A heart is a war, a heart is a shutter
One stream of light is allowed to escape
Far into your chambers a ceiling is painted
Mosaic by name, but truer to form:
An electrical storm we ourselves engineered to
Perpetuate evils eluded before
In the grimness of what lies behind the mind's door
When we met as two fangs in the jaw of a serpent
And you were the flares arcing up towards the sky
And I was the lens overawed by your light
Yes, I was what bent you with colors diffracted
Now I am that glass which your mildew begrimes
Color me flyblown, or color me blind
Marred are the edges around this old glass
The ink inundates and the horn is all hollow
Latched is our gate when the causeways collapse
Besieged now in my ocean of ink
Scanning the night sky for sign of a flare
No whisper, no shutter, no lingering there

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.

drowned the Earth suddenly.

  underneath honest light,
                                  all
   submerged. this cataract of feeling —
waters pursue beginnings. cradling them
to unknown ends, washed by the shore.
        gluttonously the night swallowed
all — parliament of birds warble no longer.
             midnight, the   Moon
claws the supple skin of organized stone
  displaced
               where all the edges bloom
forth torrid froth of dappled light which kills no less than a brief life of matchflame. tenuous spar of wind on
the unserious twilight; bulge of death
in the stream — a body haul, rafting
  in compost; stench of all topple like
resins held loose in vats. rat **** becomes
           as inviting as moulding bread;
tantric music for no instrument, hoarse
cries unbeheld —

            until the flesh no longer flounders
pressed against sleep-shaped youngness
hewn lissome in the hours of no succor,

       modeling silence in the thrill of
this enthusiastic space,
           hands scouring muddied
  obscure, atremble,
      shadowless hours fill stomachs with
the plump word of rescue yet none
  of these fingers unwished the
ingenuity of dull gods — this twilight
  nor twinight could ever grive
in forethought, striking bells to signal birds
         to arrive again so we could feast
in  silver  fish, with bare hands scaled to callouses,
    
      looking at it twice-over, this battered yolk
of whiteness, with deeds of the viridian
   now atrill in new fragile woodworks

       lurching and
         ameliorating as we all
    stutter and sing
       haunts dabbing open
  lips of small wounds that
   wish to shut quietly,   almost
every threat of gray     or pummel of
   wind startles the flyblown ornate,
  
   hurrying us back to cornerless homes
where all photographs washed away,
    very few hang
               swayed by verdure
  of the gradual throne of sea
        curving perpetually the several stars
we have ignored for a while,
     where everything quite begins
    again to enthrall with a melodic
  leitmotif of the most tender of
       instances loose
            in mouths
                 and in endless recall
                  
                                               breathless—

electric — conflated with
the doldrum of once ignited feeling
on the russet table work
and the stringing aroma of flyblown
coffee painting the morning something
earthenware;

i imagine
  
     women lounging
and displaying their flamboyant dresses
confessing a dull promenade
parading their attenuated *****. reveling
a queendom on recall and this bane,
  merely resolute, gives itself a new
meaning as a hand of forgive

   men resigning their bags on the corner,
grunts, heaves deathly serious disallowing tomorrow's arrival into
  a throb of being in place, folding newspapers to a club and smiting fervently along with the endless waiting,
  
   verses lying cold on the froth of the tile
and the wind ripening the brew of
     contestations — punctuations in their
cupboards still and reserved in hermetic
   space curating silence, giving dins
     their polished ends,

   open for all: churlish boys,
   naked girls, faith-used women, strife-torn men, usual suspects,
     rebels and the overwrought –
  never closes like a hand in cold
      or a rose, its face occulted by
identification sideways torn, inside and out struggling,
      scrunched to squint on some pale light through chinks on the battered
     wall, sipping coffee,
   mmmm, that
   morning ripple transcending the
         heaviness of the city before me.

Eaten Alive by Nothing

Surrounded yet alone,
Wasteland of desperation and despair,
Reaping rotting fruit, bloats, gnats, flyblown,
Longing, loneliness is never fair,

Lanterns and candle light to keep you warm,
Dancing shadows morph to devils,
Slitting despair bleeding, breeding ticks that swarm,
They feed and breed into hungry weevils,

Burrowing through chest to feed on carrion of rotting heart,
Also feeding on air from lung,
Heart along in solitude from ventricles shredded apart,
Alienating through truth, be still my lashing tongue,

Friends are always around,
Right until you need,
A lost letter of emotion sent outbound,
Lost but never found, devils take the lead,

Numb, in slowly boiling water like a frog,
Past scars of trauma a curse,
Can only feel so much before a clog,
Until you become cold, psychotic, or worse.

Break out the old smokescreen mask,
Smoke, laugh and smile,
Survivals your only task,
Foot in front of foot until your first mile,

Decaying down to skin and bone,
Each mile a greater distance,
Always harder when you’re alone,
Exhausted, running from the devils persistence,

Until a day you want to be alone
Quarantining spread this plagues fate of hate,
Feeling like happiness is just a loan,
Someone finally listens, too little, too late,

You hug your dark cloud,
With a thirst water doesn’t sate,
Ears covered, anxiety so, so loud,
Take a shot, a smoke, anything to placate,

An infested body no one wants close,
Insect army of traumas and abuses,
Each growing into a lethal dose,
At least for now, I still have my uses,

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.

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.

MOTECUHZOMA
            I tried to bear up to necessity,
            To steel self-conquest through my fears, and thus, 
            In stoic resolution, greet my fate.
            But then this temperance, to the common eye, 
            Seemed but a fatalistic resignation,
            A shrug, a sigh that what shall be shall be,
            In abdication to a fancied doom.
            So then I heap my irons in the fire
            To undertake all means I can devise,
            And now that versatile defense is seen
            As paranoia, and hysteria,
            The fickle indecision of a fool,
            Who- like a pup between two bowls of food- 
            Would waver till the flyblown point grew stale. 
            And they are right, these forward serfs are right:
            I am a knock-knee, and a juggler!
            Who could foresee the vortex of my mind
            Should be the whirlpool that would drain the sea?

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.

go to the blown
never meet all down
Just wear a gown.
and own all thrown
put on a head crown
go downtown, uptown
and hometown in the sundown
Never let flyblown regrown