MANILAMANIAC

YOU’RE CRAZY TO BE HERE

Sauna city, three shirt and shower days
Diesel lungged by quaintly painted jeepneys
Senses assaulted
Blaring street cacophonopia
Horns a-plenty
Graceful golden limbs with canker sores
Merely breathing, you and me
Umihi
Hee hee hee ho ho
An English city visually
But what you hear’s not what you see
O o, no no
’Cept on Tagalog bawal-ed walls
Vendor stalls
And possibly some student halls
So?

YOU CAN LEAVE ANYTIME

Airline offices abound
Package tours to the Motherland
Ancestors never saw
Compete with twice weekly trips to Ho Chi Minh City
Or maybe an extortionist will help you on your way
The vendor hordes of Santa Cruz
Goods tricely bundled
Flee yet another attempt at civic beautification
Urchins of Ermita scamper to the cry of “Bagansa”
Traffic bends around the bulging sidewalk
Where burnt out squatters camp
A beggar lad, all limbs lopped
A victim of some vengeance?
Takes your coin with stumps
Calesa and cronycrat limoed in luxury
Trespass the jeepney jungle
Policemen play cops and robbers with themselves
Growing GNP’s and poverties
Insurgencies, illiteracies
And common ordinary everyday disease
Aircon economy, peso astronomy for some
And the poor used to live fairly well

BUT YOU STAY

50’s, 60’s jukebox timewarp
Little kids dance to the imported nostalgia
Nights ending with the lonley cry of “Balut”
Paco Park, omnifarious oasis
Noosed by rumbling roads
Its giant wounded acacias
Rotting and regenerating
North cemeteries’ mausoleum madness
Disneyland of death
Were the living housed half as well
South Pacific seaside shanties
Periodically removed
Embrace the Embassy

OR COME AGAIN IF YOU CAN’T

 

 

 

ROBIN’S RUDE SONGS AND POEMS, Robin Sharpe, Kalayaan Publications, 1990

  

Content of this website is released with ‘copyleft’ license, that is you are free to copy, redistribute or use it for your own purposes provided you retain the present copyleft notice including my name and contact information, allowing others to subsequently reuse the material.  Robin Sharpe, crankyman98@gmail.com.