Until Your Hand Is Quietly Laid Out On My Palm

—for Liêm Vũ Đúc

Beads of soil on the ceramic floor a monument today, footprints are eyes—they watch over us;

Each key, a sustained sound of the piano is left by the threshold of the door

On which a careful ear a curious fence waiting for its monotone: surround me with your tongue;

Between my nation and the crowded port, there is a vaporizing shadow

That disfigures my aura like the sky for which no amount of sketch can copy;

The night is blank and here from you: a thirst for utterance not equal to silence;

Surrounding the man-made botanic gardens are lascivious trees, but your metallic silence

A predator separating me in an endless cage forlorn of green that lures us

In a divided trail under the gaze of the careless light as if a copy

Of a mystical book dichotomized by page numbers near each other outside a closed door;

How I want to return it in its dusty shelf like a sealed festschrift so my body is buried with your shadow;

And when the compact heat, a fescennine breakage of your solitaire: ‘exuberant cold is our tongue,’

You said. If we are fooled about the impossibility of creation without the agentive tongue,

How else can we iterate the resilience of our limitless silence?

As if meanings are not any viable abashing with the autonomy of shadow, your shadow

Since each apparition we encounter everyday leads us

Back to our room like tedious parliamentarians for a year-end meeting behind impenetrable door;

And as I speak your eyes glued at me planning, this subconscious mimics us in a dream as my only copy

Of our equivocal togetherness, the freedom of our being human, the likeness of a hazy copy

In which a city so obsessive demands its posterity whose being is the image of your tongue

Behind a cursive writing a holistic word that sounds like ‘truth’ meticulously placed on the door;

In advance, I covered you with fresh brocade and myself beside your agonizing silence

Wuthering, punishing, shooting with a desire to leap through time that maybe didn’t believe in us

Until a motion of your head, then a stare of rectitude: ‘my love, hold me dearly after my shadow.’

I started seeing you when all is all a mere renaissance of the shadowest of shadow;

Every second spent—ah, time is gone—but here yet and what remains is a cloudless copy

An immortal metaphor that goes back here and there, a weakening zeitgeist that collects us,

A Greek messenger in the heyday of myths that bring your promises to my now drying tongue

For the noises today a memorial exegesis is not any of real remarks as your procedural silence;

And each instance a necessary cathartic return, I dispose myself concealed by once a lock, our door;

Its oyster and lemon in stillness, its every hour’s history’s presence that avails the racing door;

A frame that has always allowed: not a plague of night, not even any death could stop your shadow

Recklessly scattered beyond the slant of my desires as artificial, thus, immortal prophetic copy

As every radiant religion has promised all sorts of salvation: eternity, exemption except every silence

A Greek messenger in the heyday of myths that bring your promises back to my now drying tongue

That reins me until we become the oldest time’s solipsism for which a memory absorbs: a continuum: us.

In a wide otherness of apathy upon which there lies a body, a faithful map to your lubricious touch, a copy

Of your hand, a speech that covers my anguish, a hide to my melancholic lips— it is your absent tongue

That holds me until we become the oldest time’s solipsism for which a memory keeps: a continuum: us.

~ B.B.P. Hosmillo

B.B.P. Hosmillo is a young critic of gender, neoliberal heterosexism, and queer precarity. He was a recipient of the Japan Foundation (JENESYS) research scholarship in 2011. He attended Sophia University in Tokyo. His essays and creative works have appeared or are forthcoming in Philippines Free Press, SUKI, Lingua Cultura, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and WILDE Magazine.  

Artwork: Heart of Poppies, by Sonja Dimovska