dark

i need not the wine of your stare
   to inebriate myself
dizzy with the fine mirages
  of your clamored presence,
  just the thought of you
    infinite in me, pattering the roof
    under many a bed that i slumber in,
  that lewd yet saccharine rhythm
    announcing your coming

     and going,
  like a nascent furl of smoke
    from a match-flame gone,

   eloping with you.

outside the mellow moon
swells - honeysuckle circle
of supernal immensity
athwart the window
shoved into my eyes
undisputed, sempiternal lallygag --
   rolls away into
   the tapestry
   as the mildew starts
  levitations, blowing into
     our windows.

1

held  against   the mouth
  sentenced cleaved to silence, what is around me
 is all this is: wire. quartet of birds. aqueduct
 as arrest and close range tap of rain on face
 rippling in the eye foreclosed and reasoned is
 this image's return -- what is it like to live
 far away from home and not hear me say
 regret as study of attitude? News carried
 bombardment of inner cities. We were hesitant
 to leave place and borrowed skin instead,
    if not borrowed then grasped for, what is the answer? if coordinates lie, what are
                   we trying to discover.

2

held  against  the  temple
   not a barrel of a gun, but similarly, a chamber if not
  a mouth breathing in sulfur. the day has spun
  out of, and in between clipped reminders of
    the calendar:
   today's broken notes on the tablatures are
 the daily. Do groceries. Pick the freshest fruit,
   take the sour out of the scale. Gut the fish
 and not word it so over the kitchen counter, I will
 watch behind a clutter of earthenware and furniture. Might topple the glass
     once and catch your attention. I do not deny your
  effect     on   my  soul.

3

  today's forecast of rain   is body staying in.
  the children are seized by terror as scattered displays    of  lightning   paint their faces
       petrified with a lack of hue -- listen to the
 intermittent, coarse static of the television
     when it happens, your face ripe for arrest.
  there   is   nothing to do in  a home
     holding  its  breath  when  you walk,
   do not   leave just yet. the water   is  rising.
      it tells   you   to   stay  in. triple your  presence
  across the  dining,  rain as if out of the  shower
      barely  drying   yourself,   leave  water
    i will    not   drink,  only    test  swimmingly 
      a  dream  out   of   sleep and   so real
       a   twitch of  fish    out   of   ocean.

4

  outside  you are  no longer  than  the   transit
  of   birds   seeking   canopies. Wind   disrupts
  the steady  arm  of   cables. Slosh of water
     from an   oncoming  vehicle  as if  beside  the
   sea crashing into   me   are   waves,

   What need   is   there  when  your   mouth houses
      water, your   *******, warmth?  Contrast as
   habit   of  alternatives. In verbatim, this is how it
    sounded from you, "We  are   very   young.
          Remember me   this   way."

  Now i  wish  voices   could  be bodies. The next irreconcilable   face   as    hearth.
              Fingers   as   assuage,   distance  as  dearth,
      grasp   if  not  borrow,  translatable  to
   signal,  my  body   heeding,   fraught by taciturnity through the   caught  wind
      through the  furniture, once your   body being   groped for like any
     other   sundrenched day.

Remember when we
cannot remember anymore,
the Sun shining through
windows sealed shut,
when we talk about it
we do not talk about it, we call
it with a different name: aberration.
I cannot remember you anymore
so small and languid in this
life. Everything pales in comparison --
offered by chance, filled with hesitancy
as if obligation, emptied by coming
into the fullness of it, saying it as a plump word
with the same accuracy of knives
tucked within the soft recess of the kitchen
counter that same day, you were different
as any other when we cycled through
Alexandrite Street, the world new again
like we were born in the similar moment
splintered by much less of a force waiting
outside the black gate of the home, and so
much more of a name slipping away
from the cliff of my chafed lip onto your
body's sustained pit, the drop barely an
indent, only as if of limited exertion but
possibly a weight for us to solder
through and through. I told you I could never
indulge into the fray and hold armaments
of it, but twice-told this battle I can
fit in: you, my accoutrement for war,
hallowed you are in excess of flow and march
through rain and light smiling through
opened windows with a blank circle of lightness
that is your face held close and memorized
before taking the commute home, force-equipped
with time's persistent pleading and our
untoward compliance like a reciprocal of stiffness:
you are the wall of your home and I,
a suspended pendulum with a dumb clockhand
     in a stalemate.

