the afternoon's gravest inset
into a summation of yellow—

all strangeness purely sing
mellow of birds,
cacophony of trees,
the automaton shadow
fleeting underneath the shade of brows
and foetal natures
candidly bring

a yellow
   in all of the afternoon.

dagliang sampay ng kamay sa balikat
na wala man lamang konsepto ng
pag-iingat.

itong bulalakaw ng halik
at ang haba ng tarima.
ang sikhay ng dagat ng
pag-agos ay hindi mapapagod kailanman, sapagkat
ang daluyong ng bawat sandali
ay mistulang hangin sa bukas
na mga bintana. inaalis ang bigat
ng panaginip at ikinikintal
ang gaan ng
pag-gising nang muli

sa iyong

piling.

para sa Kidapawan*

Diktador ang makinarya.
Maringal ang langit. Walang ulan para
sa pasasalamat. Ang ating tanging pagkakakilanlan
ay pumapaimbulog sa bawat sugat na nagsara.
Muli nila itong bubulatlatin.
Hindi paham ang gatilyo.

Mabilis na matutuyo ang pangako
kung pawawalan ito sa katanghaliang tapat.
Tanaw ng nakabiting ulo ng araw
ang lahat ng nangamatay. Kasabay ng hangin
ang pagpapaluka. Hudyat ng ulan galing
sa ibaba – gigibain ang makapal na barikada
  ng katawan atsaka muling uuwi sa asawa’t anak
na may bahid ng pula ang kamay. Dulo ng kuko’y
kapiraso ng mundo. Itim. Hugis buwan. Ang pagputok
    ay isang rekoridang laging gumagapang patungo sa tugatog
     ng isang alala.

Dadalhin nila sa bingit ng pagpaparam
ang babasaging boses – ang mga bubog ay
isasaboy na lamang sa lansangan.
Lumalaon ay dumidiin ang bulahaw. Inutil
lamang ang pagtatalik ng kamay at bakal.
   Umusal na lamang ng dasal sa likod
ng kakahuyan at baka dinggin ng bathala
ang panayam. Walang iisang dilang tumatabas
  sa dahas.

kung saan sisimulang hanapin
ng mga mata ang isang lugar kung saan ang lahat
ay iwinawasto ng nakaraan ay lingid
lamang sa kaalaman.

bago mangapal ang dilim ay nilusong ng mga kalalakihan
ang nalalapit na katedral. Naghahabol ang papauwing liwanag
na masaksihan ang kabalintunaan.

wala silang nakita,
katawan lamang sa lansangan,
tinutubos ng kasaysayan.

Thought first begins in
          mouth

                         Tzara

a Sun with a slow metabolism
       excreting    sterile   doves

            or    roses in machineries     of     crimson

I feel   the  same   inflammation

   when    thought   first starts    in the   mouth

   and ends    a derailed    train:      *******
      in   an    alley      of   locomotives

this    titular  token   of the   grave  sorrow of the World
      sinking   in   your   sleep   a  dagger

or          
               simply   a
promise

in the bleak --
the span of your forest's questions
i cannot shun with my hands.
it is like naming the trees in the
morning and almost with ease
from the bend of the boughs
to the song nearing its end in
the once-told twilight
of the never arriving,
forgetting everything
in the night as the space widens
like an eye awakened to
new pains yet old truths.

underneath the sovereign
of which darkness remains uncharted
is the single candle
burning, intent to squirm back
to its death.

    it is sure than when our
    eyes meet, in knowing this,
    there is ineffable readiness,
    than when i try to remember
    with frail knowledge the
    sorry names clinging to elegiac
    leaves zither no more,
    you are ready to forget.

ito ang siyang giit ng hangin.

ano mang tindig ng puno
ay kayang baluktutin ng
hampas ng latigo nito.

binabalinguyngoy na ang
mga bato sa
lalim ng dilim.

ito ang siyang giit ng buwan.

ano mang sagisag
ng dilim ay kaya nitong burahin.
hayaan lamang ang pag-bagsak nito
sa hubad na imahe ng lahat
ng bagay na lasing sa katahimikan.

bumubukadkad nanaman
ang bulaklak ng pag-iisa.

ito ang giit ng pag-ibig.

ano mang saplot ang suot
ng pag-tangis ay kaya nitong
hubarin -

hayaan nating bukas ang mga bintana,
at damhin ang lahat, abot-tanaw
  at papalapit ng papalapit,

tulad ng hangin,
tulad ng buwan,
tulad ng pag-iisa.

daylight does not
   (and perhaps) disrupt me
   as roses are put in
   pressing questions

  life is neither
    an ellipsis
      nor movement

   and death (cessation
                amid
              words where a locutionary, alone, dropping
     into the world
           sends us to places
        of silence) is
       nothing but a remembering
   of this and things anew
    yet old with pains
       (tender
     with parenthetical kisses.)

there are only 5 seats and on each end
are metal chapels. time slows down like a slug
climbing a vertical wall, or say, a drunken man
  making his way towards the oblique recess.

the ignominy of an exhausted carburetor
is the orchestra for the night.
lots of women go in and out, out and in,
  whichever is first, but the last is always
just as bland as any other truth:

we go, each foot splayed to cover measure,
  and in the flash of a scene, gone.

