i may never recognize your smile even as my hands retrace the contours of your face, nor name the secret name in your eyes even if i am to meet, and hold and drown in your glances, not because i am blind, or my limbs and flesh are numb, but because your smiles and your glances are no longer meant for me.

there will never be a poetry from me faithful enough to reconcile the burrows i dug in the earth of your face when i made you frown, nor a poetry potent enough to heal the breach i broke in the dam of your eyes when i made you cry. there is no poetry for the dead and fallen leaves of yesterday whom we gathered, and burned by the fires of our distance, our regret, our shame, and our forgetfulness.

but there is poetry for the blossoms of yesterday. faint, almost absent, transparent, and yet they lace every breath that i take, they tint every shape i know. they flare like stars in the empty skies of my dreams.

and so i write to you now. this may not be poetry, but this is for your gifts, your ancient gifts that are pieces of my soul, of my pride and shame.

yours were the first lips who sought mine and taught me a language i could speak for the moments when words that sound could not duplicate. yours was the shadow who stood at my side and thus i discovered that i had my own. there you were in your island home of Basilan, a destination full of love, worthy of navigating the violent waves of the stormy sea so that i may touch you. you will forever be the fruit, ripe, sweet, nourished by earth, wind, water and fire whom this boy once plucked on a summer day nearly a decade ago, and i became a man.

you are the lesson i know and yet dare not learn when you took your first steps away from me into a city half a world away in the clutches of a winter whose fingers would ultimately touch me, far as i may be from you in my kingdom of sun and rain.

you craved the trinkets of the world much more than the tattered clothes of my soul, i know that now, but thank you for loving the seeds of sleeping promises inside of me whom you planted into your womb, whose name i wish would always be Jian, the Beautiful, as a testament that before the breaking of things, before sunset claims those whom the sun caressed, there is Beauty. there is Beauty! however brief and painful it may be...

i love you with such passion and intensity that no stars could outshine, no poetry of mortals or gods and goddesses could ever define, and i would have bestowed them upon you if only, if only it did not mean my own long and suffering death. and that is why i kept it far away from you, even until now.

i am dead now, in your eyes, in your glances and in your smiles. i dare not explain how i have bound my life inseparable to my art, of how the boy who became the man died, not by your arms, or from the wine of your regret and shame and abandonment. i died on the hands of my own, dying with every drop of ink, every page after page of paper i stain as i attempt to chart the map and portrait of where i long to be and whom i would like to be.

once loved.

twice betrayed.

never to be forgiven, and forgotten. a poet