In front of a house in Las Piñas, September 29

I let the wind carry your name,
see if your house receives it.
A window flicks back dead skins of darkness.
I trace the passing time with my footsteps
circling outside the gate, waiting
a slight creak from an opening door.
That door remains closed, like the other doors
lining the street, never opening for me.
I measure the shadows' movements
with an aging day - stretching longer
towards the east where the sun rose.
The sky changes. The wind displaces
the dried leaves from where they rest.
The silence of your house is a creature
fat with hushes, crowding all the rooms.
How it must have shooed you away quickly,
no time to pick up sculptures of dwarfs
littering your little garden.
In its rib cage, my heart pounds why
departures seem hurried. No goodbye.

In The Bookshop

In the bookshop, the wind sat still on the page the old man had come face to face with, ignoring his fear of paper.  His tummy churned and loudly protested the acid crawling up to his chest.

A little moth flew quickly from the silver worm-devoured binding, happy of its freedom from the one minute imprisonment in the small gap between the pages and hard cover.  His eyes followed the angle of its flight over the hard and soft bound worlds orderly arranged in their shelves, one of which he has on his hands, and it came out ethereal and with texture, from the leaves spread out over his begging palms.  Time inconspicuously passed like a specter by the cabinets, and everyone slowly faded into light.

In the bookshop, the old man silently began eating words.