heady fragrance of drizzle
returns lonely through
the horizon's limpid perfidy -
we have been deceived
by the many days that guillotine.

the wind's lasso choking
perennial trees
big-eyes, love-crumbs,
lion-telling eyes roar
   love altogether
a dissonant song of hurtling;

  kisses are aerials in the
      starry void
  and in your eyes are lengthening
   spiral staircases where my
  glance has grown feet traipsing
deeper into some mystic invitation, a night-displacing fire
    in the harlequinade.

the croon of some
      iron silence cloaked
   in the viridian garment of trees, the inexhaustible flambeau
    of a flower's gamble,
or red Christ burning in the pellucid waterfall.

   out there, love, amid fragments,
is a church
with slender truth-bells
     and my, take my hand and let us dash through the dark!

gOd put a smile on your face
      your eyes (half-thrush like two beings in the dark
and a gladiola of light spurns to chide in its bickering excess,
    birds, birds of morning and paradisiacal streets half-wittingly
       fork to single-handedness, a star is uttered and altars sing
           rarely-beloved, a dance-song of soul) and their parenthetical
    rush to what continues to live suddenly as if to say its conscious
       death is a room without flowers.

we did what we could that night
and a supernal being is ashamed.

this is the drift of thought
in the vast ocean of gilded gold
frothing at the edge of rotund:
giving back a silenced enigma,
spewing the answer in an exhaust
of white rancid smoke
dharma burns plastered to cigarette.
burning and burning, afloat are the high-pouncing embers looking for fleeting shades and dagger-ambulations
of a shadow's swagger in tectonic soiree.

we did what we could that night.
like a flash of lightning at the back
of hoarded hills,
or say, something brutal and brash with
modern sensibilities we never jell —
we come not with softness or life
peering out of our eyes like little girls
serenaded by mad men in the eve of
forlorn nights. we did what we could
and some god cringes, winces away
like the erratic dance of candleflame.

the leviathan black spreads its parasol
and we are no strangers.
when our veraciousness starts to pierce
the veil, the populace should start
to worry of their trapped conditions.
we came here for something:
be it flesh, be it wisdom, be it plain inebriations — we will never flinch
at the squalor of tomorrow's sobering.
keep in mind, kaibigan.

    it's all levitation and transcendence.

the darkness wept as the car
groans near the end of its immaterial life.
i flick the last cigarette into the grey-faced pavement.
all oceans drowned,
all shadows burgeoned,
all fires emerged plump,
this silent radio rivers
through the wave of this ephemerality,
the onomatopoeia of strangeness,
the   thud
      of the senseless head of metal
     on the body

the   clackety-clack
       of hours thereafter!

ayeayeaye! the streets sing no mild
  appendage. the solstice is lost
    in the length and precision of all things.
bringing ourselves to the brink of absence,
    our pallid selves set ablaze, emblazoning
the quick life of matchflame or rumble of    
    thunder — the steady phoenix of
       that night! this is learning
  to breathe again, o, what currents purloined in vicious swarth as we keep
     this river flowing into our throats,
  jamming our souls to compelling music.

   remember kaibigan,
it's all levitation and transcendence.

Catullus, you have lied.
You have lied, all of you.
You Shakespeare, have
fabulated sleep too in the
delve of the word.

Neruda, you have lied,
And only Ibsen braved
the fault of men:

I am alone
You are alone
And the quibbling breath
of this life will flower
inanimately in your ears,

and look below us!
a goading fall,
a threatening lunge
oh, vertiginous is this death!
i shout your name
and wait
for the quintessential echo:

a small muteness.

pure eyes mapping out
    secret roads

swift onset of kisses
   colossal than
    still-seeking monuments.

supple enjambment of flesh
    fuller than moon.

only her one side showing
   in influx light -
      eyes yearning to discover
    what is behind mystery, as if
   to say what lies in front
    is subduable with openness.

       these thoughts naked,
        as we are both nailed
         to the same tapestry,
        clothed in honeysuckle.

you are in the middle of things,
insisting importance – you would feel
shivering in the distant blue
of another girdled spark and there,
in the not-so-distant sky,
I reach for damp perimeters

and have your face conclusive
with whiteness, sure of its glare,
  crossing the frangipani outside
  my home; silence leapt borders
and now an incident. uninterrupted.
resolute. absolved.

