such-a-deep-and-comely-thing
so-fleshless-moments-are-going
shari­ng-something-the-silence
and-the-quick-quiverings-of-flutings
whe­n-nothing-becomes-the-heart
like-a-jungle-stripping-the-panache
o­f-the-viridian-softer-it-is-the-truth

of-the-navel’s-blue-pursui­t
in-the-caterwaul-of-bodies-to-a-spry
plaything-summon-a-laughte­r-blacker
than-ravens-in-the-thrall-of-the-beset-moon
and-the-hom­es-fat-always-with-such-tender-beatings
it-is-the-time-of-the-her­on
it-is-the-end-of-the-susurration
when-the-unswift-hands-of-all­oys
sojourn-and-still-something-a-dagger-in-the-mire
of-the-cloud­-that-egregiously-whispers
a-long-possiblity-of-dreams-and-their-­palpable-weight
(say-it-will-perhaps-contention-of-pulseless-awak­enings
   when-it-was-such-truthfulness-that-when-the-heart-sings
    the-mind-stirs-and-the-hands-dance-to-roundtables-of-mirth
     twitching-such-belittled-locomotions-when-it-was-fashionable
     to-have-adorned-you-the-love-and-not-firm-obstreperous-meandering­s)

verily this evening, from the veranda
i smell the fragrance of their arrivals.

the tall, slender, stockinged women
swaying like bamboo in the wind.

the admirals in white commandeering
vessels — the shear of wind, a tractable beast.

the ploys of men to woo the darling,
  the hesitations of dames cloaked
in obvious handiwork of skirts.

they slalom through life's rugged streets
like blueprints of doors revealing
  benign propaganda.

it is all too real to me. i have lived
behind the shadow of words.

it is all that i am cut up for — doting on
it still, yet a nonexistent blossom.

hearing them leave the interior of walls,
soldering the notoriety of burdens.
witnesses drowned in water,
their muffled voices reinvent the quietude. there is a dailiness overmastered by them, such rampant
mendaciloquence denied by me.

i move past cataracts of crowds
and hunt for the silence: this importunate need that feeds my bloodthirsty being.
i awaken the sleeping prowess
of words and listen to them.

now, leave me with my ocean.
i was meant to ***** in the blue
and froth like the last of unburied water,
  dreaming of fish.

Who are you this evening?

body    first   we took   on the    evening
   like   it    were   virgins     on   flay

we    owe everything   in  praise
   of    moonlight

saying    the   ****   of word
  meaning   it   full   in the   sudden heat
     of   ephemeral   light

once    and   always
  at    once    your   world     became
    a tiny    cage   for that   little hummingbird   heart

and you    wafting
   in    the   wind   like    a cloud
    of       farewell   from   the exhaust
of     transitions


redefining    you    with   intent   stare
     was     searching     for  myself
from    heavings    of      tired     fusuma;
          hefting    out   a    mound   of
equal   parts    divine    and
       sullied       undisguised
yet     only     silence   retained   its   poise
      of     mystery    nothing
I      could   understand

a    hand    in
     hand      is    nothing but  the   instant
merge    and   separation
    and  that    the coming
out     of     words,    a   tabulation
    of    abject    loves

simply    you,   a  splitting    image
     of   a thing   refusing
to   be held   with   one    hand
     on    my face   and   the
    other,     fluttering   away

Falling as recalcitrance of movement – seeks completion – yet the ground
   ballasts.
            There is no path that leads forward as I live backwards.
    There is poetry in the way
              a woman carrying a bilao moves away from the vicinity.
       Sound departs.
I took a deep drag and fell into a thick web
    of smoke, recoiled to fetal nature, into the womb of my unbecoming.

       What seems to contain endlessness: dark.
What punctuates this claim: moonlight.
      In a house that continuously aches,
I am grateful for windows.
                             Night-erased repeatedly, the dance of blades of grass.
       There is more stasis when words flay
                 themselves to pass as something more resolute than there is
     the kinesis of life’s steady abbreviations. We shorten like this,
                             when we curse the destinations upon movement’s mindless
                approval.

We collect ongoing afternoons
                         and cohere to trees. Say falling like you mean it,
     the way we commit to breaking though unwanted, feared.
                 Feel the hands accumulate warmth when propped
  into the sun’s permanent daze – face becomes glare,
                            a day becomes a scar.

This    is  where   I do  not know   what moves   to become fully   stationary.
     Days crumble like this.
   In a poem that is not a poem.
   In a sound that is only sound and not music.
     In a dance that is not life, but stillbirth.
   In notes that are purely rambling, not reportage.
     A voice that champions a fiasco.
                             This is where the   throbbing  afternoon becomes   a part
       of me    that falls   into   a chasm of   a fateful night,
                lassitude    of   debris in  tow,

                                       starting     measures  everywhere  we   left and   returned –

beloved    I     dreamt   of you
      dreaming   atilt against   the lilies –
the   dawn   with   its mouth
        tottering before   like   an animal
   shying away from the   automaton sky.
     it     is    in your hair full   of evenings
      I saw the   moon not   with its  tail
  but with the   hooves   of the deathless    sea
      of this droning   silence,
           not with    its stride     of    sidereal measure
but    the    mount of    it past    a thousand  days
       tainted   with    crimson,  it   is not  with lithe  hands
of  churlish   girls   that I have    plucked you   out   of that
         garden but   with   the immense   hand
   of   such obscure   understanding  from sleep’s peculiar
  mouth   made divine    in me, the   word that   christens   what
  felled    star rises     from    the   palm  of such   darkness,
    
     that    in   the immensity   of your   sleep,  I am but   a bird
passing     athwart the    windows and   yearn so   much   the breeze
   that  touches   you    in your timid    sleep
           like     dreams     like     *****       like    sirens  
                  like    love    cunning   with   its     fluent   spires
          of   perfumes.