I watch their skirts make gossamer tune,
like some flotsam or a poised note being led
  straight to a trajectory disappearance:

the idea of the image is to glide
over them, over flesh,
over this fetal smoke that I will soon toss
  right into the womb of nothing

and fall flat as a key from a tone-deaf cathode,
a spanked melodrama of television with dull cursive,

        or as lithe as justly, the right camber of blues
             ripping straight through my day-old denims,

peering through the tease of a thigh’s penumbral shadow,
the sound of the world being dragged into double-doors

       echoing a metonymy: *silence the interlocutor, her mouth
                          full of birds. Dark birds.

Pasay's no conversationalist,
   unapologetic.
  
      "Way sapayan, pastilan"

Ravenous snarl of
      the carrier
     The refined grit of
        rusting fulcrum
          The terse hammer
        malingers,
  The pompous talk of
     carburetor
       and the flagrant burst
         of jetwash,

    i am never grateful for these
      subsequent cacophonies:
   a steel orchestra. i could no
   longer take the metaphysical spar of this hunted dialogue.
    darkness weds the synagogue of
      shadow and soon,
    we will all drown in the rain.

they took you now, contraptions no longer. there is a palpable quiet

      in the home. o lattice,
o vase of concrete, o smolder of onion
and the grave death of sugar;

the splintered staircase creaks
on no footwork and to go back to
cerements of this ceremonious banishment of shadow peals through
  gates opening to blue depths.

tonight, the room is as haunting
as old pangs. gnash the light of
moon past mud and linoleumed floor.
cross out my eyes and empty the
visage of their macabre.

   going back to tractable beginnings
as the bell tolls for no one:

  i stagger and startle the cornerless
  shadow, waking the orchestra of
  dogs to fracture the stillness

  like how drunken men curse at
  wives and throw vases against
  roses tossed to the dead.

  flesh warms no longer.
  garlands overwrought
  with serpents.

  glimmers of stone as dead
  as petrified oak.

  streets begin to narrow
  as light starts to pass on
  as answers.
  we make no sound.

(Pastilan!)
    this is where
     no words
      break
      fall
     shatter

it is where now,
    a barefoot army in the wilderness
tromps the silence
   leaving it trundling
  in its wagon.

     (Pastilan!)
    this is where no love
     thaws
      petrifies
      stunts.

it is where now,
  many skeletons are
  unraveled, unsheathed as a melancholy ***** in one of
   the quiet rooms in Hagonoy.

(Pastilan!)
     dogs
      all
     barking
     trying haplessly
   to bite without teeth
    fangs yellow with old.
   mane squandered by steps
    of light.
   woebegone are the paws
     and the only thing
  we do best
     is howl
    at our
       pains.

Pastilan!

it was like waking up to all white fume
or a long washline — masturbatory, feeling something stiff like a hand gliding
over a monsoon of emotions, the affect
   jazz and the crunch of fragrance
forever like sandalwood;

on my way to Dumandan, i conjure an inward miasma of thrill, unfurled yesterday, today, or was it before when our eyes were fixated on the passing of things in myriad ways without any relevance to what has died, say wilted,

like a flower going away in closing seasons,
children in hurtling speeds at twilight,
gates welcoming a resounding sound of
rusting hinges,
slow rise of night, its vertical climb,
  shadows collapsing on the Hibiscus
and the Poinsettia from the Cordillera,

   dreary men taking out *******, throwing
them into metalloid beasts, verdigris
   painted, grisly caravan of steel and
      worthless scraps —

past neighborhoods thinking about
the simmer of onion and the hustle of
the feral over rooftops, clinking wine bottles undulating full to empty — both
unaware of acumen and only dizzying
ourselves mirroring each other eye
  to eye and bridging this unclose-enough
    a gap in between,

    because you need it,
    and i want it, or simply in reverse,
a sidewinding thought through dunes
    of afterthought.

   because you have to walk my side
    of the Earth and I have to meet you
somewhere halfway where we can both
   lounge at each other's steady presence
while the flyblown dry air ravishes
      the piquant morning, all-telling what
this distance meant from its
                peak up to the very last
   traceable steps where i found you
      and you found me, trilling in the neighborhood like how void
    stills itself into all the mood of the     Earth:

    all moony and
                 fretting in the disquiet.

but finality in all series of things
seriousness, or was it
lackadaisical thought offspring
blooms walls of drooping eye?

air-tight space, its coalition
with inward breaking penumbra
of shadow,

i write a poem so as not a poem
but an antagonism of sorts
to the end that does not smell of sandalwood but

the fixation of the word
as scent plays with memory,
a fragrance of spring in all that is winter
casting

a shadow upon me, you,
if not all.

goaded by a stereophonic monotone:
a flumine voice waxes with lovelorn dregs.

i heard the plump word of rescue
dangle from the heady decibel of song,
winterward, blue-veined and stillicide.

no more, shall the wind traverse the impasse of the verdigris. the incertitude
of beginnings sigh ultimately.

o people, your darling children soldered
to your denims. o rosefrail and sightless
bannerets — we mourn such coming.
it sleuths with a tangle of fingers
underneath fringes of flesh-warmed
draperies with a different temperament
as moderate as climates in squandered tropics, flows with a truth wishing it
more of the untruth:

never shall return, in faraway lands,
never shall look back and lay in prairies
attenuated, continue to sing oblivion.

