1
Fails to realize the momentousness of the ordeal. Syntax means nothing. Delineations weak. It is all obsolescence, this one. This thing that has no name. This agreed-upon assault of objects. Its loose fizz into the air. Buildings without balconies, or balconies without height – a plunge will mean that there is only little ache left to wring out of some futurity. Arrange the furniture, you said. Take pictures of the sullen victory right after. There is no place in there but only spacious silence. Like meat before it goes into the melting ***. Like light before it reaches its tippling point. Hence, let us both agree to this once again. An end. A limit has been reached. In most days you say nothing. I wait – concealed, overwrought with time’s unloosenings. I do no waiting at all. I do wait at all – this made moment is your new retreat.

2
This is an old woe with a new name. I ask you things, you answer me endless. Endless as in quiet is infinite. There are so many places in this world fat with stillness. Feelings flatten and fall at last, here, its exoskeleton. Keep it in your drawer with your DMs. To make a metaphor out of you means I acknowledge your disappearance. To keep mum about it means I take it inside me, deeper and deeper. Do you dream of fish now? Or waves? Or the undertow you take with you, dragged in miles of feet through dunes of sand? I ask you again, and you show no signs of being uninhabited. Although there is sometimes the warmth of pressing sheens, you take them as the passing of buses – you emphasize the waning. Although this has been written, there isn’t so much writing done here. If I could be abject like say, a washrag in your home, there would be little difference made.

3
To keep myself intent is declaration. To quote otherwise the world that you breathe in, simply suppression. It is much imaginable that way, much more attainable, resolute and quick with sense. A new kind of wailing. What I want, I destroy by earnest regard. There is a paradoxical way to cultivate this thing: and it is to leave it there, thriving in a space meant to contain it, alone. Nothing will be retained – it will always be one, and never two. You believed me. I asked you again. Your answer compressed everything to shadow.

Take salt for sea. And blue for feeling.
Litmus blue, say it will, squalid yellow
are the dead and the living continue on,
  swept onward.

Take air for flight and space for descent.
  When you are held, raised into this,
you will fall at last – take a sudden slither
   of skin as farewell, catacombing mist
  as    salutation but

   you      go    ineffably

whenever, well-paced,
     well-oiled,

you will continue on
  despite
     final   exhaustions.

how did you ever come to this—
is never the question,
she clinks her glass on the russet tablework and crinkles her nose
onto some cold draft.

some answers i keep to myself:

it is not a very honorable question.
a noble man might ask,
where shall this bring you?
now that you are... this state of being?

the answer i said:
after a while, i have been having
dreams of white parasols
cerements being whacked
into aching scabs on the skin
of an old tendril - that laburnum
where a pebble of raindrop
slides freely!
and i uttered shyly of my place,
i once fell in that speed
and came to no crash.
and now here are words - just words,
pure loneliness, or say, a preordained vacuity waiting to be filled— no,
wait, it isn't! a feral with diurnal eyes
never asleep, always awake!
no, still not very apt.

i have fallen like this, and it was
also i, waiting for myself
at the end of each
line, shattering at word's break.

There is no reason for the wind
to maneuver

propagate cold in this province.
sullen this progeny when they declared

it so. The hue of it stark, dispersed.
What the hands pass on

as something with limit,
an azimuth reached.

The found body in tow, what season
limits this chance? This serene boy

catching up with a sullen, walled-in image
handing over a bent shadow

to knife this life. This economy of utterance
for I have no duplicate of your town.

I wait for it to arrive in this segment,
when time becomes impossible

a task to endure. Falls away, never settles,
searching balance – grasping what you speak.

it is  continuous there—
a bleak sign of sleepless feeling.
sharp as a rose is cut,
or dull as a petal is wrote out
of peril.
red is the eve
of all eves, eyes of the mayday
making the night weep all blueness
and breaking laughter crudely
there— austere shrill of air
and starkly absolute,
continuing its trill,
all the stars and your beautiful face.

speak, also you—
the night is cut
and the moon is beheaded;

a mound of silence
collapses,
outlasting the lucid hymnal.
the clinking of glasses,
the guffaw of the gull trilling
  on no cypress.

god has meant locks
   and keys.

chiaroscuro is the form
   of oblivion, river is the voice
   of the dead: the throb of lure-call
  poised at the hollow of the hand,
    this evening.

there is a sadness that is drunk
   with something a lasting recall
   wuthers without a name:
the wayward moon hangs,
  the guillotine of stars
     spreads black blood on the tulip,

drinking as if there is no water,
    only that of wine and something
   that has brought us together,
     separated in the evening

our life, pithless against the wall,
     engraved there, unnavigable writ:
      sundered, washed ashore.