To watch with intent but not desire, his life passed
     him on as he tries to explain which one he
     would take to the afterlife if there is such,
like a convergence at the tip of the horizon or a
     humid evening in Pasay as pyrotechnics scrape
     sky fashioned like acrobats. The breeze he needs
     no longer. And then begins to disquiet the quiet
    with the heavy burden of which he will then forget
    when he starts to move all of a sudden in space,
       capitulating afterlife again if there is such,

 and if everything takes a sojourn into the bleakness, must I remind you that you are all
     variations of the same absence. Remember when
you had your name carved on wood as attendance
    but not for long. You have escaped, locked in the
       arms of a life that you thought was yours but
     still isn't, leashed under the Sun. Bodies pulse
  then fluctuate but not a sign of life. Words function
     more in stillbirth. Never forget, as a dandelion
     hovers and puts a smile on your dreary face,

and a question in search for all available and naked
    answers. Principles undermine caprice. Do not
 adhere. Must I remind you that you are
       someone else apart from who you think you are.
  You have yourself straightened, tucked safely
       like intent, not desire in all its voluminous and
     vehement speeches annotating something unknown
           to the behest of ourselves. If I were a house,
  I am gratified by windows -- your mirage there
       transfixed in a secluded spot, looking out
   brimming with life as curtains oscillate as the
      Earth breathes with you. If I were a house,
   you would ransack everything with a sly mouth
        packed with powerful narrative. How you
   have done over, leaving everything undone,
        moved off-tangent, under impossibly gray skies,
    brindled in prayer. If I were a house,
    
       doors slammed, speculative fabrications sleep
  through evenings and mornings until no difference
   is met -- you meant a word as if it had a lock
       and the key, somewhere cold in the air of
             sleuthing pains making me so, less than
     this and more of a fractured house.

Pale, divine light clothing
a hundred people laying like carcass –

a thick fist of people
   punching into the system of failure,

unrelieved, dismayed. Faced with
  downfall, tracing point A to B without

any other in tow but luggage,
  they annulled the flight so we pull

an escape when it rained – it taught us
where to hide, where to run,
what to do when we are soaked in sound
of rain pummeling the rooftop,
what warmth to share

on a bed meant for two with
  only one     dent.

without words
and their wondrous servitude,
i would only be
and cease to become.

as in a forest,
i shall then continue to flower
in the sharpness of swan-song.
like a beast dazed
into nothing and its bafflements,
even the triviality of a lone stone
shall vagabond through me
in a thousand days that pull
downward, refusing to reveal themselves and their paradisiacal nuances. their etymologies
star their deaths to a languid crawl towards an empty page.

all words trapped, slurring
in the radiant void, unbecoming of themselves and who i am.
if i am to be without poetry,
my then epiphanies would be scaled down to an epitaph's weight and its proper terrors;
   to think that i cannot write anymore, weave anymore these words,
    reeks of deathlessness, and i,
  communing through the myriad dailiness of things shall exist only to be,
   and not become  ( as a single star is meaningless in the coruscation of the multitude - a constellation without moniker,
  a god rid of sobriquet,
as a carpenter without tools,
   orr an army without arsenals)
i am things vaguely not.

god forbid, if i am to be
  without poetry,
what will i become, unknowing of
its grave rescue? these marvels
shoot off in the temporal flight
   of this splendid fate, and if without words, then this shall only be, still afloat, a wild, directionless flight.

i hate
   and i love
as life and death
   pull
  a long-drawn tide
between
  body and
    soul -

there is not one
   love in this world
  of mortal men
that could enclose me,
  as loveless as love
could be so dearth as to not make
   roses grow - hate with its
ferocious hands, swift-bladed,
   cutting all foliage at
  the garden's edge.

i hate
   and i love.
forgetting's hands
unsheathe the moon like
  a bare bone.
i hate, i love,
   and if you ask me how,
  i do not know.
  i only feel.

god's plaything -
what is the colour of rain
that paints this city
with the havoc that once
trouble wreaked over
our sorriness?

god's no god
until he is god
in someone's throne
and i may be a fool.
he is a cool cat rolling
thunderously over the silence
of our homes or
perhaps a soldier
marching his way
homeward amid
the tatterdemalion
of days.

god's temple
is the body and a body's
oblivious of this -
    god knows no "sigue sigue"
              nor "sputnik"
       nor piercing the helm
       cerebrally

god's no fool to goad any gambit
or watch the wane of old solace.
or is it that i am
a leitmotif and my peccadilloes
are a path's adagio towards contrite?

god voyeurs over the
windowless hours
of my sanity's eclipse
and soon, when all of my prayers
turn to ash and
no sound of me is heard,
in the evening of this tide
is deliverance
and i have slept.

Kamay

Heto, kung mararapatin lamang.
Ipagkakatiwala ang sandali
tungo sa laman ng salita.
Heto, kung ipagdaramot lamang,
at ipagsasawalang bahala ang dambana
ng iyong katawan.