although so suddenly moving away
kiting around and perhaps death
will deal its part when love’s done
with its tedious labor – and it will all be

moments of bliss, two people renaming
necessary haunts, laughing
  in the dense air, keeping an ear for
the spring of yourself.

petty and pathetic,
insofar as when a wreathed breath
    brings the being to the brim
of each death-defying word,

    a woman. lying naked,
nailed to the Earth, burning
   auburn-bright from windows
a wraith unannounced without a diadem
    even, consoling the heavy lark
of the doused dark with something
    weightless swinging against
the boughs — shuddering after a great
   fall from presence to heart's pompous
   flare. flat is the world
and light, the bendable one:

   laugh, laugh, brave the hill
  and behind the bramble, the dimly lit
   foliage you are there
   from the tumble: an aureole
     simmering in the unbeknownst.

deep sepulcher and shallow pavement.
     a sharp exchange of glances,
     and then like snow-bed,
     gone at first feverish light — all!

in me, the world is still,
   (you are my
     world)
   growing roots, a throb of petals.
  you bequeath me, a necklace of hands.
   railway of stars, like the white
    of your silence and mine,
   inaudible stone of our
     ever growing distance.

scraps of metal archipelagic
    in Manila and the immaterial
language of billboards:

my mind, the crepuscular garden,
     your memory,
  the overgrowth,
never plucked — stilled, unfazed,
   your slenderness a sign of
     eternity: lignified.

Like a pack of dogs lounging
  in minutes, minutes, minutes, eyeing an endless treacle.
it’s worth the shot.
     what is?

I heard he went into a crash,
    and that Rey went into the deep blue dreaming of
    fins and fish – that *******. Brenn was up in the hills.
it’s a wonderful day to fill this space with the electric frill
               of laughter. Open that Emperador held loose in that
   cheap, slender bottle. That’s worth the stipend, in exchange for
    light – clarity, be it crass, and unsoundly. These ungodly hours
    will form a God, trying to go home, slurring, shaking in his gait,
      hailing a trisikad or a tricycle back to Philomena’s arms.
  it was a magnificent day – you know it is. The squalid canals
     are filled with the ******* under the care of a tyrant.
        Jon looks like he’s cut up for matrimony. We jeer and give out
  no jell so as to ridicule him into chaining himself to a passing.
       Empyrean is the mood now: all primed for the blackened chapel’s chase
  down the pews towards recognizing the smallest children inside ourselves.
     This moment is far from over. Like a skipping Betamax. A gramophone
        clamped in the kinked note lost somewhere in the sound byte,
  try this matrix for the forgotten. Tomorrow we will curse ourselves
      for the proud challenge, rivaling ourselves in the process.

    Like dogs in heat. Like dogs aching to ****. Like dogs
      garroted by the selfish hands of the neighbor. Like old bones
                 sleeping in troves we have forgotten.

woman – it is when your hairbreadth laughter
spreads into the world, pressed low against the breast
of grass and skirts of flowers,

     like a well-oiled lamp, you proceed with your
terse splendors, your sharp wingtips curved with gropes
of steel with what notion of a senseless blow but a smile
scrunched deep within the water?

rammed into the dry throat of the afternoon,
   a hot flesh half-bitingly rippling, fondling into my throbbing
water – from the abrupt, sweet-smelling rise of tide
    arrives what I am in pursuit as a man, smoothly writhing
the languor of tired believing the always, do you still cling

                              to me like harsh wind in Spring?

like men in parks

let us

greet the oriole-filled
morning with an ineluctable smile
and go merrily with argenteous waters and their rustling freedom,

be as flowers are, thirsty
for life, quenched by sweet ambrosia from the Earth's
hermetic vessels,

sojourn and watch slender fulminations of dawn ******
against the oleanders, the cypresses, the children tawny
with laughter, and the sparrow swift in wind's deepening hush

sing with the string of birds
and wait for women for us to
gaze at in their lush pelisses
as the heavens gather a mound
to graying, reckoning rain through
sills imperatively shut
as rain slowly announces its arrival

like men in parks
treading gently are
the passing flight of herons,
    their unnamable wings
truncating their
       journey as the day closes
its wide eyes and sleeps!

I take this benign hour, simply disappearance,
before you – you have allowed entry uncompromising
as rain would, a cold envelope, or the waft of foliage

the impenetrable silence persisting within stones unturned
and trees impaled to the Earth like fate would decree
a sudden glint of circumstance.

the throbbing room of grace that folds a hundred measures
realizing it was easier to say nothing

and witness the rest of you flicker.

