b . b . p . h o s m i l l o

Names may be given, but this is not a plea

because you love to escape, to take advantage of bridges
             we both know will not last longer than our beauti-
ful loneliness. I've been teaching you some of its
             topology, the value of suffering, the body of demolition
time erupts to make a shelter, how to disappear
             properly, the artistic metronome of handing
over my name to your unelaborated truancy
             where perfidy cannot be tinted like the windows
of our loaned car. In return, I've been learning why
             you fake a sinusitis, the trouble you find when you smell
my willingness, how to pierce me with any impossible
             thing you can't live without, the drive to be free of me
for a while in the quislings of commitment when our
             determination is the determination of the libidinal,
most true thus perishable like the life of vegetables.
             Is this what we really want for us when we try our
rationality, that is precarious, to what we can just bear?
             Perhaps, we can excessively undermine the lordship
of our bodies by way of telling the world we cannot
             face its confusion every remembering day, the role
of its compassion, how we saw it together even if
             you thought we failed by a quarter of our wholeness.
But this is far sharper than your experience, we can always
             make this wrong so you should not deny how jealous
you are when I entrust the burnished pane of my palm
             to the chest of another in search for something authentic
like your poetic attitude in bed. I will not always remind:
             ours is the complex unification of nation-state when governments
thought race, gender, and language (understood as plural)
             cannot do something more than building categories
where people don’t always find their proximity but proxies,
             their dangerous substitutes. Is this what we can just become
after we've gathered a conflagration of what they've been?
             This is not me telling there is real and fabulation is criminal,
but this is how we must obey ourselves. Someday you’ll be back
             like an accident and I'll call it the destiny of affirmed volition,
the same volition when I opened every chamber of my body
             so all your sexes could be accommodated in the trial
of what you can less fabricate. Someday surely pierced with something else
             we have not gathered yet like how to cure that's not a disease,
I’ll be the libidinal piercing you, erasing your name in unashamed purpose.

In Anticipation of Redamancy
	a sparrow never leaves the filthy manuscript of your room, its skin for more or less the years you wrote your name on a traditional paper writhed by water. So on the very first day after your last school semester, you said, not in words, your study table will have to console you or you will have to fix it (whichever comes first) as this bridge is in shiver, fracture, frangere in the Latin (whichever the word best appropriates). The last plate you turned in is absolute; your judgment; a guide: it was human temperature giving you the idea of discernment like how goose bumps approximate the thrill and fear when his red ink masters the wrong edges of your house plan you decided to propose when once his high marks were so deep on your inexperienced chest shaking, beating, and settling bruises, hickies smothered by a love bite he mistakes for a grade bite coming to permanence in a bandaged eye. Before the deadline was the scent of cemetery petals where his perfume transposed the learning in you because you acted like a man while he was the substance sinking into your emptied throat frothing the knowledge of what he regaled, the technical gathering the living skid marks on your back lighter than the biolegitimacy of acknowledgment as the month of January is of unspoken forgiveness: at last you find yourself disposed to an always starting life is the moment when even your holiday cappuccino blankets itself with cream effervescence after hours of waiting and not being lipped, but lashed. I tell you this, waiting is the distance between life & death; the experiential separation between imagination & reality; and all warm bodies and fluids know this very well. But the professor went back to your room to clean the study table with his bare back like a mop bargain in everything-for-one-dollar shop. The sessions in between your calendar and man's time is the dust each song a sparrow couldn't remember, but could swallow and you need normal water when the world is choking up events and eventually a consistent ointment, one that naturally heals like death because memory is the foreskin, flesh bitten by the teeth of a denim zipper in pain, tucked what's inside and what's out; who below and who above; who said "I'm done"; who owned to whom "I've come"; and who to a love will never respond.
next

B.B.P.HOSMILLO is the author of a chapbook collection of fragments in series entitled Dear Good Night: A Yearning Project (forthcoming). He received the JENESYS Special Invitation for Graduate Student Research Fellowship in 2011 and the National University of Singapore-Asia Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship in 2012. He is short-listed for the on-going 2014 VOID poetry contest of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hong Kong's pre-eminent literary establishment. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Mascara Literary Review, Sundog Lit, and Nude Bruce Review among others. His email address is bryphosmillo@yahoo.com.

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