2. Kurba

Kung abot-kamay lamang din naman
ang buwan ay ipagdaramot na lamang
ang natitirang liwanag.
Sa palad ko nakahimlay
ang talim ng iyong buto.
Hindi na mangingiming pang ibalik pa
sa tahimik na daluyong ng oras
ang mga kamay na ito na walang pagpapatawad.

3. Mata*

May tupok na anghel na bagong hirang
sa loob ng malaking puwang.
Walang paglalagyan ng ligalig,
marahang pagiingat lamang,
kung tatanaw sa kabilang kuwarto ng halinghingan
na para bang nagtatalik ang nais
sa hindi maangkin

nangungusap nang walang karampatang pagmamalabis.

taut the barb which my heart
flung away and adorned – such language is black while
many others have their places that silence
   had fractured.

the punctual shadow of the night,

                                   I converse in them
   through the pulse of the roots and their
   consistent counter-beats.

the many others, whose centers encircle
    heavy in their viscera:
enisled as a conference of birds
    in plenitudes of brindled mouths – the augury
that sees itself, my full being – this nocturne
     of stone-flight. the cosmic working of the sky
that hands me, a necklace of stars which implausible pearls
   simmer in fond gleaming: these foundlings that are
         dreamt away, and named innumerably across
   many other anonymities we recall with a throng of sound.

   in my hands the night folds like an origami
   conscious of its florid ikebana,
       as there could be another splendid thing
          like the calm: glimpsed, coveted like the light
   of all things grave in darkness.

i love thee
  poetry.

whose hands, steadfast,
   catatonic waters past
  end freely in dusk,
  carrying me over
  life's ferocious waters,
if not death.

whose slender body is
  to make love, make fire,
  sinking in a leitmotif of
   seraphs unknowing sepulchers,

  which ails me so in the night
  drunk without stars shall i seek
  the dharma burning in the bone,
   the fanfare of mind berserks
     the thorough ablution of
   the mind's useless wanderings,

  i love thee poetry,
   its rescue, its curse,
  its waysides - i love them all
    nothing but shorter lifelessly,
  a brief night ended in the
    bat of an eye.

looking at you.

  the wrest of images
  which imaginary kisses
  have real warmth,

  and that i,
  dazed into a normal thing,
  demarcated in the abyss of
  this lonesome wanting,
  have been reaching out
  into the palpable distance,
  your image elusive of my grasp

    like a thing
         that refuses
            to be
              pinned
                down.

i am vis-a-vis
with the wuthering truth:
perhaps,
why
we are flourishing,
we are colossal
in our
dream
is because
our realities are
small
and that our frailties roar,
bludgeoning us to our
minuteness.
it is our fate:
in the dungeons of sleep we
burgeon!
    -- as though we do not wish
   to wake up to what bitterness
     rises with us in waking.

Unless you are here for a reason, your presence
  thrusting and thrusting, what for?
  This thing has no name it does not understand -
   its incompleteness, its sleuth for finality. Maybe
   when a hand is buried with a manifold of many
   others in the fall -- to initiate a conflagration
   is to remember it for the first time.
   All versions of the same absence. If you are here
   for no reason, then what for, what use does the
   body subscribe to?

  What about, say, the abundance of Balete had you
   consciously wearing your shirt inside out so as
   to feel placeness? What now that your hand
   fastens my entrails? There is no multiplying
    feeling into truth. We do not know that the Sun
    through the interstices of leaves is a small child,
    or a swift woman. No other answer but rue
    and rage, across our slanted shadows in the
     dank perimeter. Your eyes finagle to annotate
    the bow of my leg. Or the curvature of moon.
    Anything it has in their own, vicious sights
     grappling the flesh now inflamed; anything they
     will ravish completely and leave drained. A wrinkled body of a log, or a forgotten manuscript.

    These are all answers I have to invent. Intuitive,
    unwise, unsolicited. Somewhere, I had to point
     out the differentiating margin between
      speaking too much and conveying so little,
     and the finite amplitude of silence sensing out
     something in you, about you, and arriving here.
     Why are you here? What are you doing? What must I be when you are not?

Life is our existence's continual essay, and the words we still in its premise are the repercussions of our dailiness. Should we find ourselves trapped in a moment, that is no period, no decimal - that is an ellipsis. And to continue on in the spire of our days, is our living's magical working.

let us not be devoid of value.
let us not be mired
into the stillicide of night.
let us

  become.

let us

   think.

let us prosper,
  burst
  with a light's amplitude
  beating the darkness.

let us become flesh
  and not the frailty of bone.
let us become the memory
  of our hands
  and not the pain of their labor.
let us not be the languor
  of air but
   the promised swoon of it -
this appassionata - this
  coming to ourselves
     in union with the soul's
  furtive hieroglyph - we will
  understand this when
   we cease
       to be
       and finally
         become!

blood for blood.

it is clear, verily, this evening.
   the tabloids blurt the truth
    as the populace clutch
     the paper.

somewhere an explosion
   will be heard.
a child will be beheaded—
the land is tumescent with bones
   and compost rotting away, rotting away.

