The Modus Vivendi of Rodrigo Duterte - Melissa Alipalo

                                    “My administration shall implement
            a human rights-based approach to development and governance …”
—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte,
2016 State of the Nation Address
            He struts like the winning gamecock,
the first from the south to take the presidential palace.
First order of business: shake down the trees
for all the broken-winged things:
             
            The trees taste what he is
cooking from decades away, smell
the poor-blood harvest he’s sowing
and reaping: a few pusher bodies, but mostly
 
            user bodies, gutter bodies
for the monsoons to flush away into fish-food bodies
—all felled from the barrels of goon-hired goon-guns,
thug-ghosts from history’s playbooks:
 
            NDC Sparrows, Alsa Masa vigilantes,
Davao Death Squads; masked motorbike drivers and riders:
tandem assassins—a distraction from the real death sum
done by those in uniforms.
           
            Shanty dweller bodies, his economic way
to scare big dealer dogs with nightly messages
of smoke, metal, and rubber, the sight
of reusable body bags,
 
            street side vigils with rented plastic caskets,
unscented white candles, six years
of Ave Maria nights for some 30,0000 bodies.
Keep counting.
 
            There are not enough trees in the cities
to hide behind, to climb, and watch from. Then where?
No wings, no escape. There are not enough Night Crawlers
and their cameras to cover his blood fiesta.
 
             He lets the charade of law and disorder
shock us, knows nobody believes what the trees saw
happen beneath them. Nobody wants to believe
the numbers, or a man who says,
 
            When I’m done,
            the fishes
            will thank me.