I.
After gutting and sublimating your victim into intent, you, hands the black of jeepney smoke, jar his remains. You tour him your turf of Manila, the streets of makeshift houses you once knew jollibee’d and private equity. Sunlight fills his glass like solace. Because what you offer is more than what the recipe requests of you, you prematurely daydream of days spent lounging in your high-rise soon-to-be loft, coffee you grabfood overpriced and beading with ice water the table. But in the house you look sideways thrice before entering (to make sure no one is there to turn you literary), you plug open the tv. War-torn countries as casual as poverty, yet has there been anything more lucrative than genocide. You flip back and forth the channels until the forecast corrects itself.
II.
Confessing to him my guilty pleasure of redirecting people through metaphor, my priest says along with three Hail Marys I must pay with my body. I say name your price. He says you must stave off from your fridge anything citrus, consume your caffeine with anything but black. Fasting so outdated our soon-to-be-canonized saints spend weeks in Makati, as punishment must down their shots with unmoderated restraint. Wanting my legacy to be as eternal as martyred red fighters, I tell my link hit me with the strongest you got. He whatsapps me headlines from the new york times. I shudder into the literal.
I.
The cross no longer symbol for anything. From a primer on past lives you tell your buddy I was what the car wanted with pleasure to eternalize. From absurdist to poet to director, the distinction moot. After lancing your newest victim (a man again, if it matters), his guts resin the september forever on your hands. Today you wash yourself of him by the birdbath so shrikes can reprise his sorrows tomorrow. A honda civic footnotes his misery from the city.
II.
The man I promise to meet has fewer emojis than I remember. If I tell him I spend most days knee-deep in phenomenology, will he ask me on a scale of one to truly how embarrassing is it to have a body. Because the postmodern is citational I give him page xvii, a coffee-stained page forty-four, a tweet from an account who with consistency posts decomposing collateral is hours away from suspension. He asks permission to give me what I (think I) want, his conviction as underdeveloped as sulphur. Tear away from my face empathy. State the position you want apartheid in this.
I.
You meet him through letterboxd to prove you are wont to kill someone without knowing his body. The fortitude of critics: you promise to sauté your next meal with a piece of his brain, maybe then the reconsideration with paris, texas. It was his knees you broke but seeing him see you with his torn-out twenty-twenty eyes you disbelieve any theory on the abled body. Distraught, you watch porn with no sound. Must it be his voice that rises from the muted man’s mouth.
II.
O sword catcher, o death squad of lost souls, surely by impeding from me my destiny to ignite my free will you were fattening me up for glory all along. I face you on the sidewalks of death (Ermita)! Someone offers me another night and like the sinner turned saint I roll my tempted body down the hill. The breaking of waves captures me! I am what the seagulls stand on to sing to you, I am every zipper ripped open before pleasure, I am surf. While the conflict breaks me, I know elsewhere the fighting is real. Tell me how soon your arrival; will your presence somewhere else be the hurricane I must endure. Tell me how much / poetry I must skim through / until my name / begins to demand / his certainty
I.
You instagram story (but close friends only) the results. How sweet the real. While running to make true what already is, a beggar approaches you. He asks you for anything but the present tense. You piece up a cinnabar and put it on his hands. Above you, the oracled rain of heavenly fire. Loyal to its agenda, its embers turn your country into flowers.
Justin Cruzana is a poetry editor for HaluHalo Journal. His recent works have appeared in the Ateneo Art Gallerywebsite, Stone of Madness Press, B O D Y, and TLDTD.