TV continues its comical static,
playing the music in contrapuntal satire.
  in the morning is a dog, trampling
the streets soldering a scale of metal.
  in the evening is the same dog,
sleepily cycling the humdrum town,
    his face a faint lamp, slowly dying away.

attenuated by either
   love or no love
i drag my sorry shadow across the avenue
   and a deathless cathedral is crowned
    by faithless ****** of crows.
god-driven or godless
  i awaken to the same strife-torn sky.

there is a love so immense
our bones are crushed when
it grasps us, yet there is hate
  and love altogether
intermixing, demanding another hue,
   a troubled one.

they burn the effigies.
they thump the metals
with lignified sticks.
they create a noise enough to
drown the world.
   blood against blood.
more hate to fuel more love.
lesser gods to **** all light.
the dark reigns supreme.

last night, the earth moved
and still,
  blood against blood.
  death peers through
the windowless hour
like an eyeless mannequin.

i look for you in the frantic hour
and found all loveliness gone.
the glint of the edge of what has once
  cut us laughing in the shearing wind
has died out — i dance to a music
  only i hear, bringing back the dead.

meanwhile, i ravish
   the streets mad without chance
and supernal, my bar-drunk soul.
   in the weekend, I will read my poem
to a dead crowd, drink more, jousting with a fleeting shadow, and toss
   the final cigarette into the
      stillness of the void and fade out;

it is blood against blood.
   the knife will slit.
   the gun will ****.
   the fists, clenched to the size
    if two worlds, will claim.

the earth moves, and you are not here.
the leaves abandon the trees.
the park-benches are heavily laden
with the yoke of the Earth.
the mouth of the gutter receives
the belch of a passing automobile.
the graveyards are tender
with bones.
the parking lots are vacuous,
and only the moon fills the world.

  it is blood for blood,
  love without love,
  hate with love.
i will look at the photograph
  of a woman i never touch any longer.
i will once more ask the gods
  what they have done,
but never the blur of answers to myself.

i am drunk without chance,
   and the knife invites.
   the portrayals of blood
     inveigle.
  the whims and caprices
    of the masses have no use
     any more.

it is blood against blood,
   hate against love,
and time
    is running
   out.

love concocts
  a slow death.  the night
          chronic with melancholy.

     somewhere in the world
   a man, contemplative,
   underneath a lasso of light
    peers through the window
      without a word,
     only an insignia.

    we are
    only
    tender bodies
    in supple movements
    trying to weave out
    timid moments
    trying to shatter
    the inertia
    of being
    here.

you cannot escape poetry.

there’s poetry in the uneven streets of *Salcedo.
just to exhibit, ogle at the preen park
  and watch the ravenous trees write in a treatise:
    only shadows are engraved. gravity, their paperweight.
there’s poetry on the oncoming figure,
  a woman in a pencil skirt, disfiguring herself
to pick up her wallet – she wrote herself in cursive,
    cruising in front of the aperture, a form of C in crescendo,
then jackknifes back to slender posture reaching for the sky,
    arms to sides like armaments poised to strike.
making itself known through whimsical imperatives,
   the wind that bludgeons the trees, and smites the poles:
      written in hieroglyphic – the fall of leaves and the felled
  ash of morning, deepening in its station.
you cannot escape poetry
    whereas, I start remembering you without consolation.
  the sudden onset of your memory thrusts through
       the escarpment following a steep descent towards
           my body, a figurine, without water.
you will die here. and from what has been retained,
      will arrive the inescapable.

snaking through a modal-jazz fine-tuned evening
      this soft huddle of sweat and tender bodies
     it was purely girls strobed, fired upon by the oncoming *****

of a maddened hand;

     slowly becoming inured to this droning of the blameful balm
of evening, always when    ennui   starts
    to   wane I will     start    the   car
and take myself to the   edge of   everything

and all the  suddenness becomes    inept
  and I myself

a   shot   in the  total  dark
making    it   final

            somewhere in Quezon City
given a   levitation and    you
  
      are     somewhat veined to my wall of disgust
the same as
     finding    an   old,   forgotten   thing
you
     have no    use    for.

where does a flower
   keep its flaring memories?

in the petals, loincloths
   light-skinned in
   resplendent ephemera.

or in the thorns,
    prickly music of
    an esoteric cadence
    without falter,
    blood upon blood,
    flesh upon flesh,
    ash upon ash
    tumult of pains and the eclipse
    of a broken archipelago.

in the stem,
    bending to the oppressing wind.
    like your body upon my body
    swaying to the sound that no
    ears hear underneath rivers
    and the sorry tale of
    weightless drowning no eyes
    ever witnessed.

in the hands of the wind
   is where they are kept.
   moonlight shines its
   perihelion mouth across borders
   of untouched reminiscences
   and we have called them names
   and similar aches as rain
   dropped like a net of sadness
   or the debris of a ruin,
   betrayed by the thirst of our
   lips when we longed for the sea
   and failed to heed its
   cerulean calling.

In here everything attempts
to be infinite – that when utterances
free themselves from mouth’s dungeon

it may all be but locutionary.
This is your leitmotif. To have your darkness
breed flaxen hair,

and in a split-second your eyes in their
deep epistaxis of blackness
follow me with the drone of such machine.

This unmethodical severance; something
drastic by necessity, but does not strike
with the same accuracy of necessary haunts.

Back when I was young, I had no picture
of ravens. You, screaming all across the yard
of your rawness, fracturing the morning.

The trees with their shadows strode
in stilts – the span of such winged vestige,
I thought, on the sterile concrete

was the virginal image of ravens.
Even the rain is able in that awning fount.
The sound of tranquil is the water pipe left pouring,

draining itself of its entirety. Fire hydrants
inflamed, grow jealous of such catharsis.
The bus, running over a pile of garbage, is never off-tangent.

