The flying didn't cease, nor did the gravity
but I stayed close to the ground
my mother had told me not to drift too far
but that one time I did
that one time, I,
I tried to stop, I really did
that day I saw the prodigy there was
that wasn't anymore
I saw sanctity gasping for breath
choking on its own emesis
it shouldn't have gotten so drunk on sin
an aura fighting to survive against pretention
hands holding on to a fading faith
slipping like a baby, yet, tripping and trying
my wings set ablaze by the heat of raging insanity

A memory that day was cast forever
A pithy precis comes charging to me

My eyes opened to what I assumed hell
an old man nominally clad in a tattered sheet
pressed a medicinal red cloth against my anguishing wounds
in a hut that barely stood up
hay dripped off its exiguity
drops of water leaked everywhere
but the 4 feet cot that I lay on
the gracing peacock feather near my feet
gave the only colour to my grey eyes

He shivered of his elderly age
that seemed younger than his wrinkles
poverty seemed to have worn him down
but not more than the wickedness around

"My child, are you feeling alright?"

Affrightened and confused by the terra incognita
I merely nodded in affirmation

My eyes looked around to discover a nurturing,
smiling face,
then to a corner with a *** of water
and food meagre for an infant
he took a morsel in a leaf
and presented to me what was left

"This is enough for me my dear,
do you mind finishing the rest,
it is a bit dry,
here, have it with some water instead
now eat well child,
you look like a stick for a girl your age."
then he smiled again,
and walked away
with nothing on his leaf, but the satisfaction of a whole on his face

I looked at the dry bread crumb
moistened by a drop of my tear
trying to force his bites through
I wasn't ready for the hope he shared
my throat was taking bath in ice
his altruism healed my bubble that was burst
this wasn't the insanity that burnt my wings
this was the one that stole a morsel of my love.

Kinesiology is the new brain surgery
Preferential treatment
A Martyr for your sugar gene

Cat fights
Bud lights
Hookups and straightened hair
This is the new Jesus

Wouldn't you know
It's the jocks and the nerds again
Over and over until
you've lost all your friends

To a horrible incident
where you decided to be free
This is why you will always
Be better than me

Projectile *****
Thesis on emesis
I am so green
I am peridot and coriander

Caring about what they think
Watching all the popular shows

Does and stags
Waving flags
Pre-packaged beliefs
Artificial older sister
Looking down your nose

You are so humble
You are so polite
It's the other person's fault
When you get in a fight

But most of all
You aren't racist
You aren't racist
There's no way you're a racist

I

in the dark starvation is real.
In dark, the emesis that fills my
cheeks is a currency I soak inside, animal
coinage, the fine
bulbous talons of Sepiidae.

Savagely, pelagically
starving made me rich when
Muskrat’s claws pull apart delicate meat.
Sad Spanish blood, I would like you
to panic about what has been lost.
No body, no crime—we are all cannibals; so the muskrat ate
flesh from the dugong-heavy remora

a parallax of sorts occurs
when I cannot find my own entrails—
perhaps they are ruminating in my gut—
boiling in my optic nerve.

But–I found little boys betting quarters for eating bowels
of goat. I was small enough to fit through
playground gates so I could swing
swing in earthquakes, and portents
ride out this day on the waves—to succeed

foothills, grasses, and bath salts
by the creek. I got my quarters.
They asked me who made me as Mountain
Dew dribbled down my chest.
Infant teeth shattered my infant

fists and I did not eat divvied livers and
Victim watchers.
I wrote on
my protruding
viscera
proverbs from my ancient days


–extraordinary porch things, depleted
Phosphorus, and, on bendable limbs
I catalogued my windscraped knees.

How does one so young
become
so fed up with
hunger.