this is when
we keep on keeping on

our fingers laced and kinked
to some incited cold

gives us no unction – i leave
you with irreparable harm

trudges across flame, guesses
the assailant of aches.

when these crosses straighten
within the whelm of your mouth

i will curl them again in sweet,
successive manners of graceless joust

and then when you come before i,
or is it i before you — whichever,

this music is never a notice of
ease — only rescue without warning

or attendance, seeping underneath
pallid floor work, lips puckered

pursed to attenuated form of bow
and mine eyes arrow through

your triple deeds arraying
and i can never ignore how immense

the moon is in the river of the same vein
riverrun, away, wayward—

lisps of white and red
and soon obliterated when both our

avenues close and we walk
home, hands separately yearning.

it is not that we are far away
but there is   this stilled candor  that
   there    are   spaces,  gaps,  turns  and swerves   that we   cannot   close.

   as in  a star in  its throne will remain
to be  lit in  diadem of white, cannot be touched    or you   in your silence
   with the drone  of such  tired machine:
  moon's all  round and  all i saw, yet not
    always   the visible,  encircled in flesh and
without  so much question, the  mind's a
     quicksilver marauding to  motion all
things  except   your own   parasols bending
    to such   airlessness,  and  to make tractable, this  unstable   mirage

  
      of you,    fulminating in such bright auroras  persisting within the day when you
    arrive  not with   hands but with chains,
   machineries  and not   bones,  no such lissomeness of skin love-hewn but  walls,
    not   the earthen  night  but only brindled   silence like the world whispering ssmething
     close  to the   ear not   love but   pain.

be on the qui vive when love
  is flyblown-piquant in the air
  that we breathe,
         shall we do splendidly here
where we once cried for benediction
in this station where love broke our
bones and laughed us away?

there is no retrieval of the memory
in the siege of nostalgia
when the past comes back with
the fracas of one hundred men marching
underneath the flagella
          of stark moments—

the streets will soon be named
after deaths, yet not one bears
   a trace of you.

Sometimes I am in the center of all things intentional and accidental.
My conquest lies somewhere in between its execution. When this happens,
I am ready: I will wear a white shirt. Keep mum like a leaden chapel.
                              My eyes will be red like surgery. My precision of stasis,
                               impeccable – like mother gutting fish in the kitchen,
                               or a door unhinged by my father. Each exploit

drawn   out of the mundane. Hearing the sinking dreaded music of shovel excavating
   the Earth,
   taking the image blurred. Clarified like clearing of a throat is my reckoning
   of a dull Wednesday. Rain descending like a flower. Bathes the world like soiled
   linen where we are cut from uniformly. Sometimes I am two abysses in one place:
  the gap of the ground and the horizon, sometimes cut-rate like pothole.
                   I know a day exists and can neither be decent nor loutish. In this frame,
  I can be sepia. Whitewashed like wall, hewed like linoleum on floors.

   In this center   I can be the forever grass
    when all things expire by morning

  washing me with dew.

it is raining in my side of the
   earth
and where light slips away,
ensconcing with its lackadaisical imprint, is the morning: pinnacles and then topples
    into
acontinualeveningwherewordsrunandbreathscometoa      sudden
                  halt:

in the same intimation,
your lip's crepuscule
or your commune's crescent,
  in my side of the earth
    from yours, hurled out
the many sinuous fingers
   of water and the lamp's
  palpebral flutter.

each time the wind turns the pages
of the tree, the sun ripens in itself,
a fruit transfixing the day—

we take it in our hands,
lowly in the grass we lay in slender
fascination, a fresh fruit's glaze
signaling the hour.

this is when my love heightens
as rain falls inanimately on unquiet stones, revealing their naked splendor.
their silences transmuted into undressed
woes of women toiling shorelines and men striding subterranean worlds —

whereas when brightness then quells
itself and tosses you out into the deepest
chasm of chores, your locomotives unction you my sweet lovingly arms
where i bring you close to rescue,

herein darkness prevails and overthrows
water: my hands divest their fates and begin to scour for the nacre of your heart—
and i will take it, and i will own it,
  for there is nothing the blue yields in depth but the lesson it shares,

leaving me a place, flat on my belly,
  with a bounty of flowers in my mouth
your lips have planted like your hand
     on my chest.