I do not know if you have still the memory
of this place – if you look back too near, wide-eyed,
and surgery-precise, or if you are to trail back too far,

the settings will only pulse with a life you used to know,
and adjustments we are not inured to: if you are to take
this dream of fish out of sleep’s water, it will fade into a cathode.

It had in its forgetfulness, something still the moon is a raven
in a knell of silence. If you are to come back here, everyone
is stranger than they were when you left,

and that what used to pass on as answers are now
mauled into fustian of enigmas. The din of such
demeanor, electric and tense – so swell you can feel it close in

like some pain masquerading itself into
a close encounter with the sheen of pristine moment;
but pain is in media res and to look at you merely, a disappearance

      or a terminal finish .

Here is where the oncoming figure knows you.
   We have no realization of time. Of how long
   it will take for us to both decompose. This is
   already a peccadillo. Mirrors brand conclusions.
   The body lets go of its weight like anchorage.
   How I measure warmth is a device that does not
   concern you. Light inches and asks me how soon.
   Already a blunder, an inner life revealed –

Between this carefully studied distance where sometimes
   lines are crossed, a remorse is hoarded, exclusive
   enigmas of hope. Contort this body if you will.
   Between the barely-living and the already gone
   is where I windhover. Sealed shut in hermetic space.
   My desperation becomes a syntax of waiting

and there will be all beautiful horses, and faces in transit
   everytime you pass is an announcement to where
  I cast myself into a miscalculated sonority,
  hauled out of, loosely identified.

where i go
cuts the loneliest melody
of this inner twilight.

it is where hands cease
to reach for certain things
and ****** only
what is immense in nearness,

and that is
a memory.
it is a pain imagined -
constantly shining light
into its clutched darkness
and releases from its hand,
the birds of dawn - these words;
or gently sways the perennial trees
with the verdure of its spoken
word and its unimpeachable sensation burning through leaves
like the sun's peak biting off
a trace of a leaf's inflorescence,
or that somewhere i,
together in the gathered silence,
   fathers an intimation
and comes back after
    each toppled song,

to the world and its formless manifests.

Jakarta, 2016*

some say the city is stippled with warnings
but nobody took the time to stop and sojourn deep
  into the augur – there was no price to pay
and no song to be sung. only strange silence trying
to renounce the inscrutable weight of peril;

but a while ago, the tabloids and the papers are
dizzy with tribulations – each word assumed not sound
  but force. the once Decembering wind transmogrified into
a penitent squall of smoke until the city was of a veiled mother
    weeping behind the pretense of a shadow.

not much was said, or perhaps we were speaking
  for such a long time, or we did not mean many things
but wounds and cuts and some lostness to which we all have
  gone blind and deaf: coming in daylight’s whisper.
   we cannot hear. all of which may not be revealed, like
a new phrasing that has not been conceived yet, and so we lay
   in the silence for now, hushed by surrounding scenes,
               in pursuit  of heart.

The peril of this thing is to imagine you in the
     word marvel.

Anything that must point towards the Sun
     must be tender with meanings

in the dinnerless evening
of the leaden chapel of silence there is always
a fury in its own movement say,

a touch of a hand on my svelte upholstery,
machination of an enigmatic discourse towards

fluidity of bedazzlement simply by saying
   you want to go out in the center of which
   pulses with a different life but with the same name,

or to briefly wonder
   if the word marvel is its own fault and
accurately measured in longitudinal  fashion,

so innocent on the passenger seat now groping for
some warmth from the black subcompact with metronomic sounds,

the mechanical work of this droning disfigurement
   is that even in wings

you    are relentlessly     going   and going
   crossing points   and delineating   crosswalks

with more   x-ed  angels  lamenting their   able wingspan.

Unable to give birth to new conflagration – grace of prayers is nothing but
   sadness stilled in sandalwood and simply this poem,
a letter of intent to crush your face and fracture your bones the same
     way you do with mine, in every evening where

the final squall of the throbbing moon is a realization of the answer:
I am the one who wants to drown you in total darkness,
    and my final word wanting to scar.

farewell and farewell—
so this persists, the night
unraveling
its exigent face
as delicate as daybreak.

each window shunned, each door
left open for the wind of your red feet
to enter a plenitude of vagabonds,

goodbye and goodbye
and nothing has ever changed.
to remove yourself from me
and retain, a dagger:
to seize with your hands, my blood
and to bathe your body, with
new darkness.

to move away from me
resounds a bell, a prayer's end,
the birds are in their clandestine,
the felines are in their rendezvous
and your body assumes
liquid measure, surpassing matter.

let us not converse grief when it is
fancy to speak of embrace — you
are a rusting machinery left in the
ferruginous dark.

so we have never returned
and i no longer grieve you:

you are as untenable as a fixture or
a sepulcher.

somnambular sinister of night
through the flayed clockwork
unhinged from deleterious labor

i cannot begin to fathom
with my hands somewhere
i have not yet gone
but to trespass like light
in ambrosial air
through the eye of the needle—
such impossible task,
a lover caught in the clearing water
seeing the moon
fondling the heavy current of a fall's
equivalent - oh, in love, tonguing
my way fallaciously

unpinning us both.

these durable vicissitudes —
all enduring
like brightness moving;

i hear the noise of darkness
waking the bone

of this hound,  wayward from home trailing the pursuit of this drone

hearing the stillness nailed in the
day's dormant intone—

wherever you go, i go
vanishing in the marmalade

is the cadence of melodious names
singing renegade

a song, welling up in the dark's basin,
pouring light shattered, flayed.

