or Rorschach ink blot prints, a whole set of standard ten. I shuffle them ceaselessly in the course of fatigue, or in between lapses in efflorescence, picking one from the splay the tarot way, as to prognosticate the culprit.

8.

          The view runs a series of makeshift shelters, the inhabitants
optimistic enough to ensure an earnest foreground
of polychrome blossoms. I suppose this is an attempt
at assuaging dearth. Inside a bus on my way to Dangwa,
I look at my left hand,
and instead I see his. I sense potential in this.

5.

          In a garden plotted with frangipanis, I conjure an impression
of Angeles: after 5 p.m., the streets are interspersed
with boys made of light. I see them and suddenly, my body
is covered with chinoiserie.
Arrhythmia is at the heart of this kind of systems.
I tend a hollow that propagates
an overgrowth of sinuous vines. {Flowers
are short-lived, pale yellow or white,
          with dark centers.} By nature phototropic, they move toward
{Their evergreen leaves are ovate and deeply notched.}
an unseen light source, he
in absentia. He will always be the symptom
          of my handicap, the logarithm of my lack. {Named varieties
may also be grafted on the common kind.}

7.

I have come to fetish remnants,
spending afternoons videotaping ruins, metastasized
in the avenues; keeping my bus tickets henceforth
until such a time they could 
          wallpaper an impending home; refusing to sweep those dry bougainvilleas
collecting in the front yard. The objects he lays his hands on
now throb with sudden meanings; even the stones
he holds take root, shoot up in an arc, augment fronds, bear fruits.

6.

I hold on to the trail of clothes he leaves behind.
I could follow it but then I would not be able to 
          stand his nakedness. I follow it anyhow, but instead of reaching
his naked body, I come upon a contusion
of ikebanas.

1.

On a fieldtrip back in fifth grade, we went to the city
to an exhibit of Oligocene remains
extracted from the geostrata 
          of Indomalaya. I remember standing before an encased fossil
of a flower, the Hymenaea,
fascinated that a temporal life form as fragile as this
could leave a trace
transmitted across epochs. I examined its details, parts
          summing up to an intaglio that read: ancestor. In that instant
I began to understand
the story of Brahma, who was born out of the lotus
at the beginning of the universe.

10.

In my dream, a boy is dead
          and we are among the guests at the funeral. I do not know what to make
of this, except that the flowers beside the coffin
remind me of the button-down shirt he wore
the first time I saw him.

4.

He breezes through the semi-darkness
of the corridor, ceramic and planetesimal.
This is my first sighting
of him. From now on I will love him
          for his dark, ponderous silence, his celadon airs; for the fact that
he is piquant and picturesque; a soma undifferentiated
from stem, root, or leaf, and laced
in verdigris. He is an ornate blue cabinet made of sandalwood,
or an epic journey through a configuration
of maps and forests in videogames, The Portrait of a Boy
{circa 16 A.D., excavated in Corsica}, an anthem
of musks and pigments, the little Bedouin
carved in camel bone, or a hemograph
of sparrows. This is my first sighting of him and the ones
thriving on his shirt are aqua hibisci: It is such details
that commit the picture to memory—the numbers that lay down
his phenotype into a chart to be mastered,
the stars that connect to bequeath the sky with forms,
or the moles on a beloved's body, the black points mapping out
a territory to be conquered—
because the pattern foreshadows tragedy.

2.

The tale runs this way:
         "During his final hours the taxidermist resolved
to preserve his likeness as both tribute 
          to his career and capstone
to his oeuvre. He set to work with accustomed precision, removing his skin
and steeping it in tannin. Before the neighbors found
him bled to death, he had stuffed every void of his being
with petals. They were struck with awe upon seeing
that his other self rose
to life near his vermillion form."

3.

The teachers in high school decided that I acted "strange"
and seemed "too violent for [my] age." They sent me to the counselor
who showed me a number
of cards and repeatedly asked, "What do you see?" 
All I saw were pictures of flowers and I 
          recited their names as faithfully as I could. She looked upset afterwards.
I wanted to cheer her up
by drawing her a diagram: this is the anther; this one,
the pistil; here, the stigma.

9.

          In an aforementioned garden on an earlier postcard, I perch on a stone
                                                                                                            bench
to write a note on the reverse of another postcard:
I look at him at a distance approximated by a catena
of one-hundred ligatured stamens. I am certain he would bloom
into a hydra at any moment.