Manila    is  fray

Tough enough to die,
    Brave enough to see ****** against
        the billboards

   ***** on the marketplace
   ***** men haggling for prices
   the corners are squalid -- rats with ambitions   of men take  their places    in
    the esteros

   a car-horn blares, wanes old moon music.
      I sing songs of malversation. Trains all graffiti.

     My heart like a jailbird freed somewhere
         in the big sur; love assuages nothing,
    comes with a cheap price
          a freak December night in Roxas blvd.
     i sit on marble benches and dream
        of artilleries, garlands on *****-nosed
            barrels, nuns   grieving  dust
     in    the ground.    communal bathrooms
         drunk in foolish caricatures,
   the tabloids     displaying  flowerheads --
        the democracy in the streets a ****
    for      kings,  no    love to   lull
        me    to infantile    sleep

         tortured are   the   bulls 
   matadors    hiding  behind    faces red   like
       faces    of    statesmen   flushed with
          the   spirit   of   bourbon
   whereas we are    here   river-facing
       northern tip of its  undying source
  like    wives    on  balustrades   waiting
      to catch   the fragrance   of   inamoratas,
   light  reenters
          interstice   of   chary webs of  dull heads   hemmed in like   canopies   in the throat      of     overthrown ponds,   scraps
     of metal    sold    for a  night's  worth
        of    gin   and   Sinatra,

  Deep within   the   grave, the dead   laughing
       at the dead living. Atop   waters,
   yachts peering   into   drowning  fish,
       in   the middle, a   jam   of buses
         belching    lassitudes that    strangle
    the console,    the man    in all  of us
       the same,   cursing behind   the wheel
   and everybody    else    different
              dancing    at   the   top   of our   heads.

we circumambulated the cathedral
  and whose face of gray for I to wear
  is insisting that I have been dead for
  a long time as obvious as a bell curve?
whose cross is this that I am carrying
  all across the firmament repeating
  in a yelp of command: salvation?
whose nails if not for knives
do I smother at dawn? stone’s hindsight
and a fool for the world deep in the night,
  beguiled – waters decide my home
is permeable. I must have drowned in sound
a dwarfed image when I shouted

your name in all of my silence.

you said, at the end of the rotunda,
there will be a shade for me to seek asylum in,
and it took me in without hesitation in that blank
moment left to my own device,
not my heart’s control but yours,
I drew a line for you to cross and pithered in excess.
     you have gone far enough,
    this March afternoon – you said,
   there is potential in this, smiling, you in your
  tattered jeans and timeworn Chuck Taylors

staring  indefinitely at fretful space,
in the falseness of things, you have gone somewhere,
  I in the shed, inched along where
  you stopped to dust your clothes.

these are the tiny currents
   of how you make me feel.
   they fritter like light
    from an agape console
   and when they close us in,
   that light slowly resigns
     to its cage
  like how we first nestled into
     each other's arms.

this is the moon that remembers
   your silence
  and these are my eyes that
   stare at the moon to
    ruin it into all the noises
   the world could ever bayonet
  through cities tender with sleep.
   and this is the soul
   that will recall everything
   and forget, flinching from
   the inward-breaking, pale bodied
    concrete are the many lives
   that we break to have little,
   hummingbird knowledge
    that we are alive.

silence, an immense room
        then so suddenly obscene.

memory clings longer than imagined –
I say this in hours where I touch you
   not with hands, fret you not with fingers,
kiss you not with lips but with words prying open
with gestures which unwound us ever so softly,

I unsay your memory shorter than it was held
far beyond what spring embraces solemnly inward,
     that in light structure of night you will be wholly made

true in calmness what the tremors of my home
        unravel with little dints of December keen with
   its thrall,

touchingly you

      without a flounder of breath or an ounce of caress,
  are still written here, like the world answering
           for our questions –

How in that timed instant all was brown: I look at my hand, the world outside the lens, the river, town when after April then crossing May, how everything went brindled, cut, and broken – housed in that fragmentation are so many lives: I, awash in the many a breaking and passing of things. You remember her weight to doubt and begin she was not there, for whose security she was being filmed but my own sake, from all the appearances the distance switched to fog as I remain in immense debt to time from the then and now which made no difference, and how I associate all the hollow to a hue I fear not black, but brown in this setting – how to straighten when found in the orientation bent already to begin with and is deadened by a refusal, how once again, in the hollow of, are unexpected blurs of your own skin color echoing outside then in, in which all the trembling made you sure-footed, changed nothing in you, insult I took when I see your laughter or in lotus positions there is something you ought to give me, but didn’t.