Pardon me while I remember.

  when   sight scathes, used upon,
  this glass shatters I love the sight of you.
  in days the Sun trembles
   through a fist of streaming light.
  I can only think of objects the size
    of my clenched hand

  a pear, an empty basin, a flower deep crimson
   between fingers wanting to break
       stem twice-told pains the sound  of it,
   a flat black disk on the turntable bellowing
       sounds of the bones we made in love.

we are mirror
      facing mirror -- our distinct quiet held us
          shattered,

  standing apart, I running towards, and you, from,
     feeling the wind glaze the wounds retold.

we have and have not,
   loved well, milbirghtlions septembering;
it is all for myself to reach deep within
   like white measure of kisses – the girth of such
world in turn, passes on a wily shadow of beforeness,

when all such loveliness before me was
but  a blatant chiaroscuro and not of mausoleums visited by
     territorial hands.

surely, such warmth
   you carry on, ferrying against unfettered waves of
remembering loosely against   the voice   crossing this  side of  the Earth

I can hear it like a flower,
I can feel it like the strove of warmth from the prickly music
   of an unraveled Sun,
I can touch it like the fringes of keen blackness of hair
  that demands silence.
I can bend to its call,  like a bamboo  in the wind
   or the   curve   of a rose,

     the downed flight of a heron  deep in  the twilight.

look what happens     in a speed like this
    85 on no freeway stalwart edifice of dark only trees like round tacks on square holes a dog on the road like a dead log
  
  look what happens   In a speed like this
   words or no words noise or silence
   sink or swim veracity or mendaciloquence
    little by little minced choices to
      marrow in bone without remains

  look what happens in a speed like this
    100 on no freeway pavement folding
   origamied shadow in a corner drenched
   in the pit of this dark dog on the road

   i ran him over

  look what happens in a speed like this
  so impeccably timed faster
  than a butterfly
  or a switchblade
  a shot of morphine
  a drugged-out drummer
  pummeling staccato beats
     or the unread word of the beatnik
  the dreamy dilettante

i ran him over
     dead, peabody in the cumbersome dark so small so small in a speed like this.

Kalakip ka ng dagundong ng hangin ngayong tanghali:
    Bago ang lahat, kakapahin ko ang natitirang
    init sa upuan. Iyon ang aking galit. Inukit ng iyong bigat
ang paglubog ng buwan, dito sa aking gabi,
tumatambad sa silid na walang durungawan,
  isang batang namumugad,
gumagapang sa walang-malay na gulugod
  ng pagdaralita. Bulahaw ng radyo at ang binulatlat
  na pagkakataon – matapos ang lahat ng ito,

ang tulog ay may angkop na bigat,
panaginip ay kulata, dala ng hangin ang bukas
  na walang pagkakaiba: Dinaanan mo na rin ito

kahapon ng hindi man lamang dumungaw
para kumaway.

if love's the gaze of stone and hate
       the water drifting hands to their
   undreams of dreams, then it shall be
     with the zither of leaves a quartet of wind
        sifts inanimately so as dark as the night
    they will not dare speak the ineffable.

  if love's touch homing back to cities as
     spry as an unwound, delicate moon as
        can be, these flowerings drone
           exactitudes the rambunctious plunge
    of the roots to the Earth

                  and i will sing these delightful bursts called    days in 
    April have not the touch of frolicking birds
  and the quibble  of the masses half-opening
        and ultimately quivering are the mountains and the fish dance in the tumult
      of their aqueous variations

       it    is   April,  sing gently, as now all the
    leaves have fingers and  the ferruginous  rivers    have   feet   and   my love
            a   flower at   last!

to pour water
into the velvet lip
of a jar
or the lobe of your
pale ear dwindling
like a bell
        unsounded
      in the consolidation
      of both the unclear
      of words and the
        unsaid

to pierce the silence
with the stem of breath
and break the curved bow
of the moon with our hands
that fritter against the meandering
of our eyes leaning against the walls of returned glances.
to postpone a voice
   mid-birth and embrace
     encumbered enigma.
to sing deathly dreams when
everyone sleeps dreamless.

to pluck the strings of
  a guitar
  and pain in the fury of love
and its accompanying bafflements.

to have ended the fire like
   the brief life of a match-flame,
  and to want you again inside
   the windowless room of my mind.

to this
        and to
               that

like a map that's hastily drawn.
i have felt myself stride
   like a wounded beast
  inside the bramble of
   obvious hesitations.

      what to do?

silence is a balloon in my hand. an erratic saxophone with notes as blue as doves
            strangled in noxious space.

            android Jesus, not quite the shadow, verily the toppled light
   renaming things underneath its parasol – hundredfold of monikers
    and a solitary weight of love.

                  this is where the blood starts to make sense in its cold shrill:
   a dagger making its way towards my back. here are few routines of ablution;

a conflagration of bodies. razed sandalwood. first to go is gravity. last are the bodies
    helium-gorged, afloat – there is an immense price for solace.

                                cyclic spectral          cyclic spectral

   there’s man in ox but never an ox in a man. can you feel the tenacious drone
      of the oncoming storm? can you feel the Sun so sick of its diurnal labor?
                            can you feel the tantric *** of dew? its sensorial fissures?
             butchered serrations of grass are like torrid piles of moist ***** ready for ******.
            
   again, here comes the quietus. on the loathsome table lies the shrapnel
     of last night’s carnal invitation. a moth not named Marieta circumnavigates a bayonet
                       of elastic fire. here comes the marauder of quiet again,

     in my hand, a round, red, silent balloon – I let it go, in such relentlessly hoodwinked
              pursuit towards a god that may or may not know how
                                to dance underneath the bludgeoned beat.

here is something they do not teach
in school, that is why
    Juaniyo put a bandana around his head
in red and like a sturdy kalasag, he raised
    his hand high, championing all —
nobody shall strike this country with
    impunity.