words breaking free
   from the cloud of the mind.
   the clout of the imperative telling:

  this is the wind blowing from all
  directions hoping to touch you
  where you sleep,
   rests its bone somewhere where
     no cold shivers the ground,
   somewhere familiar
   somewhere where both you
   and i have found each other
   two separate birds joining
    in the morning

     Magdalene wears these words
     melancholically
       hand in glove and earth
        in the mouth plump and tender
       like bosoms of full women
         eyes of men having their fill
       of imagined sensations in the flesh
       tingling forever throbbing
      underneath the white moon --

     until then the many loves
     will read this hoping for a deliverance
      the bow of my breath aims true
        but the precision is falsely taken
    a sidewinding serpent,
      a riotous guerrilla in the bush,
    hinging the heartland
        a poem washed away in the river
   as women rinse the clothes of men
     singing songs of despair;

i.
the Hibiscus is the paradisiacal
armistice of quagmire and wind:
leave it there anchored to Earth.

ii
when it rains, it bows to no one;
when it genuflects to no bird,
  it trills on the red of the moseying hour—
nobody sees the Hibiscus.
  only the children of the vandal.

iii.
last summer we had makeshift
bubble machines and in the high-rise
  of the twilight's cradle, we ran
viciously against the humdrum town
  blowing bushels of laughter at
the dreary populace — the brooms
  to a sweeping rustle, unsettled dust
mounting the ether.
         we hurtled across the
infantile roads like they owed us something finitely attributed
     to our locomotives.

iv.
  the Semana Santa had gone by
and the season, no matter how promisingly redolent with emollient brush
   of wind and laboring silence, held
no reprise — the Hibiscus,
   it is not alone in the quiet verdigris.

v.
  somewhere amid the hubbub of city,
there is a pendulum of line biting
   the shore of waiting repeatedly.
only steel scaffolds erected and no
   flagrant scent aroused. peregrinating
in the haloed hour, the nascent furl of
    belch from vociferous iron-clad beasts
in all of EDSA

   and when i look at people around me
they look like gumamelas, finally,
    yet i am

        not coming home.

tantric sensual muck
clothing the stiff body of
this silent pleasure.

there are so many of them
  and there is only less
  of me —

gondola in Venice,
  H-bomb
and the knife of Bach;
a steady collision in Q. Ave
as the fizz of the afternoon mirage
settles with the ides,
the torn elephants of
  Chiang Mai
the red blood of Golden Gates
   the froth of the repeated wave
at the lip of the ocean,
  city buoys lacerating
the skyscape

and your coming in here
  ransacking all;
appeasements and
  trivialities — there are so many
of your photographs here
  and only less of me,

looking at all of you
  and weeping it
later. sounds like these sounds
hanging by the edge of the bed
reducing woes to a hair-trigger.

i look outside and there
are women, cat-called by peddlers,
stopped by cabs, inside and outside
  of cars with sometimes lovers
hot legs and all that,
simmering in the highway
glancing at them now
   lamenting them later,
what's a dull boy to do in a dull town
  with clothes dull wielding the
     dull word?

meanwhile, there's so many of you
and there is only very scant of me left.
light voyeurs through the interstices
   of the huddled masses,
panic screeches through the maddened
  streets of Vito Cruz.

   the night is all black and stark
and the heavy behemoth of existence
  prods underneath where
rats, rodents and vermin run
  plodding the highway with sleek varmint
    demeanor. a lady passes by with a
string of fragrance dangling upon
  her shoulder-blades.

what's a dull boy got to do in a dull city
  with a dull heart?

there are so many of them for my
   territorial hands cannot name
and there's only one of me:

     unheroic
        impinged
small
        half-drunk and
half-believing

  that there's something
a dull boy ought to do
   in this dull city
with dull words but it comes
   with an exorbitant outlay.

dog-leashes are expensive,
    moonless hoots through opened
windows hefty with price.
   moon-blooms again and again,
missing all hurt trying to repair
   the ravaged — i look at young
girls, old women, fine and complete
  and this thing of being me
     on the market marked: sun-stifled.

there's so many of them
there's only a sum of me
that's often small and burgeoned
bringing the question
  
what's a dull boy to do in a dull city underneath a dull moon
       within a dull crowd?

marahil ay tulog ang diwa ng binigkas ang salitang
tiyak na ikahuhulog ng buwan mula sa mataas nitong upuan;

ang kamay ay entropiya – ang iyong mukha, ang aking daigdig.
lagablab ng mata, halaw sa init ng pagkakataon.

may taglay na lamig ang hangin, lumalatay sa balat,
at sa nagbabalat-kayong anino sa bakanteng silid.