caught in a sidereal
   glance
  little eyes
  have their
  immense silences
speaking to me
   like the secret language
of twilight.

pressed like the many
   spires of questions.
a restless wallflower
   impaled against
  a wall.
   beating the undulant
back to my shore,
    without a gesture
  nor a voice,
    a wilderness of complexities.

looking at you,
a succinct tiding's working.
like a consenting tryst:
let it float with a voice.
like remembering the dagger
that has bestowed the cut,
or the dew that has, with its
aqueous hands,
drawn the grass closer to
the unearthing of things.
or a kiss and its deep scarab
in the red hue.

just
let
it
do
what
it is
ought
to
do.

he is not writing boldly to say
that this is for
someone,
anyone,

only for no one.

all but one have so many names
that intertwine themselves
to their own reclusive triumphs.

this is no inner life
or an outward deaths

this is
something only purgatory
claims in prayer
or in the hell of each living.

go on death and gladly begin!

not for someone
not for anyone
not for everyone

but for no one!

what to make of it that
this togetherness is sterile?

ah, what fortuity!
clearly no sizing down one's self
nor seeing one's self through
eyes of others,

just merely being
and coming to be,
without a trace
of
going.

bleak darkness and its measure:
squandering the light
no definitions
no spectral haze
no inhibitions
its onerous labor is one
    with me.

live life at the edge of the fall.
holding a hand
fallibly.
live alone, love alone —
  these things pulse with strength
      in singleness, even the glances
of prying neighbors are sequestered
   reduced to sealed shut, hermetic,
      no sight or hindsight.

i'll run to where the sunlight is
   and wish for the moon, slumber
like a dead log adrift in the current.
buying myself love and selling its pleasures to defunct markets.
   trying to repair what is beyond salvation,
   trying to amalgamate what is perpetually
        scarred, sundered.

clangorous *** of metal, herding jeep
    and riotous chariots; mad men fill
the lines waiting for encumbrance,
     bardic in the streets of Marilao
hungry for something:
   give me a blank piece of paper
and i will try to reinvent the world
     with impunity and lostness.
the world gives back such awry stare
    and all imperative darkness reigns
supreme, mine are all emergencies
   as shadows are succored not,
retained in their caliginous thrones.

living alone
    yet not so much alone.
the dog outside does not bark anymore.
  the well-placed gnome of stone outside
      stares stonily across the thick space.
the nosy neighbor does not meddle
  through the rusted ocher grills.
the old moon wanes outside
   as the lift of light sways to where
there are no disappearances.
somewhere in the metropolitan there
   is a derby of fools and all mirth;
i wish myself there and curse my presence
      right then.
work does not fill me anymore,
    money does me no good. my soul
bangs the walls and slams the doors
     it threatens to leave without auguries,
and demands a new sense of necessity.

tonight, i will go out, drink at a local pub
   and crawl towards the ajar door of
  my father's car. smoke will caterwaul
the pressing scenes of the vicinities
    crumbling at the tremor of clocks;
i will open my dresser and discover
   all books dissipated, some naked
  in relished pages, others abeyant.

the curtain can fall later,
and the night too, falter evenly
widely spread across the sky.
    — all is broken.

like rain through sweetness
  uttered above in
  steep vertical,
  
  i am many arms
       many fingers
       many feet
       many eyes

       many arms of stems
       that graze the wide-eyed
       morning are my arms
  
       many fingers of grass
       weighted by dew's
       volatile stupor -
       my hands and a sea of
       touch alone wired
       to the same rain's phalanges

       many feet of dancers
       through vertiginous music
       as the moon, our audience,
       peers through the window
       don moonlight or no light
            at all

       and in the same proscenium
       are many anonymous eyes
       for stars,
       of many lovers,
       in becoming one from
       the manifold of love's
       surging amplitude,
      

       my love has made my form,
        and these are my
          movements.

all quiet this afternoon, the sky
pulses in its unprepossessing limit

surveyed the intersections with the wane
of tired eyes. in this side of town, yours

the gray-faced pavement, mine the stones left
unturned, pillaged by the children of suspicion,

thrown and must have hurt something,
a bird hurtling in its pace, or a mangled body of a cloud,

wingstalked, stifled to the brim of impinged labor,
  depth of sleep is measured by the weight of dream.