shine of light through the heavily draped mist

|naked|

i kneel to pick up the crimson and drain
  the thorns of your aches

|naked|

you screamed in your cornerless voice,
    the blue of the ocean peels through
     the foam and then

|naked|

like fish struggling in
      a flush of current, swaying with
  the drowned **** and the derelict
     of ships revealing old shadows

|naked|

as we took a dive in each
    other's depths clad with bravery, now

  |naked|

     to the bone, in fear of our clutched hearts, breaking in the silence,
     looking through the window
     of each other's deliquescent being
      sieving through the world,

|naked|

Soar with me, the young
     we are a flock of marvels
       roaring vertical

claiming it, the laughter
  and so years go running around

the sturdy, brindled narra, trilling of birds,
existence born from

pulling hair, mounting the scathed creature — feelingfulness straddles
the lovelorn fringe of shadows coming
to a feint.

under the canopy of the guava tree
i reminisce dissonance of claims

drunken recall or some ill fortitude
and borderless as it seems,
capturing the eye.

mirage dazzled, writhing on the
darling loam, fisticuff of birds
swarming ecliptic passages
finding a hidden codex somewhere
in archaea — women pulled from ribs
and men wrought out of tears.

such    darkness   is another  fleeting  thing
    and so   is   the   bird  of  your
                        arrival, mine    windows   receiving   bird-song,
  elegiac – pining  against   perennial  trees,
     sounds     of   well-put     strikes    bringing   back
       to   a  time   not    mine but   hastily  endure,

    and    light  is  but  another  figure   posing   for   itself,
       a  backlash  of  photographs  again   not
  mine      but      this   time    masterfully   endure
     all  that   is    mine,    being
       still    and   keeping     what
the  silence  holds   with   its    tumultuous   hands,
     a    song   once   my    roof-beams   heard   but
refused     to   declare: a   fugitive   frisked  out of
  the   nooks    of   depthless  sleep   is    I,   inspected
by   the   wide-eyed   gazebo     of     morning,   and    a    specter
    whose   name    I   cannot   recall,  completing   this  brokenness.
I am    neither      poet
     nor    bard,      stripped  of   words
and   I,    past everything  else that  makes   sweet  music,
   possess    no     mandolin.

the idle mountain of laundry
  in the corner smelt of saltine sweat
a shadow deliriously starved
   on the bedraggled linoleum

simmer of onions, the feral trample
    on iron, there is a proper pang
  in admittedly blurting out
       Never
   Again
        Are
We
      To
   Be

   falling into the well of the ear
   to surge anew, a slovenly love,
overcast of the body now gone
    and only fulgent lamp-like brightness
   unmoving in its resort
       tells me something hazed
and invisible enough to be seen
   yet painstakingly entering are these
reminders of the remainders - the only
   resolute and reachable object

  is this photograph of your
  once bright smile
  illuminating all mirrors
  dizzy with the image of myself,
   alone and bedimmed

I.

Time elapses, clock’s dumb head says it all.
                   Not you. To lose sight of. X is where you stood,
           and this is where you will begin without my grace.

   Imagination as toll, if a thing hurtling is to punch into
        the wall defending you, what sound will startle? Imagine marionettes
           moving to no strings. A god sitting on top of our heads, like a pin
       to commence a fractal of dance. If this dance is memory, we know its accuracy.
      But what is its color? I tremble at the thought of your feet
                         setting in pale soil. I may have answered.

II.

   It joys me to be wrong, when the gorgeous agony of pain
            is what binds us together. Each to each, the real time not any longer
         hers, but mine of only difficult pattern. Let me revel in this heroism.

III.

   Things continue to move as I do not. Starting at the center, sure to break
     hem. I ran out of words to name this. Not elegiac. Perennial but short.
              In all extensions, elastic like water. Hairbreadth as in none other but plunge,
             drowned in a marvelous catch. In my hand, a piece of the moon
   twitches, drifting as a signal of life, in a certain mode
                               of hearsay: in the night she thinks of  you.

IV.

   I grant light to things but they cannot see its father. This room is anxious of
its vicious clutter. I must move out, beginning with old paint, crumpled papers,
   dust on the ground, shyness of the sheet’s accent erasing its folds from last night.
   Only the kind order is to do and undo.         Time continues from this intermission.
   I write only to regret. I have so much to say
   to you, but never to one another.

V.

           I broke the news without delicadeza. This is resounding of traction. This has us
           naked, crawling towards a predicate. A fine practice of
     moving towards a parallel edge,
     facing different directions when done.
      I broke the news: *I broke. You amalgamate. Time stops. You must continue on.

Hello all. I have been pretty busy with projects I've been working on.

I have been putting my poems up in PDF format and all of the new poems are available for download here:

http://deadbeatantihero.wixsite.com/thereisnothinghere

This website works best on a desktop. I tried accessing the website on my phone but some of the titles are buried within the other titles so I think it is best if you just access the website using a desktop. All you have to do is click the title that you want to read and it should automatically bring you directly to the PDF format of the works. You may also download them for free if you wish.