slugging and chortling all infinite and lax
leaning back on monobloc chairs—
  
some borrowed courage    some borrowed reflex       some leased home
to a figure shadowboxing     in stereophonic eclipsing  volume

         sentimental love song,  some humdrum alchemy    of ale and whiskey,
   feeding us with lies straight to our
fallible ears      as guava and atis whiplash     in inebriated sensurround
of     playful mirth and feelingfulness

   toppling the signs     painting the avatars    incarnadine with black-wounds
again the music     rending the vale
   lying straight to the face something the
heart still is— gears and clash-work
     of    analog deceit  and fecund belief;

some permutation of early, imagined
     falling     into fledgling    beats of
pining softly dancing     in echoing beds
    watch this twitch of my finger
meets to cigarette ember afloat
   in verdure-jazz, lunar offspring of the

tubular     deadbeat  —   crossing this
   side of strife-torn  street,   hopscotch
     in staccato. i believe there is rescue
in here     somewhere as a tricycle blares
   its rapacious   orchestra of metal
underneath the makeshift moon,
  
    why, it is   so much better    to burn out
than    fade away, the song lying
  again     straight to our disgusted faces.

an accumulation of
the not-so-distant insofar as
a whelm of cafard..

it is something that my hands
have seen with their drones,
something that bloviates
with intermittent speech,
a reaching-for-and-out hauling
of tempests as these

shadows renegade the dark
and join necessities of clarity
to combobulate their hue
into white without any trace of remembering, whatsoever.

yet in this scraping perimeter,
everything is within reach
yet unmoving - teeth do not gnash
anymore to grit their cadences,
mouths are swollen with something. a name perhaps? or a random memory of something we chortled about?
or were they bitten off by the fangs and their unrelenting incise,
suturing the lesions and removing the scabs of these wounds?

something that is purulent in laughter is just as crimson as in pain - these photographs watermarked by an effloresce of blood from which has lived once
in this world full in movement and in flesh now gone.

the wind howls
like a hound
  (sans the totality
    of sound, as the truck
     slurs its final groan)

bespangled crown of the NLEX
festooned by pearled light
all across its furtive stretch

the heaven in my darkness
says Now as silence is drunk
in funeral hilarity. the truancy
of populace says Who as the
morning beckons with its blue entry becoming almost whole (and
ethereally exponential)

Pildira sings like a bird
  and self becomes so
quietly rational;
like my heart, (the metronome,
    settable configuration of
labile fortuities) gropes
   a perspicuous vision and plants
it to mine chest.

Pildira flutters like an
   old butterfly in this new morning and i, with the net of
   my hands cold with song, will be
songless in the moon without stars, or stars without moon.

Plaridel

Plainclothes this Saturday under the brusque heat – trees burlesque from shedding,
ripping orchestra of motorcycle: this one – too blatant to perform, to shrunken to
notice. What if I never reach you?

1.1 Crossing

There is an unrelenting transaction of birds in the surest sky in the surest day.
I can hear the rumbling of thunder behind its natal. If when found, discard.
It is easier this way unless inclinations are definite: the trance is to come,
shorthanded. Consider this day your being spared from.

2. Toll

I remember the identical traverse. It was when I was unsure of my birth. My father
had recounted and numbered how many slopes and trundles along the way when homeward
is turbulent, angled at such pace which could have given me another face. I have always
found it impressive that a person can wait for too long and waste away in hours that seek
no relevance when the daily is diminished.

3. Balintawak

You said that behind the marketplace is a dense crowd scouring for loose change. You wanted to supply them all with your adequacy that was rife and deft for sure in the turn of your hand almost a finger-exercise: that is your skillset. It will rain soon but the heat refuses to decline. You thought of the cumbersome bodies washed away by flood, and how at times, you remember them being randomly stacked at your doorstep, eroded by some wave.

3.1 EDSA

Space we have no need for want under a terminal day fully etched like unwanted visage making you remember something that was your flagrant disregard when asked about how
your day went, about a miscarriage of justifications, at work when facing absurd hours wishing to break away from that was our common bond – the long and dreaded silence because it made us always question what are we doing? Who are you? What for? Knowing for sure when to being but to end, indeterminate.

4. Familiar curve underneath a vandalized lamppost

In the console you pressing, discarding gravity at some point, managing to draw your way into and submitting to not knowing how to get out of, sealing an immediate sepulcher. We borrowed minutes, ran like fugitives when asked. An external shadow an intrusion so we had to cease for a moment but in the depth of our silence, somehow continued.

5. Entry to your home

Perfumed your garage was with autumn, or vegetation you said was your aunt’s prized possession. That it was my fault I did not turn you off as a switch is meant to be killed from the moment of discovery to dislimn the image and leave everything to study as specimen is meant to be dissected.

6. To go backwards*

         The only way home to where you were and I, scattered

out for no nursery of accolade.
i am trying to sound my way
into a great mishap.
wing me the streets of all and i shall
give back their names to their fathers.

taut as a gun is held,
these words wield their unapologetic
assaults.

the next face i see will be the victim,
and it will be ******.
the discombobulated moon
gloats without a price tonight.
the white hand of it sees a figment of solace, rumples it,
disconcerts a votive clearing
reducing it to a bawl of
a windswept tumble of leaves.

i am now in front of the machine;
its salutary silence, its waiting groans,
its orchestra of trite gears slamming
the ornate of words and cutting
the stem of the flower that once
hurt me with its beauty,

i see your face
in this mound of havoc.
the pain of marvel's presence,
inclemencies of longings

everything takes space and trembles
  in its place.

Light unloosens itself. Space slackens.
A figure of a shadow I have conjured before
anonymous eyes. Lapping up the waiflike bleakness
of their elliptical faces.