Juaniyo was an anarchist — a decibel in the  voice of this nation, standing strong
   for the deprived, the voiceless,
    the pithless. this was inscrutable force
       awakened — they did not teach this
  in school. they taught us that we'd
    be winners, hotshots,
millionaires, tycoons, dogs and slaves to
    capitalists — this total equation
  they didn't tell us together with the
   suicides and the extra-judicial killings,
the limp democracy of the state,
     summary executions, the displaced
groups, shelterless mothers with children
   suckling their ******* while seeking
alms, the downfall of all economies

for Juaniyo, a hurled rock is the imperative as a thick wall of alloy
   and fiber glass drive him to the edge
of the street where somewhere in the periphery, a bombardier of water is waiting with a steady aim;

      they did not want their powers
challenged, they did not find it appealing that their oppressive authoritarian stance
    is put to the test and is at the verge
of being dismantled to be replaced by
   freer, egalitarian structures.

   Juaniyo leaves the class in total pursuit,
  heeds the call of heartland.

herein lies common fault - loosely hanging on a speculative conjecture
     than exact detail.

mind's prison- asylum.
you go in to see furtive showcases
of the many names walking without
faces. you went in without invitation. only or abstract solicitation.

there is something that sinks
deeper than marrow, blows colder than December winnow, something that burgeons beyond naked sense.

inside this lair,
conflated you are with bent question marks to their distinct, curved smallnesses. you peek into the window of my eyes and inside this airless vault, we are both
heavy with staring at each other
dripping and bare-all, yet
this rigmarole of eyes contain
their visceral silences still.

i stripped them all of their voices
and they only look at each other
with onerous eyes, pondering
about their places, answerless
and just whirling in capacitous space --

transcendent it was the first time
when it was of faint memory to touch

but voluminously told, exacting itself
like the pretense of the heaviest pages

the curve of your face the entry of light
through momentary indulgence

nerves their city buoys and the pedestrians
salt of skin in intense heat begging for details,

ways to sewerage of mind and previous blunders
and the purest landscapes of feeling,

the underpasses of eyelids where glances hit
first, stalk swiftly – to wait underneath their

shade in the fleeting Maytime sun
coming back with renewed fervor, remembering

that from there, waiting in that margin,
there are things that may only strike a potential

but never learned, memorized, collapsed into
the absolute, and that lostness is imperative

to the finding –
the river of eyes where pilgrims are in transit,

well-constructed like the mausoleum that
keeps its secret of hills and cathedrals

kept unmarred in the silence of your refusal,
pulled out to be nailed taut into origin

the blankness of your face taken as mechanism
of marvel – to whoever god drew lines on your face

and to whoever foolish wanderer would dare traverse
your collapsible bridges, the sonorous depth

of your being when back against the dash
of beating back to senseless origins,

your name similar to the prepared countenance
of Manila, passers-by in awe of your slow Moon

unraveling behind curtains for showerheads,
humming behind, a conversant tune

where not one being ignored and it was true
to the form of first whispers

this whole new world mapped out
made naked to the twisted augur of shadow

reared by light through innocence,
a whole city I know but cannot touch.

1996

When news of his would-be death arrived,
his body sterile in white cloth,
serene his was, his finest stupor – clinging on to a drip
  of life, his tongue a strawberry his mother recounted,

forcing him into, his senses dulled,
  it was 1996: else there was understanding,
  there was a hand in a hand that is a latticed rose
  of beauty – or unbeauty, the high prayer of it,

they sat in front of the room facing a mute wall
  for days weeping or laughing. The rustling of the
  daily paper broke silence not news – his dearth was sure.

no more almost was when he went sharply
in a field of grass, his shredded amusement
received by an unfolding – it was his years sideswiping
  him later on, his indices of age revealing an undulant postscript

to which there were imaginary sky-portfolios and
  a particular representation of a smoothened end of a smoking gun
  he held now, years after, years later on

a portion of it his mouth pressed on a lover’s,
and a footnote hidden
    deep within his pelvis:     come back here when laden

binuwag ng sariling bigat
uusal ng dasal na ang tanging hiling ay pumanaw.

Hindi ito ang buhay at hindi ito
ang pamumuhay.

Kung dito sa lupa ay aangat, anong wika
ang isasalin sa laman kung pagal na?

