Your smoke has intoxicated me long since my dad stopped driving me to school. I am scorched by the touch of your atmosphere that I will never get used to. I can never take back the money I've spent on ***** ice cream and orange quail eggs. And despite your ridiculous amount of potholes and how every corner of you is corrupted, Manila, you are still my home.

I will forever treasure the nights I've spent walking through your pavement. The lights of you will never fail to fascinate me. How every monuments and art musuems becomes a portal from the past to the future. For all the laughs, tears, annoyance, and anger that I've had with you and the inside jokes that only we know. For the people I've met and will meet inside you. For all the streets I've walked and will walk onto. Despite your lack of snow and intense evidence of climate change,  Manila, I am still and will always be in love with you.

Manila    is  fray

Tough enough to die,
    Brave enough to see ****** against
        the billboards

   ***** on the marketplace
   ***** men haggling for prices
   the corners are squalid -- rats with ambitions   of men take  their places    in
    the esteros

   a car-horn blares, wanes old moon music.
      I sing songs of malversation. Trains all graffiti.

     My heart like a jailbird freed somewhere
         in the big sur; love assuages nothing,
    comes with a cheap price
          a freak December night in Roxas blvd.
     i sit on marble benches and dream
        of artilleries, garlands on *****-nosed
            barrels, nuns   grieving  dust
     in    the ground.    communal bathrooms
         drunk in foolish caricatures,
   the tabloids     displaying  flowerheads --
        the democracy in the streets a ****
    for      kings,  no    love to   lull
        me    to infantile    sleep

         tortured are   the   bulls 
   matadors    hiding  behind    faces red   like
       faces    of    statesmen   flushed with
          the   spirit   of   bourbon
   whereas we are    here   river-facing
       northern tip of its  undying source
  like    wives    on  balustrades   waiting
      to catch   the fragrance   of   inamoratas,
   light  reenters
          interstice   of   chary webs of  dull heads   hemmed in like   canopies   in the throat      of     overthrown ponds,   scraps
     of metal    sold    for a  night's  worth
        of    gin   and   Sinatra,

  Deep within   the   grave, the dead   laughing
       at the dead living. Atop   waters,
   yachts peering   into   drowning  fish,
       in   the middle, a   jam   of buses
         belching    lassitudes that    strangle
    the console,    the man    in all  of us
       the same,   cursing behind   the wheel
   and everybody    else    different
              dancing    at   the   top   of our   heads.

madmen fools and nothing,
the mien — brazen, stupefied glance
and hungry for light, our words gutted
like our enemies in our ill-thought.

this road dredges, the aporetic line
sifting through new divisions, something
an equation forgets the dividend
and almost always a salient permutation
of men and women and the "takatak" boy
peddling cigarettes to claptrap ***
of metal envoys,

  reciprocating some chances of restive
dreadnaught, diffusion of sweat in
scalding heat of 12:41 afternoon sun
and smoking with bystanders
unaware of the doldrum and the ennui

   it was a fine day in Ortigas.

he left me a note,
"dear, you are interesting",
how troubled was he?

all i see now are the silent ruin
of words teeming with wisdom
in every trail. you are gleaming
in the moony boondocks,
Ibabá remembers you as you were -
timeless and ruminative,
pursuing the source of rivers.

our sublime versifier,
the crucifixes now tremble without
the fullness of your flesh.
each page is turned without
the hover of your voice yet
stills its resonant message in my mind's premises like redolent graffiti.
striding river-pace,
once in moonlit Orfeo
graced by your sibilant being,
leaving only the strongest of impression
on the surly couch, a toppled glass
of Shiraz remembering your attendance
leaving the clamor of the audiences
real to touch, elusive in thought.

before the war was the ever-present word, and after the fray was
the armistice of the Sun where in
humdrum Sampiro, your fire's genealogy
is in the hands of the muse!

idly go the hours, wading everlong past
Calle Herrán - the bells of Paco Church
tell in this imperfect hour
the roads where you once traversed,
travailed and perhaps beer-maddened,
putting a face in the metaphysical!

in your banquet i partake
the wisdom of your wine
and the reason of your flesh -
the gods delight in you,
  o, Manila of all Manila.

superimposition of celestial ampersand:

a continuity of all things
  stars hanging loose in the pupil
of this deadbeat word.

typhoons in a swirl of tempestuous ballet,
dogs shivering in the blue cold,
biting their canine integument the way
scarabs would, sinking in a temporal flotsam-way within tectonic display
    of text

hectares of blank stares bringing
to life lysergic field of black birds.

and then some

equal number of evocativeness:

continuing on into the ground
are the bones warm in their compost.
the sudden fragrance of rat ****
appeals to the masses.
too much laughter in flooded thoroughfares pockmarked by
the vehement jam of staccato jackhammer.
choking us is today's headline
in supreme obbligato - its stench
reeks of libidinal perfume etched
in the flesh of the rigmarole.

one filthy day in Manila.

billboard's calligraph --
past the haze of Manila infested
by car sprawls and belching machines.

magnanimous treatise of tarpaulins,
people chin-up asking God
with askance

something like this
"o god make this bearable
like a mound of fresh fruits
from ****** labour."

maniacal sensurround:
earth-shattering frequency
of footsteps trampling the mouth
of monolith shadows - the peak
of this quake is our complete silence.

rain's catharsis in effect
sousing us in the blood of unreal light.
this diastolic shrinkage
jamming the beat of constricting vessels.
the adrenaline surges
within the dermis of this pretension.

a collective of tired beings heeding
the recherché of voice metamorphosing
into form, a dagger-butterfly
paring us skin to bone, cranial
to visceral, soul to nothing -

catapult of a trajectory spit
plummeting in eased-up pace
from Taft Avenue flyover
to a subjugated wagon of scraps
and empty wine bottles.

today's paper reads:

"Palace hits hiring
   of **** dancers"

fancying to fall right in the
spanked curved of this
insatiate melodrama - something
  prayer could not save from
this land's mutinous ignominy.

   we resume to fulfill our madness,
hundreds of tack-headed people
  rolling down the streets of Makati,
drenched with rain's trilling aftermath.

squinting to look at
  no sun, only the grieving of skyscrape,
thumbing down unidentified objects
  in the depth of loose pockets,
    desperate for home.

with what sense does
this sea of read
pirouette on?

the soot leaving black
blotches on the ****** sheets,
lampposts do not complain
of sudden twitches
as cacophonously, a line
of machines with their ravenous
machinisms create a seam of
crimson to a slender
rose's architecture.

i leave my engine on
so as to hand this road
my readiness,
Ely Buendia on the tattered radio
leaks outside the ajar windows,
chasing the dream of rearing
movements
as my flesh remains dreamless,
stationary.

there is a sequined gathering here.
erratic simulations of
naked eyes pierce the musk
of the austere air's gravity
of existence.

all of us
occupying space
and our attendance is our
sigh of dismay as our homes
decompose in waiting,
as our beds remind us
of our body's aging clamor,
as our ineluctable senescence
opens the dungeons of our frailties
with its trembling, wrinkled hands.

we are our waiting's consummation
as we are left here,
wary of our precise proprioception,
left in
the tongue-tied dark.