I am converting these works into PDF format with the intention to turn them into zines and chapbooks in the near future, given the right price and resource people to help me come up with the projects. Feel free and read away, all of the works are free and downloadable.

The website currently has 19 titles for you to read and download (if you want to, that is). Let me know if I could help you with anything!

next onset of such peril,
   be much the silent as though concentration
   of stone – have your say, yet the susurrus
   wills your anchored voice.

finer: knowable as a book is opened and a leaf
          is turned, a star: to exact how it is to float
   deep in the celestial of your body’s ample universe,
    and take the milk of the nebula,
      for mine to drink in this silence whose dress
is white and not   blue, or anything the coruscation sings
   hewn tenderly, swelling in the wandering of words:
   whose ambitions are no less than the swell sheen
    of the borrowed moon, and greater it is than
   it shall be the only thing timid like light underneath
     the fleeting of the shade that has been stripped and
  coursed you on, naked:

  yet my hands bequeath you enough the shade,
and slowly in you persists the evening
  full not of stars that lowered themselves to
    the penetralium but of all time has erected the
day,  the twilight  and your obvious darkness.

desultory moon
over Chrysanthemums tells
solitudinem.

stand(ing) here alone in the dark
like a head of tack pirouetting away
  to no music - only acrid scruple
    of this being with and not being with,
     one is always alone.

  space occupies the potteries in
  the garden as a steady arm of light
  stills in its mouth, a flowering dark.
  it is only 3 o'clock in the morning
   and the heat clambers the wall of
   the vacuously atrabilious moment
  of just plainly existing. the slender
  harlequin of moon, like an old lover
  having its own way with me, a child's
  yelp coming home — the hermetic
  air crushing the light, slivering it
  revealing all the ensconced phantasms
  too commonplace like a fork in the road
that i know, or the wayward metropolitan
  that teems with a concatenation of roads
  and gutters bilious with the squall of day.

  a figure moves entering a warm miasma,
   receiving the star of aloneness,
    vacillating between
  place and         placelessness
   telling this originary of repossessing
       the moon with a hand in my hand,
   pressing a question of where
    have you been all the raging while.

Fallibly, this evening, the moon over movements
exposed to prying dimness.

Everything is resigned to silence. The balcony
peering through the vastness, the moon like a tonsure
of a septuagenarian paving a hole in the sky.

The Earth moves with feet: plantar, tiptoeing –
out of propulsion from underneath the ground,
turns to sway, a clenched league of roots

the dog outside fashioned to sleep, draped by
the curtains left to dry in the bleak behemoth.
a stone his own size, or the emptiness my own weight.

Here are misspent days under hermetic space.
I am a child left to my own salt. I lift sleep’s lids
and what dreams diminish in realness is nothing but a tide
that clings more to brine than my hands – leading me back to
where I have found myself verily this evening,

the old Moon repeating itself, unfinished still.

it is just:
  an utter illusion
  to a no heart's control,
  reckless without form.
  weighing us down to
  a clenched fist's nothingness,
  and then comes to tremble
  everything that it announces.
  the wind breaking loose
  in love's captivity
  and its faltered exactitudes -
  all of us,
  blown ceaselessly away
  by the same wind of it,
  that pulls us back,
  scaling us to
  love's nakedness.

You feel stories are always unsolicited. You do not want them.
You want to feel the agony of the moment – all the more the electricity of it. A moment mottled by
rain this ordinary Thursday afternoon, or the dust eloping in the wind as we drove past 50 in the middle
of the night, you telling me I do not clean my car thoroughly, like that of a lady’s. You feel stories pose
no importance. Say, at the edge of our seats or at the jagged lip of a cliff – you would dare say jump,
alone, unwound, unfettered, resolute, obvious and available in truancy, out of incalculable fear of
existing – you took the plunge and claimed it’s all the same. Apertures frantic with dazed visions of
fondness. Vertical leap, cutting through the vague sky. Keeping some sense of freedom, yet we are not
as free as we think. You do not want a story. You do not buy its thrills. You chortle at the idea of lasting things because they have hands that are clenched and frenzied. They brand. They are territorial. You are no territory. You are an island, adrift somewhere, breathing on its own in between penumbras of want
and coasts of dread.  You feel characters do not change scripts. They change how you say things. Say, when he told you were needed, and I told you that you insist your forceful importance – you felt the need
to dab into the air and spire through the thickness of the dark, flamboyant with the color of freedom, you said, pale as a dove, I am free. Finally, the man might have left somewhere without you knowing it, and just as you are unclenching your wings, you project your pace into the sky like an unseen margin in the invisibility of all invisibilities – it is impossible to look away. You felt stories are not needed. You wanted experience. The end of a dull knife, the sound of a .45 shot into the sky as the police circle the filthy streets of Quezon City. You in your Chuck Taylors, running, looking for some tough nook to hide in – omen of another rain in sight. You remembered when you first bathed in rain and laughed a laugh so impossible with high notes and shrills – you laughed away like you were not coming back, because there is no need for a story. Now left to wondering in the vastness of the room before me, was it something
to be believed? A broken orchestra enters with its surrendering music and everything is ended. I fell asleep, still dreaming of running away.

