Dongsky Poem by RIC BASTASA

1

IN America, you cannot hide your brown skin
and everything in you, Mr. Filipino connotes what it takes to be
humiliated and discriminated but you go beyond all these
in the name of the mighty green paper god,

the dollar i know you know
even without the essences of a metaphor


2

you can endure all the discrimination and the humiliation
for such lowly job as errand boy or whatever euphemism you may use there
like a sanitation engineer
for a garbage collector

but now

3

there is a little change as you emphatically try to hide
in the monotone of your voice
like a sleepy sea breeze

you got laid off due to that bad economy
creeping up like a black worm on the American white beer belly

a sucker, what do you call that really?
yes a leech, son of leeches, those crabs on the tin pail,
like what our corrupt politicians
feed us in our country

(where do we really have to go?
Dubai? again?)

4

you can endure them all, at whatever cost, to support a wife and daughter
here,
but now what you cannot endure is this
jobless state

5

now, you must go home, who knows, this is nothing but
a blessing in disguise.

i must be lucky somehow, i do not need much
and i do not need to be in America to be human myself
or be in Dubai
to at least survive on temporary basis

6

know what, we're on the same boat
but to appease my thirst and hunger
and an array of disappointments
i try my hands on

7

poetry, this if you may call it,
poetry.