                               I must teach the trees to let go
of autumn, and relegate spryness to the hearth
of cold without merit, this slow, claiming mutiny
with its face-oval peering through windows multiplying
lovelessly, a crunch of a leaf, suchlike, flourishing
in peerless company. Before me, the sound of footfall
preparing to make sense, a rotunda of bell – that movement
of somebody done for, so ****** the scald welt of ******,
the belch of the world like a pore clearing its squalor.
Or the toppled verdigris of gull.

    Autumn’s greater extension, the abeyance, smilingly
a facsimile of crowds – its roads adorned with laburnum
singeing through the morning’s cauldron, a waft of bald terrain
inflamed, drawing with absence
      a crippled drip of rain back into the world’s dim address.

I do not know what it feels like to live in someone else’s dream.
Outside the house, the moon, like a mistress, slits its throat
and bleeds white. The nature of all things around me has its way
of heaving out the wrongness, as if a drunkard staggering for words,
floundering in a curt reply after being asked where’s the nearest station
towards nowhere. I remember in 4th grade, they asked me what I
wanted to do with my life. All I ever wanted was the same clichéd response,
without knowing the appropriate punishment the desire coming with it.
I am not culpable. I wanted to be a bird stirring in a plainsong: free.
Whatever that meant. In a room where cross-sections of you tender me
margins I cannot cross. When I was young, whenever my mother would
leave me for the marketplace, she told me to always lock the doors
and never let anybody inside. The sound of the gears resembled your hand
in mine when we held hands, securing each finger into place the way
the night tucked us to sleep. It is still something the unforgettable, with
its feigned urgency, its ersatz summer days indoors spent on nothing but
gibberish and luxuriously lounging at nothing, looking at blank spaces
as though they were naked women the first time and the last. In a place like
this that selfishly spires with thoughtless hum, it’s conversations with the smallest
details that cover such distance, revealing weight I cannot solder.
Freedom to me is as bizarre as any other feeling that pushes one person
over to the next one. I have its wobbling sense scattered all around like a crushed
scent of bougainvillea. What we have to give in exchange for it, and what we
are to acquire after trying to weave out denotations that would make us swill
over like muck over the city that we selfishly breathe in, and our almost
ridiculous misunderstanding of the word riddled with unsparing details.
  I had myself mull over it, passing your decrepit house. Freedom,
the wind, or a bird, or anything unloosened like a waning volume from a stereo,
a readying tip of fire awakened ready to catch the corners of your fingers,
a basket of fruits in the morning from a remote bazaar, the peeled off and pared skin
  of an orange, some November night that burnt auburn, anything that may take place
     anytime in our hands – something that does not break in it, but holds still, waiting
to take place, forming names, sliding away from fingers. Freedom, to have a shadow
engraved on an architrave and a cornice, and to have your name in my heart
  like a frieze ornamenting some entablature, or that long dream of striding past
the Metropolitan, knowing how erroneous it was to feel so immense at that cosmic moment
of sizable smallness: the perpetual dialogue between a host and a barfly,
  mellifluously woven striking in sense, a farce raiding meaning all afternoon, like the close
eye of the Sun inspecting furniture, or your nosy neighbor taking time to stop watering the
  plants and watch you dance from your window, to a music that he has no knowledge of,
               but I do. I do. If it wasn’t plainsong, then I was wrong, writhing and alive
still, leaning in the air of a dream – free, wandering,
                      *wind,   passing of figures, clenched fingers, nothing.

to Dani*

remember when, you do not:
you are a ground slicing the center of
    this home.

the long divide the furniture endures.
in front of the colossal tv
bodies spilled like water.
20 minutes was all it took – your name alone,
a potent hygroscopy.

when close enough:
dissipate. You took all the green the foliage could,
    soldered to your body a forest it manifests.

   repeated, if not a newer foundling:

    the   space   you  take  for  acquisition ,
    the faultless tenancy   you   mistake   as  counsel.

every saved for, and gleaming space
   aspires for venue – translates to an arena for snapshot.

[some mundane depiction ascribes for you to be known]
years later my portrait still hangs perpetually
on a modern furniture from a contemporary skillset.
  take this declaration.

years later, leapt to this day and forward:
the surgery of galvanized steel is reminiscent of a departure.
the tedious laborer smiling through bonsai pots
  carrying out lobotomies. The afternoon more sterile than
   your    face  as if operation.  This town knows you by practice
  
  and habit: all of it sepia, if not leaden.

It is June. Plaridel is in sepia, or leaden – whichever,
  this is the leitmotif.

Soon clouds with jettison a plodding swathe of
  water. You will wear the petrichor,

While a ramshackle of a passing tricycle
  whelms a throbbing orchestra of junk.

Here is the hearth that rears no fire:
   a mother, children in tow – a troika,
   on a cart not even close to ease of
   a hurtling thing.     Trees naked in vulnerable
   green – the verdigris carried by a
   miniscule Maya.

Here comes again, the neighbor peering through
   the nuisance, is alarmed, eyes like a fugitive,
   curses my mother – I grab the nearest, sharpest
   object available that was my own hand.

Ingrained deep within, a root – or a stone, among many
  other stones in me, this salt-well, a savingslight of turning wave
   that is almost an approximate oceanview in me.

Gnarled over the longest time. In here we soothe by
    gin, passing out in front of our gated homes,
    singing whatever was available, close to our pitch.

Somewhere, Windsor has lost the poem / critiqued by
  a mirror fecundating a smeared image, a blot.
   A Rorschach was it, or just a day dazed they did.
Somewhere, this is scattered. Uncollected. To make remnants
  of as evidence, not to investigate if true.