Now it all comes back:

in pursuit of you from the basis of this armistice, when in the swelter of this afternoon
I wish you realer than anything imagined,
                 in confidence   that I may   arrive at a   hunted  answer.

But the question, when hurled, broke into the wet back of mound’s infinite silence,
   like a dog with its paw leaving dog-signatures on the bedspread,

at twilight, flowers shift from grace to melancholy, rail of stars in sight now,

I amongst the darkness, waiting – wishing you again underneath the dome
   of this immense night,

prying amongst stones their language of truthfulness: Have I not loved enough?

black crushed pupil tipping at its
  peak with a mild sheen
  discombobulating words
  to their own contained madnesses
  putting an apostrophe
  on everything
  it lays sight on

  a salvage of disrupted vision
  wrings true wind blowing through
  the white steel of dangerous contraption
  in the hand and takes to leaping
  of faith, a restless voyage:

  a volute image lightheaded
  still with the passing to and from—
  nomadic breath still splendidly
  penetrating through all sound
   and silence and words
    like fire wily without intent,
      the moon. only there. without a name.

angels brought home
wired to some memory.
the sea tethers itself
to the wakefulness of beds
as the blue head of
melancholia peers through
derelict foam.
i will bathe myself
frayed into
these waters
and emerge
the victor -
as many a name lay defeated,
stony and silent, pale and white
with forget.
what i came for here
  has already elapsed
  as sleep only is the many pages
  of slumber underneath a somnolent
  done of some peril. untouched
  as a sterile book.

no man figures saints.

   i lift my glass and drank
   as the erected monuments of
   some fallible memory pendulum
   and then topple like oblivion
   in a glass case.

   we defer significantly waning
   luxuries of time-keeping
   as we both pinnacle through
   the mountains and shout
   names unwilling to have faces,
   eyes, liaisons without warning
   and then FALL. CRASH. Break.
   now, habitual clock-arm meshwork
   slurs a tell-tale forgetfulness.
   i am now accompanied by the
   music and we dance in separate
   stages - a standstill in
   imperfectly drawn sidereal
   circles.

swell of silence
  and the wrest of stars,
o'er the river my heart sings cooly
against the face of the
        somnolent moon.

my heart is etched
in the sand and the dunes
tender on in the tense heat,
and underneath the bowl
  of the afternoon, the shadows
are stripped, shattered are they,
  mending to pieces;

i see here clearly yet no sign
  of you. birds are ailing in the
distance, the boulangerie of clouds
   and the automaton trees,
  yet no you, neither an espy of you nor
     a spry child hiding behind
a flower,
      still no image of you
  here, i go mazy now, into the
   fleet of hurdled moments.

I take it that a spray of Sun occults your face,
like watching in a squalid cinema, something a slapstick would
conjure a stylistically dumb image, or the prattle of
bunkum hubbub drowning loudspeakers in plazas.
You know there is a part of you that goes missing
  every time you hear me pass carefully under the care
  of toppled light, and there is a part of me that engages
the dark in this straining mutiny. This is such a troubled time
on the hardline; a martinet on the other cheapened end
of a totaled horizon hollering at gentrified space, eyes sternly
fixed on the mattress, conspicuous in urbane manner, something
shadows bade with hands, lifts up all the ragamuffin days:
   to capture you in such moment, such oneness, of no complication,
like a clean Yamazaki on the house, or a metropolitan district
   augured with rubicund crisscrosses, streets sidereal in measures,
an aggressive ******* at the end of the curb, the spanked curve
   of the mordant asphalt, and the rise of body heat from yesterday’s swelter;
  something only I could have thought of in white thighs of little ladies
    and peering birds for collarbones: look at this, maddened, retaining
    nothing but age.

