Manila is smoke rising
from a thousand flumes,
chimneys, exhaust pipes, trash heaps,
staining the air brown like the people
who walk the streets holding a hanky over their mouths
with one hand and a cigarette in the other

Manila is towers rising
over rice paddies and garbage dumps
and tiny barangay villages,
skyscrapers ascending electric
silver in the blinding sun
steel veins and cement bones protruding
workmen squatting on 30 story ledges
in their chinella flip-flops and hardhats.

Manila is heat rising
the goddamn heat innundating
every grimy inch, baking feet
through rubber soles, melting gridlocked tires
to road, battling the rattling aircon units
on cabs and hotels.

Manila is roads rising
highways, bridges, overpasses, pushing away
from the rich earth on concrete stilts
new boulevards and broadways
to unclog the fields of jeepneys, Mercedes,
motorcycles, buses, tricycle taxis,
fighting for each inch of pavement.

Manila is workers rising
at 4am to shuffle off to work
with their plastic bags of coffee and pandesal sandwiches,
millions of workers from faroff barangay
converging on the city by the grey bay,
buses and cars belching smoke
into the misty dawn, on the choked roadways,
the skeletons of highrises looming everywhere.

Manila,
Rizal’s perla del mer,
now tarnished by the soot of industry,
the grease of politics, the effluvia of Hollywood,
a chainsmoking giant in flipflops
squatting on this mango republic,
a field of steel and concrete and human bamboo
the more you cut it down,
the faster it rises up.




april 1998