The 6th body of this is what I am speaking of in glossolalia.
   A requiem leaves it stark and cold in this consummate weather.

Another piercing salvage of metal cuts the humdrum town
and unlike the sturdy mango tree, this is a collective of secret
  encrypted lasting more than a life.

It is June. Plaridel has ripened from the expired summer.
   Perchance the exquisite promise is sweet, holding all the bitterness together,
    ready to fall, at last.

so it begins when it begins
    blasé grass serrates
past herds of carabao dreaming anxiously
  of the day's toil;

the countryman stilts through
   mounted in gray mountain
with dippers, casserole, mirrors
with imprints of ******* clad women
    and women who are (really ******* clad) ready for bathing work,
    collections of red days and even
    tenderly the ***** sing attenuated songs of rooming-houses —

  the crunch of basil over the afternoon.
waft of a pasture's death my eyes well
    up rivers and ponds of elation. dog days, feral nights limp behind rusted
   kennels and makeshift asylums

   there is nothing left of the world
(this small world
            that only rises when bellows
  of festivities harangue the many streets
             bending in them, the curve)
  men moving from neck to neck
    of bottles — (in the north there
      is only four corners of bottle: gin,
   pristine brook; in the Visayas is
      the redolent Vino Kulafu of the same
   potency) plucked out of the vermilion
   and on benched careening on half-painted gates crooning Sinatra
     gets stabbed, bloodied on the floor,
named after elegies; native chicken held
     upside down and beheaded as many blacker days stifled; what do you make
    out of this?
    
      carabaos, equines, hens line up
   the slaughterhouse behind the
      TODA; you know a fine day when
         it happens — breaking eggs
  against the lip of the kaldero. crumbled
    archaic sensurround, barrage of
      simmer round the clock cycling
before the child wakes and wails to suckle
          our mothers, faster than repose
  of milbrightlions of stars falling asleep
      to silent radios, leaving windows
   open revisited by the eve of cold.

twelve and raw i was
when vaudeville came to town
over the grasslands lay the trapeze,
the fire-monger, the carnival clause,
the whir of metal.

it was the twilight of the Earth
and its men chortling
in single splendid dome
of temporal gleam;

yet now,
banderitas and the lowly
   signs gone, wavering are their
     beacons — rivers amply dead,
and no summer fruition —

this town's lack of circus
   brings night farther to day.
the river makes bride, the muck
  of clay. street vendors pulse with
different tongues. spit and spatter
   spar cleverly downhill
and still no dancing of olden days.

nights i lay, hearing the steady phoenix
of imagination. was it this town's proud
  call? the festive moving?
    sun meets moon and underneath,
the roulette spins in my mind like
   an elusive daydream
   mounting the carousel and steely
     tetanus beams,
        beating  around   an empty home.

The poem was something in me a land
   beginning its history and I dug.
        a wind carrying a dove, en route
     a reachable reality stretching, floating towards

        a  tree whose body is its own frightened muting,
   a shoreline lapped by repetitive waves
     that is the poem, trying to erase what has been
   long  engraved in the sand, sand in between its
  very small distance housing  the salt of this wound,
      an addressable stream -- a signature of the
   not-so-distant past, which aches I trust to live.

he wipes his glass clean
she wipes his glass clean
his  glass   hers
  to see    in
       the fold of   her   being
she   sees   to it  all clearing;

  and things to fulmination
committing a steady ******   into
   the   silence, this   afternoon

I think to   myself

   wardrobes  tossed
hers,      somewhere there,   in oblivion
    temporary,   absolute,
  zeroed in, sexed up against   walled-up contention

  our  legs  a tribe
of   hounds,   our   fingers
     feathering  light    through   his   glass
  she    wiped   clean
     with       her      emissions
                           eyes    wide   as morning

somewhere by a mountainside,    horses
   ride   into    the Sun
and he   thinks    of  
      repetitive  lapping    of   floundered  waves
to    bite shore
   and she   thinks   herself

           a    verse     punctuated
open    still
           to  
                        revisions

my little hummingbird
moving towards a stasis of light,
holding a simple secret, a bell's machinery!

       trilling on wiry breath
      or my mouth's plumule,
        my chromatic bird,
       unmoving as a bud translated
        in reticence, plucked from
     the mire of ground's vastness,
       speaks only so timid of my
       hand's agronomies,
    glazed by a moment's fresh glare: your unending eyes that see
     yet do not hear!

      take my hummingbird and fly
    with it! take it away from the peripatetic and plant it soft
      to your mouth's jar!

in adroit flight are these words.

drunk with the proper   tremendousness of rampant trifles.

they will soar like rigid flame
as the tacit air agonizes in its
  grave failure -

i am saluted by moths
weighted by the dusts of sleep,
peregrinating around
my mortal fire - wings unclipped,
they pine away from the heat
of this wonder they try
to unwind like tough scabs
to erstwhile wounds.

prescient science
nor foolish aeons cannot
shave this wreathed land baring
the enigma of its history -

the thrall of poetry's pulchritude!
the way it makes its way
like a conference of beasts
  roaring innocuously,
  or simply a lamppost
brought to life in the night,
  imploding in itself,
  a burst of primal colours!