all quiet this afternoon, the naked body
of the sky is blue, spun around in penetrating tone.

quick is the flat motion of the quaintest of feet,
this afternoon in Poblacion, heavily veiled and demurred

the vertical climb of morning past the cranes, the monoliths
screaming broken litanies – strange skies are insipid now

thick with the froth and rekindled petrichor,
you told me you had a view of every inch of world

from the 31st floor and now I circled to cut corners
and fold my love for cold fronts, monsoons, storms.

blood now is the accoutrement.
night's tenure is the morning's
leasing: what will continue to
  light like a beacon in this
    vicissitude is the flash
    of a *****-nosed nozzle.

no sound is heard.
no bones were felt
trembling.
all the voices were muffled,
thrown into a makeshift exodus.

the pains will be etched away
like moss unraveling the secret
of wall upon wounds like old scarves.

but the ground,
which has girdled this resounding feat, will never forget:
death's squadron enters. harbingers.
what has hidden them in the lull
has now sung severances:
a distance closed
by a fusillade
of bullets.

is it too much of an onomatopoeic dissonance that this is synonymous to
   regret dubbed as slouched nirvana. Across the bonfire, there’s volition
   as glare, light as judgment. Why they call her
Luningning, I know not.
      Take excess for jaunts and flesh, and pay no heed to illusions. The mirage
  on the wall is but fire-dance on the bitten lip of true company.
                    heady static pierces pinecone. Soon the moon will sink like **** to ****. Or felled star as tripled glaze of salted lip. Or the ****** of the butterfly.
     Are we here to metamorphose these tiny susurrations into a commune?
                     Dank and stale as ****-laced pavement, the whole world now
    spires in uneven strobes. The last song on the karaoke as memory. The knead
      of temperamental air on the scalp. Take pork rind for bread, intemperance
    as tribute. The night dons its silken robe and shows her pair: two moony eyes
               piercing the noise.

paint me this picture, sonorous color
clutching the quiet ****

             pressed against cloying scenes,
        a loose hand bannering a bayonet.

rivet me waters, and much of the Earth
tightly groping inlands,

                thatched in the branch nowhere alone,
                is the song of God lullabying cities.

again the whole sky with its keen eyes
manifests a gleam worth knowing a cherub,

                 and sooner than it is later, when the seasons
    postpone their flamboyances, chiaroscuros of smoke,
   deceit, uncared for and unheard shrieks bounce off careless corners
    and the song of God is but static with little wings clipped
    and tossed into vicissitude:

song   or    no   song
bearing a fruition of attrition:

                    resounding far-away:  a comatose  of cars,
             a scuffle of powerlines, a melee of battlement and tranquil

continually     fluster the  child
   in  metronomic dance.

you are all of the mind’s dirtiest trick:

a weathered image of Magdalena,
a sleight of hand and a swirl of skin.
                        defying the laws of inebriation like a culprit
      set loose, or the pallor of the moon excreting its habiliments.
the old rancor of the tree from its spurious beating. vestal buds of autumn
    frugal hands of drizzle in April, prostitutes pirouetting, pried open,
   dissected in faces of the tabloids (their almost acrobatic supremacy on centerfolds)

   all mangled like the unclear, yet certain picture of a 1990s havocked
      retrospect.

you are all of the mind’s filth: a putrid modal-jazz entrapment
   and I am that sad fellow at the elbow room of some dislimned establishment
       falling as lithe as poppies in spring

  only when my mind starts to sing freely, a clenched, harmonic framework
  will my bones start to unloose in the ether, death with its ammoniac perfume,
   closes in like an unwanted visitor with a bounty of silence drowning everything.

i imagine you anything but     lustrous this evening.
     there are certain points in the pressures of your gravity
that levitate to mere intersections of the finer points of ecstasy.

i imagine you    all soft   and plump  as a word   of salvage
   without the vigor   of   blandishments  when you start with   your
    own   way of  moving i imagine you  as blunt as   a dull  knife
     plunging   into   me – i imagine your  sidereal   satellites  fail  in their   coverage
   over impossibly the   blackest  of skies   in February,|

i imagine  you  anything  but clean
   and   all white and spruced up   with   the most
  drenched   light,   real   to the touch  and swiftly moving across  the afternoon
like  wishing you   all but   perverse  and   anomalous
    and   strikingly   beautiful.

