The poem
She lies in her well-kept apartment above the spick and span cathedral in the heart of the walled city above Manila Bay and she dreams of the great, ruined cities of Europe: Vienna crumbling into the ocean, Warsaw in a plague of frogs and flies and London, where all the black men have learned to talk like white men, where all the white men have begun to talk like cartoon characters. One week left until Christmas and you can't buy a Scrabble set in any shop. The cartoon characters are warming their three-fingered hands around a bonfire made of love letters.