Desks Are Never Meant

thousands of desks
receding in the past
but what desks?
classrooms? of what?
students waiting in line
and then vanishing

I left my desk at Sta. Maria
when I decided there was nothing there for me.
An aunt borrowed it.
Whose books and lamps and diaries lay still there now?

There's been a shortage of desks
at elementary schools in my province.
Meanwhile, a pile of rotting tables and chairs—
seemingly unused—cover the grass
outside a government office.

These desks are not desks
but penitence and processions
trickling like coins from
a faucet of ignorance
dropping, wetting the parched playground
or the schoolyard of whatever
makeshift classroom

McKinsley declared in 1898 that Filipinos
are meant only for assimilation
under a mild sway of justice.
In other words, nails.
In other words, splinters of wood stuck in juvenile fingers.