the fabric is still tumescent
with forceful movements. the slight creak of music from a slighter nudge and one can feel the swollen pang of the woodworks. the china in the cupboard drunk in tectonic skirmish. the subtle audiences from the edge of the bend are still in awe from the attentive loosening of flesh and bone and secrets. the moon is brought closer to the veranda where one has peered out of with a cigarette in hand. the clothes pinned to pegs are still dwindling in the heavy air of now nothing but plainly exchanging sights and smiles hanging, breaking to dominant laughter. one had lost count of the stars lost in a nebulous braid of milky hair. a qualitative study of light is reduced to just a mere, struggling study of how things come and go, out of the windowpane and into someone else's doorstep, where sighs amble to reach the calm of beds and the craze of trances. words like these
    are not enough
        still to push you out of bed
            and make breakfast—

i have no other means to see,
only through the intervening vacuities
of the word — out in the field
there seems to be no end seething
to the very beginning;
these words now
appear limbless yet still make
their way deftly, scrunching
against the wall enough to toss the
body out of sleep.
i have nothing to offer
only my despair
and in this, myself, have seen all
too pristinely without a sensible trace
of fear or a mitigated feeling

i am all words and no conversing,
addled by the thoroughness of it,
ample warmth of a makeshift fire
  thwarting the involuntary shadow there,
  hiding behind the renegade
  of thought or a portentous rearing
    of imagination's hearth:

i am all words, no other than this alone—
having achieved this noble sense of
  swift perpetuity, no other means to
    this end than the poetry of impetus.

a    man with his
     heaviness    weighs the
masculine     waters

    be    like stone
its depth    of concentration
  
   wherefore     birds  lose
  sight of their    rapt flight
above    waters    stills a man
    whose mirror     is not of   a mirage
but       a    man   flat against    the seductive      rose
  
   to     hold  his     breath
and rain's      supreme bullet
       are    but simplistic    maze
again     the   stone cannot  reveal
the     man   in his  proud   geographies —

      such   trouble   of mortality
begins,   a wrest     of bones,   the volcano     defined    by  such earthenware
whose   metaphysics   unalphabeted
  like   fellows    going back to god's    arms
   sitting      well   with
          red    roses.

these blatant exhibitions
of frailty

man is need
man is want
man is punctuation
man is ellipsis
man was
and still is

an aged man leaning towards
the ATM, eyes squinting,
body in slackened cursive
drawn by little light,
commandeered by mechanized voice

enter
the
amount

the price
of
existence
wanes
slurs
laughs at us

what does life mint
in the blank paper?

man is want
man is need
man is slave
man is punctuated
survived by no ellipses,

only by a continual drudge
of need
want
fools
all.

is this vacated cocoon
 a concatenation of a gradual
    obsolescence of a distinct
      machinery

    when it lulls me to sleep
 so obscured

   grip like vise, then lift as if
 passing a levitation
 
            submerges something
  in the throat
       rammed like inward canopy
   of hand, links like leaves and leaves like
       leaves still.

   paying hindrance to stasis
convolutes a mirror to steel and mangles
       the bile

    not minding me when i fall
asleep to its last, faint recall.

I take this mangled body of iron,
  its acoustic of all malleability.

the flattened world outside
sings something so slender, a structure
    of a rose.

as long as there is the fierceness of these words,
   they will leap forth, a defenseless vault,
and cry a breakwater of rivers.

these words like caged birds peering out
   into the ferruginous world consummated
by the oldest of thrills crumpled anew – fledgling beats
  of dance, this hysterical morning that slinks to a clasp
    of slipshod music.

when it is time for all of Earth to slumber,
   I am the drapery and all unknowing eyes,
         my children.

i can hear a fraternization
  of doors that loutishly slam repeatedly:
just another instance leaping out of reason
   and lunging in on impulse;
wrapped in the heat of leaving, all your words
     scatter on the floor like white, mangled asphodels.

one hairbreadth heave and a cutting glance
  at space and it seemed to have bled carnations
  pried open, dissected, obscured, mutilated by birds.
bags drop like H-bomb. displaced equanimity somewhere
   between blame    and        accurate   silence:
in an instant   i believed   that   I am that sudden   word
       of  reprisal.

    there’s no   getting   even,   still   halves are separately
       wholes   to   themselves,   intact,   further apart,
         breathing and gashing    the   air.