still swollen:
      moon in eye
    lips murdered red
      with the crimson of
    maddeningly furious bites
       the crunch of bone
    turning in bed - air and moment
     stopped and in between
       the hounds spread
    darkening rumors,
        dropping once again are
   eyelids from too much
           heaviness of unuttered
     words, unperformed verbs
        seething in between teeth,
   cheek pressed onto crumpled
     ******* from groping in
the dark knowing only its
       frail rescue

    these tiny fingers still
   ache from touching anthropomorphic fires,
        the ears still swollen
  from distinct susurrations like
      o's and h's and their
     sweet campaigns
   my heart's well engorged
     with a whelm of promises

       in the morning there
      will be i and you,
    our love still throbbing
     in the loom of it,
   as we go on leaving -

darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

This is today’s calm headline: when the clout of a hammer
sings a would-be house the same way a dog’s howl fractures
an all-too-sudden image of a stranger. All of this having
to do with your body, that is when trying to insinuate a day

like a beast cautious behind a brushfire. Take your hand
and cross your body – paint a gesture, with your timid signatures

   a showcase of a blind transaction for something and take it
to the nearby cathedral. Fasten you would, a murmur veiled
and hidden in one of the pews and kowtow / this is your

   finest headline today / before them, make do your obeisance
   to / to fall like a downed tree after a surge / drift on a river /
             / repeats as if you do not forget /

there is nothing here, much fill of
the vacuous – just tired mesh;
a precise ruling
     of chaos, like how my mother told
me over folding clothes that i have
   my own way of destroying things.

dizzied and then clamped by my
way of default fixtures past furnitures
and a break on the lip of the wound
having knelt on a shard of glass
   age 7 in familial entrails —

knowing how heavy my steps were
by looking justly at worn-out shoes,
pieces of the Earth jammed on slits,
  their countenance earthen, exhausted
from the mundane. walls chaffed
from childish gnaws, drunk on turpentine.
stock-still hands of an old watch with
   dents for portrayal of agonies

in the dresser, clothes pretending not
  much to do

  and when it started to place its
  affect, i have learned enough to love
   was commonplace for hurt,
  and that there is a false horizon
  staring back through tough heads
of protruding nails, giving back a dignified
  image of contrition — in the mirror
a furiously slaughtered conjuring
   of what i once held in my hands
vivisecting to discover evidence
  fingers painted red, running the fugitive,
rogue without emphasis,
    
               hurrying back to home
  photographs nailed to their stations
  with cases fractured, deep into halved
   smiles, mother locating me with
an old chipped drinking glass, telling me
    i have my way
          of ruining things.

Bones need not to be ashamed when under
florid light’s strict surveillance.

Take this as advantage. This means invitation.
Dragged you into a terrible work of a labyrinth,

anesthetizing your execution, your critical art
you had secretly loved and loathed –

Sensing out a pattern, your vision as tour:
we see nothing but wreckage, heed nothing but lassitude,

and when their faultless gravities fall
upon, let them interrupt us. When we are broken,

repair with beauty all who elude us everywhere:
introduce them kintsugi – all these years

of specious encounters: I have marks to prove,
telling like an alphabet, scattered like punctuation.

Bones need not their love for understanding.
When spread on a territory, virulent like a makeshift

field effect: necessary when transcribed what the utterer
resembles an intone of a blatant present: you too mirror

my figure. Shatter it when you are done with.

So much laughter perhaps in front
of the console

If when we hand over what was given,
we are inconsolable.

Assume this position when
reaction is demanded:

You could, a massive day.
You could, a spectral of night
daggering into the forthcoming of nakedness  that was your title,

enmeshed, and then in a moment’s brief charade,
        torn apart, contained within four bedposts and a notch
        for a shimmering body lined with a peregrine skin.

how much it cost you, putting a face in this profile
    losing the document from flinging in the last time over and over
  as if we do not die only making copies of it each day

a    page is  turned not over but crimson  with   blame,
forging a lie  about  every  gilded moment  as  if  touch could  end it so

                      this day collapsed into a breath’s span crossing rivers.

when all of the home, or underneath
the bed, or even throne of dream
  all lay with life of felled bodies,

         — lest I feel forever the joy
              of the fall,

when all scrumptious light bend in
incorrigible water, strangeness pursues
all dark;

    soft, soft,
soft, encircling in cage
   the soft,
soft, aloft hills and dead pools
  of sweat
soft and supple      skin
  raged thud of fragmented name
on walling up lips

        love is man and man's prison sees
to it all silence when everything is set free
and we have no use for them anymore,
    
     imprisoning us, the love–

1 Method:

Witness nothing but the body
    hurtling at best, if not dilapidated.

Cusped in space, never held.
Behead the music,

    if not the conductor.

It will happen when everything has
  expired in the threshing.

Wring me pure, make me delicate,
  chain me in the wrongness.

    Embody this figurine pierce it with stem
  break it gossamer as petals imperiled ad infinitum
       sleek as a metaphor rising from rinsed perfume.

2 Chance Operation:

  Say when she caresses / this mired  setting:
  it is   of  preparation.

  Seize this mean when preparatory.

 Turn you as inside-out cleared from veiling.
  In a vitrine you wish to be freed from,
  examined, never granted meaning;

  Mundane the discovery.
  A throb of fever gone from tepid bath
  walking into space, abled.        

  Acute blunder is study, wash me with theory.
  Sullen is the word for it, entitled to acute error.

  Say when    it  ceases,
   tranquilized. Never waking up, fastens to

3 Dreamwork:

  Always still is the heart.
  I envy the water midstream. Fingers partition
 
   when infiltration is sure of. A conscious removal
   merits the continual of lobotomies.