November's Daughter


oh, say you, zithering delightfully
    the leaf's breath leads me on
    to the tree of your sanguinity.

the wind is much stronger,
    the verdure is greener
   in my side of the Earth
you cross with a single glance
   etching something in the soul:
a writ of marvels or a lace of birds
    stringing across the entire
November morning.

in one of the days made thoroughly
    by careful hands,
  it is you in the flesh of many
   tangible days.

i say again,
the wind is cooler,
  thwarting the summer.
surly flowers glide in the air
   and the clouds twitch in sun-glaze
  and temperamental pondering

November supremed you, me;
   the sovereign of its bounty
  opened its door and let in,
     a crystalline vestige:

the wind is tender past the windows.
  i watch the slow specter of night
    in its vertical climb;

  you,
the moon,
    altogether, hand in hand,
  like water falling and falling
    into my mouth, receiving your shadow–
the world
    moves brighter than ever.

think  I  shall  be springtime; such   clumsy
scent  of  the world   collapsing  not  with  nets
but   hands  not upon  trellis  but    bodies –
    sleep    shall   carry   us  to  inches
of  terrible  speech    such somnolent world senses
    quietness   in  the  rivers   of   our blood;
how  murmurously  veritable    moment
     leaps   forth  ripe  in the   air   of such  splendidness
when  it   was not   mountains
    but    your   *******   deep within   the    Earth of  me
and I  rain    cleaving  the   scent   of   the world
    into   two   separateness   until   the
enormously     ****   moon   plunges    within;
   I    shall   be   a   tree
and you, a rose    or   springtide, or   everything
   that
            blooms,    withers,
dances – new  beginnings;

i   am   going
into    the    limp    dark
   where   silence   recites
a brief  candleflame
  
    it is   as if  these cavernous   impulses
rush   back    like  children
     whose  heads   are diadems
and   you,   their   mother   of   spring’s   masterful
    hands    neither  went
      nor      came

to   a   dream
    of
        roses  which
trudging    kisses   smite  the loam,
    giving  them   reckless meanings
yet    all    the   same

   in    death
and   in    beginning,  in  these large minutes
your   eyes  contain
such    light   which   all  things  darkled
    are    born anew
with   timid  
       names

i left the spigot dripping last night
and now the whole home is submerged —
archipelagic scraps of tatterdemalion
things line the floor like dead bodies
and poesy atrocities. but i have not
in mind, this disfiguring lament.

1     Take for example, a fine line
       darting towards your *******
2     And bend it towards the direction
       of genealogy or analogue fire
3     Henceforth commend contention
       and differentiate beyond hapless
       extensions of body to body
       mirror to mirror
4    Where all axioms define the universe
       and there is an epistemic
       afterthought looming past the
       arithmetic of things such is that
       of a steady punctuation mid-birth
5    Take the corporeal and eat Suns,
        thrash the Moon like how a bed
        is meant to be whacked by the
        spanked edge
6      Cold resuscitates flame and flares
        congeal all frigidity — or at least
        arbitrarily, remember it by whim
        caprice and then fade out
7      As misery clots in the same vein
        pulsing with different blood
        which we shall ensconce with
        laughter — a drunken hilarity
8      And then oppose the dictum
        that forced us to the point
        of recalcitrance, rousing hungered
        heat with memory of waking ice
9      Recount what I said about
        such opposites complementing
        each other in precise farce
10    In this exact exhibition faint
        upon recollections — going far
        inverse to poles only tells another
        distance covered by wide strides
        and a place nearly forgotten
        rekindled by newer ones.

I.

I trace you against
the skull
with the old photograph of

age 8 and 7

aloft and angling down some stage, or performance

in
this perforated dome I call home

trace you against
the map impaled to the wall
and locate you amongst the
geographies and heed
its brash distance

shake out its potency
like how my grandfather murders
the brief matchlight

I trace the trajectory
will not pivot to return
or scope rescue

none like this force,
the insufficiency of maps,
the harsh terror of adoration when
like a fruit ripened

will fall to the hand waiting
underneath

II.

    Propel me to where it counts

into the masses transit-worn,

shorn out of the flyblown-dry in amazement
or immense performance of breaking

outside the window
when it rains forever

to Icarus in his blunder,

from the dilated pupil of my father while
   watching television

from point-break of time
  and sense when nothing made one kind word
as salvation

out of the tangle of clouds,
    the skytilt angle where heaven might topple
at one point to scatter my reckoning of a god

from your place of interval

III.

space – where you will it,
when the night shining in,

          far are the noctilucent skies
  place me in the soft ease of beds when
   burial is ideal

make me ****** than light at first glance
    or water upon initial drop

and then in space, where you will it,
    promise-tender, drunk in shy altitudes,

this most biddable machine will spread to make way
    for weight giving in

to assume so small a drop of the pin in the ocean
   or to cannonball – fitting  chamber of a gun,
  
swimming in a mess of no restrictions,
  prepared, contained to carve deep

in the night writhing in with him
  with no need of hands to break point.