o, this sea
  of living , mortal blood -
sleeps in the silage of
    gleaming flesh

us, the brute million,
    enisled here, fish roaming
  up and about hurried currents,
   a muddle of breath aloud
      or a hoard of a dream,

  we, wet with continuities.
   ah, populace, maddened
    furiously sauntering
    back to homes.

the horse rummages on the track
and the victory is owned by the ****.
soon sleep will engulf my body
like the oblivious quietude of Aokigahara-jukai.
things and their semblance of utmost care.
light begins to burst
and there is little left to see,
wide-eyed, crunched by the efficacy of aches.
taking all to the very heart of hurt
as gamblers wager,
and coming back with the sound of completeness:
a man is a man in his chronology of defeat -
left torn by madness,
a cornered beast pressed against the woods.

the moon plays its lyre, white-washed,
sound wading in the very source of quiet,
hauled out of the Sun, its mother.
this hound stalks the world
with woebegone legs, a reflection of the entire world fractured
by a singular shot at the end.
i hear the guttural snarl of engine
unwavering in its limitations. say, at first light, all exists to paint darkness quicker
than any obfuscated conclusion -- hiding in
itself, its mood for squalors.
the mud dug deep for bones
pared from the slaughter of midnight,
hiding them to mask my defeat:
everything around me sparkles with
the vigor of frailty, all the same.

the nights are too long, scarce as froth
from an opened mouth left flat,
a dry gin bottle.
i imagine sad armies dissolving in pale moonlight, and crosses thumbed down to the snaking hiss of its nondescript prayer.
gears gnash like teeth in anger
of you in your young clothes, the pace of cars
hurrying back to homes.
i remember the splintered wood burning
the last in the round kiln of the Red Lion.
the upholstery of night is the twilight's
catharsis. the coast of dread widens like
the vernal metamorphosis of a young ******* in Gibraltar,
come in, come in with undecided ******.
you can hear the fall coalesce with the levitation of ember, landing like feet blunt
on the asphalt beside desolate bicycles
    in seedy parks.

the surreal tabulation of analogue repetitions:
death's myriad, in all corners screaming
the countenance rebel, against the floored masses.

to Martina - with love.
your tiny feet hang over
the modest tapestry.
you assault the morning -
   my own, rueful morning
with the harangue of your
     viridian kisses.
in stolid nights like this, Martina, the bowl of the sky
bawls in silent ruin.
    distant roars of flightless
voices fracture the night
    your dandelion smile gone
from your primrose mouth - Martina,
   full moon, incendiary star,
in a slew of love and vertiginous
    height you danced sprightlier
  than any hapless dream soldiering on in the tight solder of the threadbare midnight. Martina - you had us trembling before, and now again, as you dash with your superlative shade that fleets,
      i wake in ruinous mornings.

| masalub-on |

to bellow
is far better fate
    than silence.

what the world never hears
will be forever buried.
the muteness encompassing
all our states has its way
of burying things and emblazon
them with nothing but monuments.

nobody hears a creature
  when it is wounded
  in the dark bramble.

nobody sees the crossing
  of birds at dawn,
  and if you do,
  you'll never know the
  memory of their flight.

nobody knows the existence
  of rust in the gears of
  a train slumbering somewhere
  in Buendia. the resilience
  of its song, the allegory
  of immutable abeyance.

all matter consigned to odes.
punctuated by time's manuscript,
and all derivatives of sadness
   mean only this:
      
        it is time to go.

enduring quiet -
hands clasped sealing all tyrants,
a tumultuous poem.

among the tense blackness
of night,
take me as river
takes to silence of a lark
a-trill on quavering beat
and consider
in arm's light mid-step
slowly rising to no more
than a drop of bleak bone,
the evening's behemoth.

a resounding collective
behind a closed door.
a soundless sound.
an organized chaos astounds
this meaninglessness and puts
in it, two hands rubbing each
pressed on impatient bodies
primal without signals
as vibrations prickle through
feeble walls.

i hear some defenseless mess
inwardly break as most of wrung sunsets reek in rain-swathed air.

in here
a cornered hummingbird
of yearning
listening even before i spoke.
drinking in quiet, the water
on the tabletop
that begins to arm itself
with fringes of light
and if not for my mind's frolicsome
fingers send back to glass
for someone else's mouth
to touch...

