After Art's Fragmented Memory

[VII2311]

Dead bird, bare tree.
Skull, ashtray, and gun to head.
White flower, wooden chair.
Empty landscape, color-bled.

6:40 P.M.

[14VII11]

The late afternoon moon is a faded mark
on an already faded watercolor sky

Punta Fuego vs. Tropical Storm Falcon

[24VI11]

I have heard the world speak.
Its voice is the bellowing of the waves.

Ferrous moon

[V11]

Who shot at god and left heaven
bleeding from a rust-colored bullet hole?

My eyes aren't on the road when I'm driving

[V11]

A sky split open by lightning
Unleashes the warm wetness of a nimbus cry
And sends bone-feather birds fleeing into
Grey umbrella-trees for the night

[02V11]

Cells slowed by summer.
Sluggish.
Sedated.
Somnolent.

Sagging flesh, smelling of sweat, stinking in the sun.

Draft

[IV012011]

This is an all-white page, blank and waiting for me and for my words. The cursor blinks. A wavy, green line informs me that my second sentence is ungrammatical. I move back, erase the period after “page,” insert a comma, and change the “B” in “Blank” to “b.” Microsoft Word no longer thinks I am violating the rules of language.

Tweets that belong here

The moon is Willendorfian tonight. Weighed down and made huge by yellow light.

___

Heat speeds up molecules. Why then the lethargy of summer, slow-motion sweat, and the temptation to remain immobile in bed?

a thought while driving towards dusk

[24X10]
let me burn in the afternoon fire of the saffron sky beyond billboards and electrical wire.

hands

[14X10]

the hand on my thigh is different from
the hand on her head is different from
the hand on my lips is the same as
the hand on her lips is different from
the hand on my heart is the same as
the hand at her side

it rained in boracay

[18VII10]

the ocean slicks over the
backs of unseen beasts

an invisible horde
returning to shore

driven by stippling rain
and roaring thunder

38 degrees

[06V10]
we congregate on the streets,
trying to escape from sheets
drenched in sweat and dreams

shirtless beggars
whistling for a breeze

last night, it almost rained

[29IV10]

you were so close,
i could smell you.

but you never came.

old ideas

cruel beauty
[01IV10]

the desert loathes not the barrenness that defines it nor does it pity its self-inflicted solitude.

but cruel beauty dreams, sometimes, on its bed of sand roses, of a fecundity that shatters the diamond-sharp silence blowing over its dunes.

like a nubian queen, it drinks from an oasis
whose illusory abundance soon grows tiring.

and so the desert wakes with sated lips dry and cracked, embracing its own arrogance like a lover.
___

somnolent seas
[01IV10]

i want to see you when your somnolent seas
are roused by the habagat wind,
and roiling thunderclouds hide a sand-scratched sun

enough of your placid submission,
give me your undisonant violence at its loudest
then let me have the pleasure of taming your tempest

sauteing in the sun

[09I10]

we spend afternoons sauteing in the sun:
marinating in human juices, skin crisping until golden brown

under a salmon-pink sky, violet-gilled and veined with light,
we breathe in dreams and await the rising of blue moons

tethered moon

[20XII09]

the moon, tethered to earth by its light,
floats on clouds meandering
in night's incandescent sea

Boodle feast

My father's stories start when the flames die down. He sits, orange-lit by embers and the heat brings him back to the time when he played with knives and guns.

He took my brothers hunting when they were adolescents. My eldest brother felled combed blackbirds and herons when others hit nothing. Unable to wait for the next trip to the wild, my second brother would sit by the window in his room and lure Asian tree sparrows into traps made of thread. Dots of sweat would form on his nose as he sat like a statue for hours, moving only when a bird, tempted by a mountain of rice, would hop into the invisible circle of death he made in our garden.

My father is the kind of man he is -- one that holds bonfires and boodle feasts on his lawn -- because as a child, he sat in a hut with a slingshot while his older cousins went hunting for wild boar in the foothills of Mount Apo.

With the Aetas as guides, they chased a boar towards the creek and killed it with a single bullet. They threw the carcass in a pit, roasted it, and wiped its blood off their faces. My father partook of the feast, and he remembers how the cold mountain air solidified the boar fat in his mouth. The next morning, they looked at the leftover meat, bloody under the sun. Boars were serious; for fun, they would shoot bats or make arrogant doctors dance to the music of bullets.

And because of that, my father is the kind of man he is. He watched a spider weave its web and counted the number of insects it ensnared. He spat into a river and blew a crowd of needlefish to pieces with his rifle as they fed on his saliva.

Tonight, as I ate grilled pork belly by the light of a bonfire, my father told me stories. He did not eat meat. Instead, he feasted on a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of red wine, with ice.

Male train

On the stairs, pedicure-pink nails. To my right, a shirt with cigarette-smoke accents. In front, a jaw ferociously chewing gum. Two seats away, crossed arms resting on a belly that juts out like a fleshy peninsula.

exploded silence and kantian astigmatism

standing in the train after an exploded silence
[21XI09]

the crowd cannot touch me
but i am close enough
to read its thoughts,
breathe its yawns,
and avoid its exhausted eyes
___

in which the moon and astigmatism prompt a detour into kantian philosophy
[02XI09]

we were looking at the moon, my brother and i, and amid comparisons of astigmatic eyesight, conversation drifted into the realm of kantian philosophy. “bees can see a different kind of light,” he said.

“ultraviolet,” i answered.

he ignored my display of apian scholarliness and pursued his own train of thought: “the moon we see, it will always be dependent on our senses — even if you take a photograph or a video of it, it will always be different from person to person.”

(or species to species, if we consider the bee he brought up)

“i can see a blue ring around the moon,” i said, while thinking about the bee. “can you?”

“no,” he answered as he blew cigarette smoke from the side of his mouth. “but it’s almost like there are two moons.”

“will we ever know the moon — the thing-in-itself — or is what we know of it limited by our senses? does the moon — the-thing-in-itself — even exist outside of our understanding?,” i asked.

he remained silent and we both looked at the night sky, thinking about bees and noumena.

i briefly turned my attention away from the moon — a white disk ringed by blue flame — and wished on a star that my brother be given the chance to discover kant as i had: in college, sitting on an armchair, my mind open and waiting to learn.

(passe, i know, but on nights where an imaginary bee casts a shadow by the light of a gibbous moon, all is forgiven)

//originally a tumblr post

the sound of me

[10XI09]

this is the sound of me thinking of you
i inhale a thought, exhale a verb
because breathing is insufficient
and only words will do

this is the sound of me missing you
the echo of a tear that only i will hear
as it falls in the night
and evaporates from my palm

this is the sound of me wanting you
a rustle of sheets, an intake of air
the contortions of my body on a bed
that feels empty and untrue