Agno Street

by Les

is a smokers’ alley, filled with mists of boredom.
You walk by students somber in their blue jeans,
limp as knapsacks. Often you feel like a fish

swimming through the bodies in school.
The world is a teeming pond. You glide against
each other, daydreaming between bell rings.

How you spend confined minutes takes skill.
For example, you have mastered the art
of elevator discourse. The crowded street

is a familiar language. Everything passes
through it, and the concentration of things
lends life a certain busyness. It is as though

small spaces were the place to be, and truths
were marching in a learned procession
between classrooms. You need to pick them

carefully in lectures, this saying of dispersed
images. You need a place to walk, some green
hill beneath the watch of acacia trees

where the air is cleared by a smoking ban.
The words would cavort like kids in a park,
like prisoners after a jailbreak.

But it is a long road from Agno to Katipunan.