All Chapters of TUNNELS: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

in response to the ongoing anti-extradition bill protests a day like this, or the train between us won’t stop - this life is too long, dear tourist - & you know this morning I have to pay the rent too – as you insist that demonstrations at Victoria Park crowan ashfall of a feathered controversy - scarred by heavy clouds – as poetry as a lesson in leaving seems like years – & everyday umbrella seems like months of our days, days of our months always like this sure it’s like this you know there might be another Worldwide Plaza - buzzing non compos mentis from your postcolonial Central - & that i’ll never know what new noise gently crumbles our married Clock Tower lungs – our karmic hearts in Kowloononce upon a ferry sea always like this we used to see chaos intensify in the streets – waltz of smoke rioting upon youth – alla tumult of fire eating fire – time’s commissioned by risk as rains of pleasin fals

 Shoppers, take this time to please your companions. Right, left, right—obviously they take your attention via clockwork sales talk. A drop of discoloration is being processed when you talk to them—lover, robber, gender, industrially colorblind—magical are their actions to repeat the blooms of magnolia on marginalia, high-price of intentionsunder duress. If all good shoppers are careful enoughto be attracted to the sheen of the lights, or to somethingstrange like Mambrino’s Golden Helmet, I would liketo think that life in a crowded place is clueless about the appeal of mass nouns to the art of small things like undeclared birthdays and acupuncture points. Inside the fitting room, there’s a hunk of love, all spruced-up with a groovysense of purpose; this I’m referring to all typesof clothing as professionals, feeling the way we feel right now, are available on site to serve you,always. But what is fake measurement if everything at this moment

 Things forgotten suddenly met me when Iwas asked that time the question my memory couldn’t wield a cut grass, a mercury dimeI only held on for was dear life in general— something more present than schoolchildren& the charts they count are no more no less my simple kind: silence felled& human signs felt & this feeling screamed when I wanted to speak about the worldwe live in & how those prescriptive maths would have kissed happiness in passing,though my views may be wrong, they may even be non-academic since the essence of it allis to patiently wait & watch the lilies grow & remember how to laugh once againon the side of the bridge drinking the everyday from an empty Coke can & while curfew callscould be so alliterative, I guess repetition & all sources of knowledge could potentiallyturn us white, as though July birds scattering into the r

 Through the hedges darkly buffeted by the feral state of gravity,of the unspeakable, its melancholy birds preening under the suncaught in the breath of a revelation: summer lying, you. We cannot suspect the horses running to be like the pastharnessed still to what’s not fading away; crisp hellos are a theoryof disembodied music, gospel at times, your blues most of the time. Let me hold the perfect hand, white, blinding, lifted highto make me touch the melody in a forest once you saidwas giving you death, the time my eyes were full of skies. Seasons arrive in no known glimpses of flowers, of fallingleaves, of snow splintering into muted signs. A living clock tells.The river runs past you and me, flowing into forked destinies.Now the mocking presence of the forgotten: how could younot know that part of your existence was built on large ruins?Oracular was I to echo your bone to your bones: Xanadu.  In the context o

 For one: I saw a book, ash-colored; on the sideof its skin lived the initials A.I.riven by blanknessand a fatal crave darker than dark.It read Ako and Ikaw. My eyeshungered, wishing for anothercourt in the sky, or another throatto house another world in another time. Second:I should be in jail. I have been cripplingsyntax to its spindly few. SpellingI pummeled to misspell Astrosphinxas statuesque as May I sing with me? Words whiplashed on fire icejeepneying with Saint Lazarus—the emperor of English over grasslilt parsing poison into ice creampoetry and screaming grammar noir.The narrative of tradition, beer-fellowedby cultural madness to digressand mull over a foamof savory crab fat alongsideour pickled come-what-mays. For this,‘Ikaw’ and ‘Ako’ separately are You and Mein Filipino, that by accident tryto understand Taglish as nomadologywears thin of its spatial possessions,rhymes, or like those rent checksno prettier than your beinga residential state s