ang mga umaandap na ilaw – ang tahimik na ugong ng iyong pag-hinga

sa aking tabi, ng aking bigkasin
ang hindi kayang wakasan ng katahimikan lamang.

everyone else sleeps while this weather
takes a peculiar turn,

decides to chronicle with a mild kiss
of drizzle on the loam.

you did not know the name for
the mortal perfume of the Earth in the heat

of contrary figures but knew the nascent lunacy
of things and the dangers of their pursuit.

the gripping contravention holding things together,
a piece of the sun against the urban sky

and your apparition splayed as cold silhouette,
forced libation of Earth to soothe its machine,

sharp impressions accurate with details,
disseminate through the static conveyor of messages

the intact hieroglyph of your movement
in this odd weather.

mutilated
   as the light obtrudes;

like a fly trapped
   in a spider's lair, waiting to be
     devoured—

my hungover soul, dead,
drunk
    from drinking all
the sadness
    in the world.

ano pa nga ba ang tangan     ng haraya
kundi ang langitngit ng katahimikan,

na sa isang sulok lamang ay mahahawakan hindi
ang puso: sa isang iglap, pagsasatubig.

puspos ng liwanag ang lupa. Muling pagtatangkilik
sa sukal ng dilim.

hindi alam ng hangin ang pangako ng paghilom.
hindi banaag ng kahapon ang bukas.
pipikit na lamang ba’t walang pagtangis,

na sa dulo man ay marapatin, kung tayo’y papel,
     ay mapupunit na lamang
ba sa mga kuko ng marupok na sandali?

billboard's calligraph --
past the haze of Manila infested
by car sprawls and belching machines.

magnanimous treatise of tarpaulins,
people chin-up asking God
with askance

something like this
"o god make this bearable
like a mound of fresh fruits
from ****** labour."

maniacal sensurround:
earth-shattering frequency
of footsteps trampling the mouth
of monolith shadows - the peak
of this quake is our complete silence.

rain's catharsis in effect
sousing us in the blood of unreal light.
this diastolic shrinkage
jamming the beat of constricting vessels.
the adrenaline surges
within the dermis of this pretension.

a collective of tired beings heeding
the recherché of voice metamorphosing
into form, a dagger-butterfly
paring us skin to bone, cranial
to visceral, soul to nothing -

catapult of a trajectory spit
plummeting in eased-up pace
from Taft Avenue flyover
to a subjugated wagon of scraps
and empty wine bottles.

today's paper reads:

"Palace hits hiring
   of **** dancers"

fancying to fall right in the
spanked curved of this
insatiate melodrama - something
  prayer could not save from
this land's mutinous ignominy.

   we resume to fulfill our madness,
hundreds of tack-headed people
  rolling down the streets of Makati,
drenched with rain's trilling aftermath.

squinting to look at
  no sun, only the grieving of skyscrape,
thumbing down unidentified objects
  in the depth of loose pockets,
    desperate for home.

it dawned
     from the half-bitten fruit,
    this boorish serpent,
      this inner foreboding
          of flesh tingling tempted
    out of frame.

     sin takes to blood, the nail
    sifting the flesh, birthing
         the bells of the word

      fracturing our silences
     displacing the void into radiant senselessness -

       this heart of Pilate
     where once in front of
    this purloined innocence
   the temples crumbled to ash
     of all beginnings

    telling us all of our
     preordained peccadillo,

   unannounced wraith pouncing
   on each to lurid each,
       biting more from the world
    and its land that remembers
     the till of feet welcomed
      by diadems of flagella,

    love have we not, eternally?
      no singing seraphs wept
        as the afternoon erupts,
      a fragmented word: love.

the heat of an approaching story
(they have their own way of trickling
  your hands are hourglasses on the wooden table,
  the sands of whose sea you have shattered immensely
  with a single stroke of    recklessness)

it will be punctuated by the silence taken to the limit
   of a moment’s finite order
  (I dip my hands into the palms of useless glance
    waving heavily against the concrete lip of this dark
   intervening, standing in between as fury on the other side
   of the city is taken to the streets – barricades and men
        bawl into the fullest weight of the world,
     you said you   see all of it.)

and  will reach the lilt of   embrace,
  in all forms plundered of sentiments,
  all of it taken into the  air where

  I    see the final bird of dawn, flying
   and I cannot.

in  the   sovereign  of your  sleep,
   you ****. tousle. scream out of bed
   flailing.

         like   fish
  out     of    water,
       the   current of    immediacy.