     Turuan mo akong dumaan nang walang
iniiwanang labi kundi misteryo na inimbak

sa pagtiwalag sa bawat sandali. Sa ilalim ng
bawat tulay na ginagawa ng winiwikang salita

ay isang kontrata: hindi nang luluha pa
  at kung pumikit ay panibagong mundo ang

tatambad. Sasalubungin ito sa pamamagitan ng
isang paanyaya at kung makitang muli ay pakakawalan

ang kapit sa sarili. Tatantusan ang bawat kinauupuan
at itatala ang mga natutunan. Paham ang liham ng pagtitipon

at kung hindi sinipot ay sadyang isang malaking kakulangan.
Walang ibang transaksyon kundi ang palitan ng salitang

maghuhugis-kamay, hahaplos sa bawat tigib na parte,
ililikas ang katawang hapo sa paulit-ulit na katanungan

nang pagiging mortal at lalakipan nang panibagong saysay.
Umigkas palayo at bagtasin ang bagong mundo:

ang tao kung ilalaan sa tao at pakikinggan ay bubuong muli
  ng katiyakang panandalian sa payak na panahon:

hanggat tayo’y naglalakad pasulong, tayo’y gagawa’t gagawa
     ng tulay.

waxing, planetary
odd moonlight—

the faces are whetted to diamonds.
the paralytic shadow begins
to twitch;

benign light froths to full afternoon,
this sedentary creature in between teeth,
a clear consonant of dull air.

thereby gleaming, tapered to
a nightingale's song;
i take my place amongst the elements
of night: as if to say a new portrait in mausoleum crossed by grass and aureole

the laughter shattering its dull one—
a lurid memory, all to itself amongst
kindred of parks.

Hands       places I haven’t known
   in her room taking-light all I have known

groping for some place I haven’t known
     from her   belly once with the life I have    known

of   value, I cross an   ocean I have not known
  to know  my girth   within  her rondure eye   I have known

to live   with   is   a cross I carry to a  hill I  haven’t  known
     seeking    correspondence   from   rocks that I have   known

to be   much  wiser,    in account of what  I have not known
    yet to   be wholly   complete as in ready  for fragmenting   I have known

as   means    to    live   in  summaries I have not known
   to    be  a tracer   of evidence, as if a  search    party    I   have   known

to    be   your  hands  in  all the   places in my  body I have not known
  to    be   sequestered by   the face you   carry all these years that   I   have   known.

I. Katunggali

Pauulanan ko ng tingga at pagkayari ay
magbubungkal ng lupa sa kaloob-looban
    ng katawan – iyong libingang yungib

at doon ay hahayaan kang mabulok

kaya ingatan mo ako at huwag
hayaang biglaang pumutok

II. Tanawin

dahan-dahan kong aalisin ang sumasaplot
na lamig ngayong Hunyo

sa iyong katawan at pupunuin
ka ng alaala ng Abril

itong pagmamalupit bilang talababa
matapos tuldukan ang nagdaang panahon

kaya ingatan mo ako at huwag
hayaang bumigwas sa kung anong
grabidad ang pumipigil sa iyong pagkawasak

III. Rosaryo

sa sukal ng dilim bago magpasalamat
at magbigay-pugay sa diyos-diyosan,

maingat kong kakapain ang kuwintas
ng iyong

    mga kamay. Dadagundong sa iyong paglapit
ang hungkag **** katawan

    paluluhurin ka sa altar ng pagtangis
at sabay lulunurin ka sa kasalanan

kaya ingatan mo hindi ako, kundi ang iyong sarili
at humingi ka ng paumanhin pagkatapos. Hindi na bago sakin
ang misteryo ng iyong katawang ibinubulong sa pigurang kahoy:

mahuhulog ka sa aking bibig bilang
    alinsunurang awit.

IV. Iyong katawan*

Hindi ipaaari sa sinuman.
Huwag **** idiin sa akin ang karumihan ng mundo.

walang ipalalasap kundi isang ordinaryong karanasan
lamang – malayo ito sa inaasahang tagpo

kundi pagnanais.

           Higit pa sa ingay ay ang salaulang katahimikan
  ng dalawang katawan na pumipiglas at nais lumaya

sa balintataw ng isa’t isa bilang piitan.

Kaya ingatan mo akong mabuti
at bigyan ng panuto kung paano ka hahagkan upang hindi
     mabasag kung malaglag man sa isang mataas na lugar

dahil   mayroon   pa tayong   bukas  na ilalaan para  sa pantasya.

everything in its own defeat —
but we need not be that
with common travail.
take as a word is to say
the world is flat
and streets fat with fools.

from downtown,
i have here genuine
beam bourbon —
we want it to slide clean,
desire it to crash rough;
streets will
echo old haunts and
we
will be larger
if not bolder
than hounds.

i was thinking of a love divined—

or an amaranth held close to the Earth.
i tossed it into the graveyard of names
and when i start to cut
a dozen more of flesh,
it will then begin to rise
yet i bequeath it no unction.

it is never a clock nor a pendulum-sea,
spindrift sloshing forth creases
of fabric, spinning a cataclysm
leaving all solemn in a torpor like a
tractable animal wounded behind
   the bush.

i was thinking of eyes unfastening
the lovelorn, arriving with an image
i have long feared—

i walk with no clothes seething
with a bulge of life.
it's a cold room, this peregrine of silence.
i see mouths reduced to creases
on the wall. hands unscrewed to
loose hinges drifting apart.
teeth biting the lip of days in disquiet
as surf takes on multipliedly by the shore,
a hoard of wave-rustle.

i was thinking of something pure
when all yesterday's tumultuous memory
tumbled down like a reared on avalanche,
tossed to a basket, folded,

poised to be sullied once more.

the   upcoming  word  for word
         learning    the  dissonance
         overemphasized –    the inventive   wrongness

to   settle   for   what has
   decomposed,    what has   nearly   drowned

a dream  with the  quickest  sense of   being

   obliterated   upon taking   it   to   the   shorelines

and now   to   materialize
      as   the   body   starved for,   following the   coil
of its   womb

       to   whatever place   it   has   strayed upon

in   the   world  that  is   a   cage
      where   breathing  are we of   clay.