  Augur this dim presence, make it raw again
      infallibly, make it my body. Forge my skin out of
   and  listen to  it. Feel the drone   of  this machine

   making space less tolerable. This begins
      an end, but of what pursuit is this here

   always  a  vision Blinded  by   definition
         away    from   here?

Proof of the past:
    In November, you were born. Nothing here but stark cold,
   until your warmth. Your presence extolled.
        The mirrors remember your vestige. This is the silence
       that extracts itself then exacts itself in this frame. Sometimes letters

accumulate but remain unfinished. In November, it is all clear.
     I have no use for sordid entrails.

      It is the stone’s duty to be evidence
of situation. Its flight, the sum of all its lost parts,
    say when you speculate over the escritoire over an unfinished meal,

burn altogether and turn to scrap everything even the soft presses on the creaking
  metal of the chair where we almost made love but didn’t because it is a surprise
   that in rawness we are ripe more than ever, making our

     life total, if not equal to an immense fault. You are sometimes

the cold metal chair I conjure.   Sometimes just bleakness.   This uniformity

    seeks riddance.

   Proof of the past as surety to claim:
       In November, this year, they have changed the roads. Detours constructed
to arrive at a certain destination. Faces blur past the old university.
Trees    are  effigies.      Leaves wriggle like   the  curtains of  room  201,  2nd floor,

      I do not know what specimen I have in my hands. Bare in lack of worship.
  Grandeur      is  here
         when   seasons   are predictable.    This is the home and that is where you are that translates
      it     so. A wanted want – a dispossession.

Proof of the future:
                        You know nothing about this place.

in the provincia, scarcely dense
of terrors and their territories,

oh, why the familiar "magtataho"
resonating in the hollow gray-lipped gutter

the batter of eggs and their absolute
nuclei in the dome of the bowl

so trilling of birds christening the town
with their sibilant breeze— myriad gyration of the "banderitas",

aye, my heart gallops in its shearing throb
and no moon shall eclipse underneath
the unheard druid of strife-torn memorabilia;

all green, prancing and zithering the shadow of the bramble and the tawny
body of this brindled Earth, all mine
to take in my mouth
the supplication of silence,

all mine, the fine afternoon!

"when you cannot sleep at night,
you are in someone else's dream"

how many hours shall descend
bringing in a cavalcade
of dim twilight's press
  on the soft, aqueous levitation of body?
is this liminality's gradual
hand nailing me
into flesh and stirring
me out of this oceanic crawl
when all you have ever
done was sleep me away
and tell me
of these
susurrations of soul?

i have no answer to
this solitary condition -
say, taking you by the hand
and somnambule in cosmic field
of no thought's ethereal working,
or as in playthings are freely
laughing behind whose hair
flails without a face, i wonder
which beauty holds true,
my wide wakefulness,
like the only key pursuant
to its inimitable hole.

i am infinite in someone's
thinking, who dare not
say something,
who daunts back to breathless
consoles, and springs back
dizzy with a gyro of questions,
  i am all hunted answers but
  where
  is the votive voice
  that searches me?

your home filled with vines does not know
it is alone — it seeks to become a diaphanous fold of trees, a violent vermilion of skies crushed to clay.

its arms hold refuge, a delicate heart.
the formless shadow there and the unguessed sensorium of furniture —
they do not know the touch of ruin.

underneath you, i am.
soil crumbled by the hundredfold of your
weight. in the air singes the burning of days, punching a hole onto me like
a globule of diminutive fire rife to
cull the vineyard of my body.

your home does not know
the dream of its weight. the anchor of its pillars gnash the acidulous trifle of hours.
doors, windows, cupboards still — every aperture gorges itself with the water
of your footsteps.

your home does not know
that it stomps stonily against an earthen fruitage: my body beaten to a pulp.

50:53

Strobe
   when  revealing  a  smile  variegated
your polychrome
   soul  within  sight
   does not know where to go but to pine away
from   the single light  to touch
   the innards  of your   button-down
    making intimate the body  contorts  dancing with another
                a minute past  a  gyratory

if   belief  is a  grave:   let   stasis be  metamorphosis.
   this rained-on house will not give way any minute

else  there is the  wreckage  springing from a singular
  hiding behind  the  music ballasting ground
                    and from a convinced consequence of being
   became fracture as if salacious to withdraw nothing but noise

   from the quiet or vice versa. If when  breaths were postponed,  inert – they will
  start    estimates  from  outside
      the   neon sign that  says Pulse and  reimagine the lives when divorced
     from  the daily, and is  then  summarized

  in a  fusillade.   When  on the  ground

    they  must  have been  dreaming   of  wings,  or  falling asleep
               constantly  with   a warm  body   stranger  tomorrow in  that  evening
   a  contingent

                   this   place   they  have   not   reached  yet against  their head
  said  it  was  the   most  sincere of  blankness at  any  given  rate,
               when   movements  statistical,  numbered, unwarranted like a metaphor
     or a glib downpour – the aftermath

                       becomes   sleep so tender with a dream which resonates
   They must  have been   dreaming  of  wings  but  by  the  time  when someone
   waiting  for  them
               inside  homes,   they have  already   flown into    days.