II

Starving made me easier to tie.
easier to lift.
my ancient autopsy of starvation
made me feel gutted out
like Finished
ice-cream containers.
Made me able to hold my breath for
up to six minutes—starving
made me full of Household Gods and rickety
rosaries,

small brown globular clusters,
1 arcsecond of stress
capable of aligning me
with spring-loaded washers

I pop one nut—two—
Dental Work can be a rhizome,
ordering wee-soldiers from
its tethered nodes without
lactation, laceration, infection into
my sleep-deprived throat,
Choking on bird chirps
and x-ray bursts

below the cradle where
my android sleeps. I
have named him The Alabaster.
(Synching The Alabaster.)
The Alabaster–Allie–is a kind of boat
that I have hole-punched into; like
children of the deep I have hurled
nearby rocks into its lungs.
I have wrenched crumbs of my honeymoon
sidewalk, for a beast that panics.
I would trade
the last of the dugongs
for a muskrat’s smile–
now there exists a cult for Plastic
that the spotlights started,

and in the night it will not
end with the filter feeder sinking
to the depth of the imagined water column,
spinning in the Gyre disposal.
There isn’t a colander large enough
to sift through the pejorative waste.

I knew the night would be fraught.
It makes my fusiform body necessary for
transport. Makes Monophyletic solid consumption
trucks and ACE arms reach for
well-behaved spearfish bodies.
Makes days disappear and cold
seem like simmering.
Makes staying out of sight
a trim.

And I told them,
the Fusiforms and Balusters, that
the spearfish would devour the hero who comes
from afar bearing the gift of travel–
Tully-Fisher, with his cottonseed oil
“Manufactured in USA” in
compounding pharmacies.
He made me.
And I told him:

to Tell me to trawl for something less
plastic than my second
self–that I which exists
in Mary Poppins cannons, compact
intimacies, medical and portable–

to dig within my throat, discover a nurdle
that failed to photodegrade during the the day
the Sirenia sang,
the Muskrat gnawed off his leg and hand
fed it to the remora.
III

My mouth is parched
for diagnosis of rickets, for
my un-mineralized bones.
I need RR Lyrae, Statistical π,
population “II”s
to stand in for my night.
I need Sweetened,
Spoonfuls of BB pellets and
Spoonfuls of cepheids to help
the tetany go down,

myopathic infants and
ricket Rosary symbols only work
in sacrifice–In this sense,
I have constructed a panic
architecture–Craniotabes are too
vast. Prions and viroids have seeped
through,

Infections more than dreams,
for injured muskrats who yearn for
the last real mermaid’s smile,
or tears if that would smash open
the cluttered ocean and scatter
the unwanted hosts multiplying
in my spinal fluid.

In day there is no more starvation–
the remora bring me
Libations and admire
my six pack rings mobile.
My connective obligatory.

Under my fingernails are thin
crisps that may somehow create equilibrium.
Although I nibble them regularly
I can’t always swallow.
Surrounded by a dense fog of fleas
my tongue is itching.
My teeth are scratching, scraping
away the space that will always be there.


The antique aisle at the local international
superstore is handing out shriveled
heads of past didactic patients.
But I tell them it’s not what’s there that matters
it’s what’s not there. And in my case
there’s a surplus of nothing that
I can live without.

try to antagonize the not-so-distant
and remember the tonal bent of a father's
rampant voice causing a cataclysm.

in front of the hospital, the moon a blue nun,
parked are the scraps elsewhere but home
under permeable dark. i look into the eyes

of whose visions i own - whose perspectives
borrowed a causation, as in when he clenched
his fist i thought of cigarette stains on my

button-down shirt as we both stumble to
the ground that was our dearth grave. i remember
you in his anger as countenance collective

and my own rebellion. his limping strides to the
automobile approximate the sizable crenelation
of your fingers. now i am brought back to Pasay

where your light is bendable mercy.
this is the face of silence, incited by a meeting
alone, a variegated road unmapped, unnamed.

inadequacy contends what intent commends.
this night demands emesis: the moon no longer
flumine, but xanthous as autumn, or a bell in

leaden cathedrals. the longest journey back
to origin is the first step taken towards a foreign
home punctured by diffident apology.

