memory palace

demolished, but here–
left of the kitchen

right of the cabinet where I'm kept. Intimately, I know the here, which balloons when it rains.

Four rains in the evening
Seven rains in the morning
Every month wearing down
cement footprints, names
like it wants to dig so deep.

I learned to fear the dark then grow into it. The rain being so loud it feels like it could bore a hole on the roof like a

door, wall that curves
against itself
into a nautiloid

if one can dream,
dreaming of its future form

that was not here
before and at the same
time always was
as something that could

dislocate itself from a year. Learning it could do so that year. Become virtual. I felt the house an impostor of itself.

In that, knowing it finally
understood me; I could whisper
to it my wish: Someone
else should have been born
in my place and taken this name.

float above the body of itself, on it like a boat through:
will be what
had been would

have been were
it not misplaced earlier

ahead of that, hallway
the smell of breakfast

absent in my recurrent dreams of transit. Enormous train stations, Gordian highways, and just trying to get home at midnight. The fleeing of the populace on buses, jeeps, trains, boats, ferries, overfull. The coming of 2 a.m. a doom bell.

Sometimes waiting in hotels to start dreams of dead people. My aunt visited me and showed me around once while we waited for the traffic to abate. The hotel is just as confusing as the city. So many fountains.

" I’ve been thinking about what it is I live my life for. But I’ve been thinking about it and when I see a parent’s love for their child, . It's the love that I feel and we all feel for each other and the people we’re close to. That’s probably not the answer, finally, , it’s enough.”

I laughed, and said I'm glad she knows what she would have liked, and I'm glad to have met her here. She would never have fucking said such a thing when she was alive. We put on new clothes from the souvenir section,

jumping from one form to another and lost in Metro Manila's labyrinth. Hallways that keep growing: outside of the home into the city, into the islands the ocean

fractures away from
into its own room
where i can remember

palaces no longer
tied to the matter.
this is your
way: the body
becomes complete
memory, which
uncryogenically
stays fresh
through misremembering

the one time we all
had it here–
stay in that cavern
but with unbitter

, which must have been left out so long it's become bland. Papa says I'm much like ojiisan, who loves that stuff, which he hates.

Before the roof fell in and never got fixed, I tried to grow plants here. Watering them at night, because the heat would take away the moisture before they could drink it.

Coriander, lemongrass, and this was all before pandemic, basil, cherry tomato, and they kept hiking up the

walls, entwining with the internet cable.

"My kind has been here longer than you have." said the vine.

"It's not my fault they passed me through here. They will cut you out." said the internet.

"I've been here longer than either of you." said the wall.

"You're made up of many different kinds of rocks." said the vine. "You don't even know who you are."

"I'm much more widespread." said the internet

"You don't reach everywhere." said the wall.

"You aren't even fiber optic yet.", the vine added.

"I interact with humans the most." said the internet.

"I don't know if that's always good." said the wall.

The vine pulled against the wall. "You'll outlast humans. We have to think about them."

"I might." said the internet.

"The internet is kind of just a collective subconcious dumping ground. It's not so different from dreams." said the wall.

"When this world goes, will you remember us?" asked the vine.

The internet thought. "As a collective subconscious-like hyperobject, I cannot remember you. But I can take you with me."

A voice overheard from my mom's phone: own to

rent, lemon balm, i never met ojiisan either, oregano, a tumblr network, rosemary, people started becoming afraid of going out at night, garlic, onion, eventually I just gave up, squash,

parsley, which gets that
way when it's too hot

outside, what people
see: a mound of dirt
the air above

the 00's being steel nimbus

like it was in the early 90's, when we were flooded. I played video games my grandmother saved up for with her, waiting for the water level

my favorite level
like
in a drowned world
able to swim up

to lower. A few people got electrocuted. It did subside, and came

back for me. After a certain age, the world I experienced, to me, felt submerged, in slow motion. That's how it was/is: me bedridden, in an underwater raft, dreaming, because that was all I could do, dream

of what could be. And so when the time came for us to move houses, and move again, and then again. I'd already dreamt

all of it. And could not believe it/what was real. And that I might blink, I would just wake up in that bed

which is in
the shape of the house
that used to be there
a thought: a breeze

a wrong turn, easily
leading to another.

leaving notes for myself
on reflective surfaces
looking for the lamp

which looks wrong.
looking for the future

which shapes it
differently with
every redreaming. here–
like i always was

in a room, detached from the very foundation of time, the idea that moving
foward, that there is something to move towards, that there is a "forward"
a terra incognita outside of this room, an anisotropic here or there
which I know well, because there is no returning

a book
to a library which has been declared bankrupt and foreclosed.

Standing outside of it, reading the demolition notices. A fire started here three years ago, and now a new development will be built on top of it. I watch somebody in a full protective suit haul out a cart full of half-burned books. "These books have been decommissioned, so we're chucking them out."

I look into the cart, and see they're biographies. All of them biographies of me, each slightly different, where slightly different things happened. The cart is hauled off, and before I could catch a glimpse of the hauler's face inside the helmet: one that looks like mine.

Here, on the moon, many things are reflected. There is a business to reflecting, while earth clings

to that
image of a garden, which keeps it alive, which remains possibility
both in past and future, in the sideways present, when it is unwritten, unuttered, unwound
from conception at all, where it is spinning in its varigiated forms

elsewhere, i’ll be there

a wishing well
full of ancient coins