vestal nights clamber
the perennial diadem
of quiet mountains—

you take the fall’s seriousness
         like you were a leaf from the bough
of this tree called love –

     as you were nearer to me than any other
light with its hands clasped, starting rivers in me;

   you, whose mouth benignly twitch to utter
such glibness that even the stinging fragrance
of newness sings in me

the darkness swallowed slovenly as if all of the world
swims past the squalor of my blood – new to old wholeness
bones to a gleam of washlines,

       wherefore there is nothing left to guess
in such hypothetical kisses when you looked at me
with two strutting cities for eyes that
churn to fade out such articulation of sibilance –

     it is like this is never a better fate than plunging,
the moon between the hill and my body
    within your body.

my love, love of all loves, is the moon
   nobody knows. I’ve found her voice
the sweetest taste. In the stolen throbbing
room, I bask in her absence.

there is not much of me like you,
  or I, and in a glassed dream you flung
aside and strode in vestal swiftness.

I can no more taste your truth.
time tells your monsoon, and underneath
the steady weather, your light hands me,
   a bell – a bell I have no use for.

Moon missing now, in the depth of sleep’s
ravenings – a revelry was it, or a passing train?
gnawing sound at the very heart of nothing,
my love, love of all loves, is the moon
nobody knows, my tenderness of silence,
  and with stars eloquently leaving signatures,
the available anguish dropping all else
   in the knifed horizon.

if kisses are green and bodies verdantly exact in sameness
   let my hands be two birds glorifying the waters in the slopes
of fingers,  
  
if song is but undeath and the rise and fall the unalphabeted siren
      of the morning,

       such loose wind swaying over her silently as loincloths
   over blackred roses,  easily it breaks like a finger of a shadow
     whirling gently through opened windows in candid moonlight

but  if surely does your going signal the dawn but no birds
   wreathing the trees and no gardens inherit garlands,

  what shall then be two birds over waters but a single stride
      of sorrow and whose temporal flights disdain centrifugal faces
of waiting; measured, coveted, photographed, love everywhere fading
    where silence maims sound and music topples over the moon
       the stars  the sleepless nights and  the stellified dust of the world
             that must be opened again

This old and twisted thing,
arranged in awry futility
like most lives circumspectly:
 a pair of denims
washed in the Sun,
 a slow laburnum glowering.

face-ovals perfumed with
  the camphor of such departure.
 the hand waving the weight
  of the night's obsidian
    is the love i take in - dull or sharp -
  as it arrives, tired as a crankshaft
      or a waned piston

 this junked engine, wheeled off,
  looming a light-clenched house
 with its exhaust of excess. declension.
   rife as a numeral being. repetitive like the drivel of radio talk.  heavy like the sudden drop
     of Sunday on the plod of chapels,

  once more into this.

1

I  love     the    love    that   loves   to
     insult     the    love   -- so   abject,   giving
berth    to   himself,

  once   i gave    you   modest   figurines
      of    angels    but what    use   are angels
   when wings    are   clipped,  prayers are hindsight
 dashed     with     words     inflamed

    and    once     this   i thought   when drowned
         dies   at    last    but    makes   it as  fish-dream
  sees    the   punctured blue   as the moon  is
      discombobulated    in    the   water  which reminds


        me   of   a  room  so  small, your    face   virginal,
    one   with   white  curtains    flapping   endlessly

2

My      recent    memory    of    drowning:

    A   man    desolate
            trying    some   cockeyed  miracle
  on     beer,  using    a   variety    of    silence
     as    the   world like   a flat   black   disc
           continues   to   show   a  collection
      of      failures

3

  I   am   worried  I might   forget   your  face
  the   next   morning    but   there    is something
      to keep    the    light     from   passing
           beyond   and   not   through but still is
     evident     of   a  day   leaping   off    memory.

4

    My    faintest    memory     of
           drowning:

a     woman     glinting
       under    quotidian     Sun

            quickly      fades,     departs
   from    imagining    this:

      You   know    it    is    bound    to   happen
   and    both    of    you   are     now     drunk
         and   her    face     now    is   the    cold
     brink       of    all   places    so   placeless in   recall


                          and then the world all over, blue,
          deepening, rearing  multitude    currents.

superimposition of celestial ampersand:

a continuity of all things
  stars hanging loose in the pupil
of this deadbeat word.

typhoons in a swirl of tempestuous ballet,
dogs shivering in the blue cold,
biting their canine integument the way
scarabs would, sinking in a temporal flotsam-way within tectonic display
    of text

hectares of blank stares bringing
to life lysergic field of black birds.

