It is fiestatime when gaiety is propped up like starched
khaki pants on wide-brimmed windows smiling
doors open up to the slapstickshows on the streets.
Colored papers hang like daggers above the heads;
confetti like dancing butterflies fake the rain.
My, the mind is poisoned happy by paper works!
Big ones small ones round and square and triangular
drafted to patch up
wallcracks or hide the dirtyboards.
It is fiestatime and there is quite no place
for real construction work or cleaning up
of decay.

The main street gleams where fancyfiasco
stares from heavily-draped windows or
drives upanddown
the length of furnished tableau
in streaks of blueyellowredcars purring sleek like
fountain pens on fine-textured
official papers.
Indeed fiesta, where selected kitchens
teem like abandoned peels of laughter of peoples
who know tomorrow on both sides of
crisp bills and hard coins,
objects stirring
listless life in the dead eyes of maskless clowns,
society's confused creatures of the lesseralleys
in this paper feast.

For in lesseralleys, the spirit staggers
poisoned on dirty rags across naked doors
staring at
the same slapstickshows on streets that vainly creep
up to dreamland of mainstreet,
deep windows trying the patience of being
starry-eyed and stunned.
The dream here dresses in sweatdust where there, in draft.
Fiasco here is real on frantic empty tables
and papers that don't quite make up decaying walls
or force a feast on bitter clowns.

- Dias