we were all in waiting for unction, congregated
in the plenary room i have made white with
blunder. our faces pale as backs of moths,

our elegies able to forecast the future,
the climate of the home burdened by tropic,
our keen eye for movement terminal with disgust,

a hand scarred by the Earth we rested upon,
asking heavens, "Why?" Response: rain dividing
cities. i think of then, this film where a man

continuously passes arrondisments, where his
days are measured by softened landmarks pulsing
with blurred faces. it was his case of aberrations.

when it was over, perturbation of vast space
automatic. a relief over the clinch. beatings
sustained over dinner the next evening.

in any other bed, the infantile stance of sleep
a wry mark of confusion. i notice the clock's
stoppage, its arms angular as if death's geometry.

otherwise it was unfeeling of feeling. my mother
forgot the laundry today, now fetid, pressed against
wall torrid upon the afternoon,

left outside to dry together with mutiny of trees.
outside when yourself happens, a conjured image
of bluntness. immutable, fixated, reminiscent

of small statue bought from a surplus in Malolos,
tamed wildeness is sound of a slurred machine
sent to repose as in, gnashing phonemes the

guttural, and the distinguished identity of the
next word draws a line connecting a caricature of
your face, terminally instilled

preserving the imprint including you.

My tinny laugh fills rooms my lungs could only hope to achieve
Merriment and the soul of old Bachus
fills this weary frame
I'm told I'm so full of life
The life of the party
So happy that I exhale living
I'm living
I am alone in my room
I'm living
Haggard blonde hair and purple eyes look at me in the mirror
my face is red, my marbles are bleeding
Thoughts of stories and characters I love with all my heart
emesis on pages that used to be blank
I talk to myself almost constantly
words and phrases repeated in a Tourettic staccato
Blinking away the inner rain as I walk into stores
"Sometimes I just get hit with an intense sadness
Where I want to curl into myself
Light the forge of my heart
Warm these dying limbs"
I am told I look so happy
And I wonder if I perhaps should have gone into acting
I feel so often like the cliche
asking myself in between podcast and music and ****
"It's...never going to get better is it?"
and I've spent so many years fighting to answer that question
I've spent many years fighting for the answers
in questions that I don't want to ask
I'm struck by fits of inexorable sadness
and two decades of reflection has given me nothing but these words
written in dark rooms
with my smiling face

The boy threw up on the way to school,
Regularly,
A matter of course,
Compass-setting.
The stink of decomposing plankton
Would rise into his blowholes,
And make his bright eyes water,
Make the sidewalk swim.
His almost hairless body, half-formed,
Wet cetacean eyes casting about,
Sought protection, not ritual heaves,
Not emesis on neighborhood lawns.

His mother protected him when she could,
Let him swim in her shadow,
Helped him feed, hid him
When she herself was not in danger,
The denouncéd *****, the common ****,
The bright-eyed nurse.

He scraped his way along the sidewalks
Thinking six times nine, four times three,
Thinking bile-tinged thoughts.
He thought of the school cafeteria, steaming,
Waiting, windows fogged,
A place that sometimes had no food for whales.
He thought of home and crashing waves,
The leaping thrashing father,
Up, up into bright air,
Leaping high and falling back into the sea,
Killing what lay below him,
Denouncing the *****.

He wondered how it could be
That at home only she loved him,
Only his mother,
While at school many, many loved him.
Even the ladies in the cafeteria,
Even on the days
When there was no food for whales.

He thought of children, tiered and glowing,
Standing on stair steps reaching
All the way to heaven,
Reaching so high the air was thin and shimmering
Where the oldest stood, singing,
Singing in the school's foyer,
Singing Oh, little town,
Singing with no fear of megaliths
Falling, white-crusted, waves driven asunder,
Gulls sent screaming,
Their wingtips slapping foam.

He thought of his teacher who loved him,
Who loved his gray skin,
His smooth gray skin,
Who gave him stamps and stars.
At night, rising to breathe,
He saw her stars among the stars,
Her stamped cat shapes upon the constellations.
At night, rising to breathe,
He knew he wanted to live in school,
Wanted to breathe the dust of tempera paints
And construction paper forever,
Far from falling fear,
Far from barnacled screams.
He knew he wanted to live, and live, and live,
Without bile, without flukes,
Beyond the horizon, among the stars.