     i will     write you
a boy    in     his
        fetal     nature:

    bright-*****,   holding  a   crimson  balloon
       in his   small  hand (a  reminder   of
       levitations)
    teeth white    as endless   snow
         the flat-footed lotus
   wading     in
         the     waters      of   senescence

    you will    take    it
   as a holster      cradles      gunmetal
       as      parking lots    fill
       parks    with  senile    men
    waving canes   into    the Sun
        yellow-teeth    and   brittle-*****
  
        you      will    wake
    and       smile   your way   half-painted,
      half-illuminated   like   a dagguerreotype
         in my    mind's   chamber
       your   half-nose,   *******,
           you snoring   beast   in   the jungle
     of   my frailty

         i too falling in sleep
     the red   balloon    let go
           into    the   cirrus.

the heron
of your arrival
lands squarely
its talons set
on fields of
awakened grass
as the slender bell
of the morning
shouts into clear void.
its unequivocal voice
shatters the windows
of this home's numb silence
where mouths play back and forth,
the jocose allusion
of a blank audience
where the laughter sledges
an amalgam
of fire ferrying proudly
over a flight of moon-stream
that stretches its white bones
in a quotidian gyration,
fanning out these
  words almost as if infinite.

water's gravity
moors me to this dome's prison.

washing me to plush blue
is the dream of hands
that puts me out of my sleep's premises.

the bane of existence tingles
the flesh and the suds rise
altogether with the squalor
of its own meaning.
my old hue languishes into
a burgeon of slosh and no friction
nor word could rupture me anymore.

and the scent dangles
mid-air, where all perfumes are born, with sorry fountainheads
peaking through the ordeal
of this sonata.
water makes music with skin
as froth takes to sea, the exhaustion of brine -
all disquiet in foreword
and finality

hung clean, in the backyard
of ordinariness, of consummate asepsis and its breakable concepts,
  ready to be worn out
by a day's grime and back to
its fate once more, all of us.

i have not seen it in the
surge of the next moment. it arrived like a letter from complete anonymity to the familiar gape in the doorstep.

i wish sometimes, now that i am
full with age yet none the wiser,
i were a bottle of wine sitting in hermetic space, where no breaths could go in and out of, as disconsolate light trudges the finite spaces its fingers like a taut grip to a gun, able to drain completely of its poisons.

i have you in my blood
and sometimes its immortality
coils into morbid contortions.
a rally of aches, scraping the sinews well and accurate, paring them of their pretensions, this kinship.

i have you in my mind
and sometimes when the impetus
galvanizes me into stolid incitations, my voice lifts and then vanishes into its shy desolations and without sound,
i pass through the deluge of
all this - of i being you,
and you, being me.

i have you sometimes in my eyes,
when these two brown planets
  wax in their postulations,
nebulae of emotions explode
into tiny aggregations and now,
  i am a lone star in its celestial ambulation through protruding shards of our battlements.

i have you in this warm fount
  and sometimes, like a dog
choosing its memory, i sometimes
wish to forget my station and elude its equanimities and only have in my dull mind, where all
  the bones are kept and
  guard them in the midnight where they shape themselves into
   massive morphemes digging deeper to soft skin and mangled, looking
down on me like a prey caught in a hawk's periphery and lunged at,
  where all aches are awakened
with recalcitrance, casting
  me away from my own tenancies.

i have not seen this in the
coming of the next moment -
we were firstly, laughing at
the smallness of things, sharing
light and other affectations,
until we came in the way
of our trains and closed their
  stations, looking for
a place to go now, anywhere

   but home.

these winding, blind itineraries
  and their purposeful turns;
  bends on the wry pavements,

  their naming of things
awaiting the return of memory
  with an auspice, or a head with bounty,

  i am but a bamboo in
    the wind — slender gymnast
supple ground's tenement,
   or daresay honestly, a creeping into
the world with roots close to
   heartland, this poem
now, without feet and my eyes
    with surgery-precision ruptures
the softness of all things held close
   and divine like a secret,

swimmingly
   light coming in
unabashed rooms
   here now is a poem,
a homecoming.

I'll peer through the flaxen strand
   of night

with your color that excites,

and think myself the blue pither of fire
  or a flummoxed stone left unturned.

it's not the rapture of a knowledgeable
   beast or the common grip
   of the eye's gift for unsparing detail.

it's the way the queen moves to all
    corners unclenching a fold of sidereal,

and then like a child with almond eyes
  spruced up, spritzed this morning's
  incandescent dye,

the lapping of strange tides revealing
    fish with dreams of brine

or that one moment when you had
   at first light, the hot flush of coming
      into, recognizing insatiable appetite,

  whistling its overdue intent and the detritus
        we try to hide when we had that virginal moment of    once and  never looking back
      at mirrors.