and then some

equal number of evocativeness:

continuing on into the ground
are the bones warm in their compost.
the sudden fragrance of rat ****
appeals to the masses.
too much laughter in flooded thoroughfares pockmarked by
the vehement jam of staccato jackhammer.
choking us is today's headline
in supreme obbligato - its stench
reeks of libidinal perfume etched
in the flesh of the rigmarole.

one filthy day in Manila.

i brace
the impact of this death-collision,

my eyes search the
emptiness of sleep
yet there is a hanging invitation.
a counterplot to my figure's
incessant clamor.

to dance upon the
slenderness of this road altogether,

lighting our cigarettes,
mapping out our deaths
painstakingly.

we know not its macabre,
we pain not over
its toxicities,

takes it closer
  to lips and then purses
a blow of haze curling over
   our brows,
we cannot contain its ballistic call,
its ruthless honesty knows
   no stoppage.

we call death like
a finite answer to a fold of
questions!

we lay silent on the floor like
leaves in June.
i held her arms like tightly-knit stars
in the loom of the sky.
the invisible hand of the moon
enters through the window quietly,
our breaths twining, slowly rising
like dust, lift altogether in the moonlight.

soon she will fall asleep and i too.
i hear a distant crooning in the night
as she careens, pulls the covers.
through intruder somnolence,
a gentle hand whirls as the winds
of many days banner our lives -
the leaves that we entirely are,
on the same bed's thorough agricultures,
were blown apart by the wind that
has brought us together,
now apart, whispering
good night.

"No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt." - hunter thompson

but it did, Hunter.

and the silence grows fuller
like a plane to Nicaragua,
  or the sudden surge of quiet
   after two bodies have already
     fallen from the vertigo
      of pleasure.

   treading the barbed line of
    living as the wind acrobats
    and mangles itself into
     a dagger - a sharpest edge
     of memory's telling:
  
     i am endlessly searching
     for something i cannot name.

     scouring for lost things
     in the pocket of this
     realm. tentativeness
    a tenfold - sink or swim.
     mind dwindles somewhere caught
  like a flailing fly in the lair
    of a relentless tarantula.

furiously this night grows
    insectile in its habiliment,
  buzzing and drilling against the
   walls pounding on them like
a man would, angered and hostile
   behind narrowing faces of wall
    in steep confinement.

tiptoeing
     through shards
        fire
            song
              light
        ­         no light
                   silence.

this won't hurt
under secret strobe and
cigarette haze
this won't hurt
underneath the parasol of
influence as the cosmos rains
weighing down eyelids close to
pavement
this won't hurt
this won't hurt
won't hurt this,

won't this hurt

in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.

twilight hewn mauve
from lightsome fire of eve —

of us, knowing our ends,
sighs finished float upstream

of you, knowing your beginnings,
flashes of flyblown leaf dropping
into the paling autumn

of i, wording it fresh out of
unapologetic twinges, dropping signs
on the world, their sorry beckoning

of us knowing
our ends shying away from
a once-told beginning
when silence fell
on our bodies, it is much more
telling than the last word
unheard by the sky.

our words outlast the weight of ourselves,
  to breast the wave and still themselves there,
even the Spring with its careful hands
   dole out lobotomies in cherry trees; their fall
  is not our fault, the behest of their nature.

this is the way the light sees itself disparaged,
  from which darkness still seethes and grows
  there is nothing we ought to do but look up
as unsuspecting as the world in the rain
tricked by the passing of words not our own
  but someone else’s translation – we cannot be helped.

we shall pare the flesh from the bone
we shall strip the fruit of its fresh glaze
we shall gaze upon a tulip and behead its fragrance
we shall raise our clenched hands and eat beasts
with our bare hands,

        and as an unquiet stone turns in its station,
pours out of its mouth, a tilted shadow,
we stride past worlds, our mouths tender with words
as though we have not yet feasted our fill.

dark inwoven vision seeking clear,
   pure — smiths a dagger.

when you told me
some are the abeyant,
  in that terse communal,
some out
   of print

     Radio
Body English
    Silent Radio's
writing of an english
   Body cursive and lithe

i arranged all things:
TV, escritoire, left a place for
   a machine, drone of minutes
and the fixed gore of absence
  all wounds avulse, words
to wring realm of bones.

image of men is no huddled God
  in the synagogue pew;
this is the distinct cadence of
  the indescribably beautiful:
when words continue to bleed
they will never go out of print
and they will mint something in the soul
without a word, or a gesture,
   or an insignia of attendance.
their benign  dreams   prowl
    upstream,

     your dreams,
i willingly go, rising, falling
   riding all the darkness.