MANILA, Philippines ? It was a night of poetry, red and white wine, a groaning buffet table (food, glorious food), and poetry in three languages.

The event was ?Printemps des poetes? (Poet?s Spring), held recently at Alliance Française de Manille on Reposo Street, Makati City. The theme was ?En rire(s)? (About Laughter).

Often, however, the humor was caustic, bitter and cynical, cri de colére of literary artists wounded by an unjust society and a hopelessly corrupt political administration.

Consider Virgilio S. Almario?s ?Pulis ng Laging Saklolo? (Police of Perpetual Help) as read by Marne L. Kilates: ?Pulis ng santong katwiran/ Hinuhuli araw araw/ Ang di mag-tong na sugalan.?

As translated by Kilates and read by Marivic Rufino, this became: ?Police of holy righteousness/ Gambling dens await your daily raid/ Only to pay for your protection.?

Ed Maranan likened politicians and their spouses to rats: ?Boom town Warat, boom town of rats/ They go to Las Vegas, spend dollahs for thrillas/ They?ve oodles of millions, from kickbacks, commissions??

Some of the poets transformed themselves into performance artists, like the venerable Virginia R. Moreno, Frank G. Rivera and Vim Nadera.

Caparisoned in virginal white, swaying to music and swinging a pearl pendant, Moreno chanted: ?This thin hot oyster/ Has swallowed/ Something./ What it was no one knows??

Also clad in white and waving aloft a shawl, Rivera conjured up a scenario in which the Filipino people asked God to ?pls give us good, clean, honest government.? And ?God does not wake up/ Cannot be done./ It is you who will make it happen.?

Another scene-stealer was Nadera, who wore formal native attire and sombrero, and went around reciting in a stentorian voice: ?Dito po sa amin, galing ang sandugo/ Sa kopang banyaga?t galong-katutubo?? (Here in our country, where we made blood compacts/In foreign chalices and ethnic vats?)

Being from Quezon, Nadera offered members of the audience a sip of heady coconut wine (lambanog). A nice twist was that, as he boomed out his poem, a young Filipino woman from the University of the Philippines was translating each stanza in French.

In a ?non-erotic? tribute to poet Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, Angelo Suarez removed the sounds in her work associated with moaning?meaning all vowels?and, with great skill, came up with a series of Germanic grunts and groans.

?Sounds like suppressed orgasms,? commented high-school classmate Raffy Evangelista, a lawyer who writes poetry.

The funniest and most pungent poem (double-entendre intended), however, was Gemino Abad?s ?Arse Politika, Or Breaking Wind?: ?Most subversive air/ It floats incognito from well-hid silo./ Subtly it spreads?a sudden relevance./ You sit or whistle as to suppress an identity crisis./ Most of course consider it a minor olfactory problem; it soon passes./ But a few, less civil, demand full-dress investigation to get to the mystery?s Bottom.?

Inspired by the poem and powered by wine, my colleague Pablo Tariman threatened to write a sequel titled ?The Farting Shot.?