In some odd, conjured up way, I might say under
a lethargic light of a dream, as if a housing roof-beam,
that underneath it (mine, of course, the dream), you are
a carefully placed furniture and around you, children scram
for joviality, passing and crossing the shadows that blot
on the floor, where most of your stagnant life, you have breathed
under me, in the same net of which nothing is cosmically related
in some way or metamorphosis, under me or you so quite new
possibly, consciously aware of each other’s settings and adjustments.

[Amy Wright: Here too there are tears for things]

When asked how to be of use, clenched when the hand
yearns for consumption – nothing was happening and when
you look within the azure you will see the multitude
of sun’s tireless handkerchiefs bleating in the distance.
   Today is Saturday, and nothing else was happening.
   I used to lament over the cities you have turned over,
and within the same day, found they were susceptible
to consummate within a name – an arena for collision,
of all the crisscrosses and the winds that mark our places,
to all ships making their way, traversing into the lateral voyage,
the undertakings our sure fear: we do not know how to be involved.

How i found you frozen in this city
but not desolate. You have everything
else tethered to a string -- pull, fathom, decree
    it yours. Say when to stop, but not falter.
Push yourself over the edge none to break
   the fall but you. When sensations reach
 for the viscera, choose not to break.
 Coagulate like shattered glass in the banquet,
 labor as it were forced by default. Resign
 under makeshift places we haven't slept yet. A couple

          of  accidents made of yourself, some familiar
 things brought over supper. Your father will smile
 at the completed sight of you. Your mother I saw
 picking fresh apples from the stand, your face
 this evening juxtaposed to the many lights of
 this city. Yourself would manifest a pavement,
        stretched like a corpse I sleep in the gutter.
From the city which I found you what else
      are we but to wane.
   We   curve    in   this   curve. Let me  finish
 bent   as  small as  a question  mark starting
 
   with   perhaps:  perhaps they meant it
       perhaps they  saw it  coming
   perhaps it   was  i not  you
            perhaps  it is  morning and  birds spry
    everywhere   speaking.  perhaps it was you outside the  rain   burning

                    ending, concatenative else it was
        merely I trying to explain   to  a  grievous fault.

Picture me this: not the arched brow
  but the body when night, curves like a moon
  accruing more weight.

Develop me this: not the body when curved like a moon
    but the white stucco of it,
    assuming its form.

Fold me like this: not the white stucco of it,
   but the space it takes for need,
   the occupancy it wastes for want.
     In this manner is how you will

And lay me flat against the river:
   not your memory of walls with fleur-de-lis,
   but with lilies. If this day were leaf when turned
   from the night when I took this collapse,
        let your hands be pedicle. My inflorescence you have
   mistaken as displacement yet not drown – meet this canopy

  at the end of this river that is your river – your static grace that
  is the music of your passing.

When met, disintegrate: not the lilies – they are anchors you have forgotten,
     not this day if it were a leaf, but the day dried from a washline
   of clouds. Let my inflorescence be a blunder of your recall.
         When you meet this canopy, pack all of its mileage,
               exact it in this distance. Take photographs of. Do not keep.

i went with you towards the waning of the old moon,
enclosed in a season, stricken with half-glow, i went with
you to a blue enclosure, whose hands cannot bridle you,
as they, hunters all, would a thing that refuses to be held.
you happen everywhere as though secrets alighting pursed lips
and fragment breathing, springing in with the indelible hue
of autumn, yellowing all around me, where I join you, someday,
where trees bend slowly towards a reason, careening and pulling
back days  that closed our eyes and carved in with sleep,
like a prescient dream where all but motioning parts of you
     join from all separateness as though
                                             you were still here and never departed.

whenever the silences
fall on our supple bodies,
it is as if we are strangers.

now that i am coming home to you,
the memories make the evenings
longer, stretching them to their
capacities.

when we are lulled out
in the surge of the next moment,
our eyes pull us back to
each other's arms as we struggle
to make collision. whenever a bendable luminary lifts to light your face in utter calmness, many stories ache to be told and now, once more,

i hurry home to the warmth
of your hearth,
tender with the conflagrations
of my heart's tillage
and all the aggregations and their accompanying pains,

i have voluminous stories to
still in your ears. these intimate susurrations.

will you listen?