affixed there, its insignia of silence,
   the river-memory of bleak stone
   in waters raging

all at the vandal of the afternoon.
  running dog's the swelter, a salvage
   of iron in heat. the revolution's an image
  of the child in all of dogdom

when anger breaks loose a fettered dove
   here, or the crisp agony of bannerets
   shoving a name worthy of forget:
   bawling enigma from here to there

all the tension of wires, umbrella-heads
   are people, drowned in lambanog.
 our mirage drunk somewhere in intestinal
   roads flushed with the swill of bile --
 moon's the face of ******, stars
    their ****** patrons. squall of wind's
  the pernicious call of morning starting
   washlines, groping dry,

   an unpossessing pale ******. somewhere
 in Quiapo, someone's a Jesus-monger, ****
         of the Magdalena, or
    an inverted crucifix treading its way
   past hills without geometric memory.

  mine's the next station, yours too,
  thumbed by a tired machine: this etcetera
      of coffins squinting at their faces.

white: whips like its many
      a name,
         divines in it still,
  my eyes pure engulfed in
      the silence;

       white: which sound
     spills the sud of women
      sitting by the river
     looming clean sheets purulent
       with the Earth's gruel;

   white:
   oh, by the
      window,
   heart's ****** tillage or
      a word unspoken sinking
  in postponement, a moth's
    glide in perpetual motion

    white, many days,
      fewer nights,
         earth sways to crystalline
a tear to light a face
      of beauty once
      tarnished black with
          the blood of roses.

When your dance a bounty, yet sing
they fail – I have learned to love,
worrisome mother and adorn you:

such a kiss is planted
a rose on the plump cheek of children.
your girth measures unflinchingly,
the laughter of the world around you
so small, kept in a dark, blinkered box.
your parasol smothers the light
cast unswervingly on stone.
who has long kept you in the caliginous womb,
with all the light that spangles through?
who has snuffed your little arms
and dressed you for everyone to see?
when you are quite flamboyant for
everyone to feast on,
what word passes on as salutation?
when you are festive enough to revel in,
what pagoda tries itself to the life
allowed to gleam proudly?

women, men, children, and all -
frolicsome around the darkled bough
smitten by the frayed sight of believing,
sifting from the way our hands
craft things the dispensable glee
of glasswork: the world is Murano.
and my eyes have seen all flourish
in a darling ebb of curbed felicities – the diaphanous
clangour of steel and shadow.
the slain orchestra of frogs in the crush of rain.
the detriment of the Earth curled like an infant
in the womb of the dark.

     - oh trees and their wondrous life of green,
begin to question the wind and its tourniquet;
shadows drunk on turpentine, the spry wilt of hours:
what is their final duty?
   if our laughter is slain in the perils of night,
how are we to become them?

the way i
     do things
   is my way of
        undoing.

        do not take me for
         a fool - a flustered
      butterfly's well and
       love is not,
    thinking the paradisiacal,
        soldering to the squall
     of a senseless moon,
       all of me bursting
      into all the fraternization
   of stars and then
        the squalid dark --

slowly moving are all,
     and what slithers in our sleep
shall purloin our senses and in
  beds of old haunts
    will all be pure motions
    reckoning the void.

shadows assume our parks.
silence heaves our decimal places.
observe me when i utter a speech,
  yet in a quickening,
     i have already unspoken.

Heed tetchy static, roving around McArthur.
I can feel the steady impulse breed flaxen flumine.
   Songs tumble notes as ladies sing blunt-mouthed tune.
You croon with them, mindless of the force that tries
  to break free past the console. Your voice is analogous
     to reticence. I hear nothing, feel everything underneath the lazy glow
of the sign that says Yield plastered to a decrepit signage past the
        posh city buoys of Jupiter. Everything comes to a halt
in the remote red light district. Somewhere behind those thick walls
   that enshroud the fumes of tantric body heat, I can feel the ground
    stop in that disconsolate delineation: morose and encumbered,
    outnumbered by the cognoscenti that filled the streets unwilling
  to give us directions to whereabouts we rarely have knowledge of.
   cigarettes rammed deep within their mouths, masticating the cloud
     of nicotine as though it were tender meat, I hear the radio go
      ballistic past the sign now that reads Exit.

I once bore witness to no soggy corner, a seedy cinema, or a vile discotheque
  when out in the open, the somnolent air on face smashing the distance
  often times misappropriated as meaning, or desire – that we hold no choice
  to circumstance and acquiesce: I have become consequently obsequious
as in April’s proper warmth swallows the coldness of metal and mostly words;

it was when nights are spent without maps – roads and their meanings,
    separated by lines – washed with the squalid metropolitan living,
down from the urban thresh to the empyrean glower of a slow moon beginning
  to ignite in someone else’s but mine only and nobody else

aches and persistent meanings, a hand reopening
   a long-forgotten dusk –  painted anew with a chance never off-tangent
   but always at the cynosure of things

   this glass with rondure of your face, the valve of shower
   your hands or simply the droning sound of driving homeward
  
      that I cannot escape, a voice leaning in, saying something
    in the calm wind.

it is much like rain this hot evening,
          prompt in arrival to assuage default
                  settings

   like most days when in the intimate dark
          which love I clutch and whose
              hands i ****** shatter before me

    between the moment just arriving
        and the press of disappearance

     this body that dartles onto the leadened
          cathedral of  your heart, the jaundice
     of your repeated self accumulates

           to harangue this true evening yellow
    starting a burlesque of moon, flushed

         in the punctuation of mildew. grass
   its fragrance the first time and the last,
         translated - a revision of wind's gesticulstions. else it was strangely always
      pure dusk, wide-eyed, awake in futurity

    dare the hands clench and the feet
       mingle with swift pace much like
    rain    this   evening      forgetting
      a jammed, rusted   parasol
  
          your first time underneath the world,
       Summer ending in a blink of an eye,
          a stab of bated breath.