milbrightlions of sky
where the brindled Maya
begins its escape
from the wind's seething hands,
O, celestial machine
of pompous working:
when the day breaks
its shell and births
a yolk yellower than
all dandelions,
the world from
its shell will rend
the horizon and there shall
be forever the two Suns
stamping the raze
minting in the livery
of the world, each to
our tenderness sings
   humanity, purely—

Mindanao rain

   drain a mind:

rain, mind an a, o (or lack of
      the voweled demarcation)
      
       a man rid
or
     a dim man in
   a man;
  
      Danao
sings something
   blood writes heavily
we have many cicatrices

    mind
the
      now

    arid mind
man rid of
a, o — vowels to
    fruition a total emphasis

     and man
in a drain, no strong aid
        in rain — in the
eyes  of
    god is the
true
   anon man
in the rain
    amid rain-moan
   or nomad in rain.

a **** I On,
  you
complete the atrocity.

mind's collective.
a primary congregation
in chiaroscuro,

white axis
tilting black worlds
as stars lean
towards their gaseous disappearances.

mind's prison.
blood surging in staccato,
thumping like wild animals,
trundling underneath the womb
of genuflecting hills.

a cityscape is innervated
by electric wires and their
secretive jolts: this plunging light laying leschenaultia diadem
on my head naming me king
of shadows thriving inside
bells telling all buoys
with their rotund calisthenics.

all words elope stagnant rivers,
vexing truths out of horizons
painting them without color,
like the image of a dove trapped
in mirror's water, reaching
forth kingdom come.

Mine eyes retain the scourge
      of love

       blueness bites vogue sun
  scarring moon-clusters in
    unyielding boughs lamenting
      this sidereal zither.

Mine eyes burn pale fire
     through chaffed hands pallid
      markings wall-scrunched
      and depthless now

      names wield swords as their
   sharp edges bequeath wound upon
   wound taking helm to helm,
        no shattered voice of pain.

  Mine eyes still these urgent
    importances distilling the
     crucial hour's wane - unreliable sundial seeking the sun
    to scale shadows telling time

     Mine eyes know
    her nudeness vague, her bareness clear, her voice splintering the woodwork of soul,
    keeping it in a jar,
    
    urn,
      rotundly incarcerated there,
    mouth sings lip-meanderings
      multiplied wolves at
     the door.

this here
is written
in millipede strobe.

you mirror
the one you
  love.

it is when her hands reach
for unresponsive things
that yours too,
quavering, unknowing of the expanse
of things that seemingly draw close
in killswitch pace
that you find yourselves
dissipating swiftly like
snow tumbled across waiting tapestries.

it is when her feet go without
saying that there is a
clandestine traverse of unspoken
truths and disrupted images,
that your find yourself waxing,
beaten away from the track of
the force that beats us back
to glass.

look at us - with eyes in the
doldrum of things that mean
everything, like how breathing
is default in trial, like how derby
is expendable in the flurry
of indefatigable trying,
like how i slowly,
naked and dripping,
kiss you through waters redundant
in its resounding call.

it seems to me that the child is beheaded –
there is not much to look at in this paling weather.
moderate climates douse their bleak, blank face-ovals,

their frigidity has no relation to stone,
their silence, loveless as a fabric is torn wild
by a rabid dog, dragging it senselessly against the furniture.

outside, the whiteness bears no reputation of laundry
impaled to clotheslines: frilling at the collarbones,
fringing at the high afternoon, distinct flutings
of iridescent night-gowns,

they want the life of some lovelorn progeny.
the scald of water is his trademark – it seems innately natural,
those who, someone else lauds the **** verdigris
  of trees, able to tell how immense the stasis
  of the darkness is, outside when all homes bellow
a concatenation of absences:

  it seems to me the child is guillotined at this
moment, verily, in moderate climates.

in that lightening moment I was stricken
   with a memory – quickening, swiftly, and then
deliberately: a bamboo in waiting yet akimbo,
    a sea unfazed yet stirring internally,
taking in the morning’s tremendous yawn
staring visibly, a thin line dividing soul and body,
    ephemeral and perpetual, vivid recall
and faint oblivion;

was it the wind that she borrowed with her
   presence or was it the breath that once stilled spring
like an invisible, yet felt river in my blood?
what impeccable maquillage was it that she donned,
      dawn or twilight?
something the silence waits with its mount on the boughs,
  the munificence of such plural modesty,
or everything the noise tell me which isn’t exactly
   but still is, a memory.