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Grief is a nation of everyone, a country without borders. I roam the avenues of it out of habit.
Eric Gamalinda -
He imagined over and over the few moments they had together, kiss and touch and stickiness, until those moments congealed to a single kiss, a single touch: a pearl. Then even her face was lost in a blur, only the smallest sensation remained. And then nothing. He was over forty now. He thought of her but the sensuous arousals that once troubled him no longer stirred in him the same seismic memory: he didn't feel hate, or distance, or love, or passion. Only safety. Nothing can touch me now. Only pity. What will you do, whom I cannot save?
Eric Gamalinda
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There's a strong message of divine righteousness in dictatorships. Every megalomaniac has to believe his actions are sanctioned by God.
Eric Gamalinda -
The homosexuals fist fuck in the steam room while the janitor isn't looking. He calls and never speaks but you can hear Oahu rain. Press your ear against the glass and heart another life not happening, the soundless blur of snow on the plasma screen.
Eric Gamalinda -
Even dictators become dictators because somehow, deep in their hearts, they believe they've been chosen to save the world. Everyone is chosen. There lies the problem. Every wants to do something. Everyone thinks his, & no other's, is the only way. Everyone is deranged with purpose.
Eric Gamalinda -
The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places—under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary....
Eric Gamalinda -
... it's pointless to think in moral terms when everything is permissible. We have become the people we detest. We have lost the capacity to imagine what is forbidden We have been freed, in other words, from our own hypocrisy.
Eric Gamalinda -
Because you brand our tongues with silence. Because you watch us in fear, even while we sing.
Eric Gamalinda
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The monsoon came, six months of infinite rain. The towns I once knew were wiped clean, and everyone said it was God revising his poem.
Eric Gamalinda -
It offended him and mocked his wounded soul: the fact that the world didn't die when his heart did.
Eric Gamalinda -
He tells me that Filipinos are in jail because we Americans want a better world for ourselves. It's America that gives ammunitions to the dictator. He says, Your corporations can do whatever they want here as long as our government protects them from our discontents. It's you who will benefit from a Philippine dictatorship.
Eric Gamalinda -
Love is a fragile, useless thing. It decomposes easily in the tropic heat.
Eric Gamalinda -
Rely on no one. Depend on no one for your happiness. I am declaring my independence. I am establishing a republic unto myself. I am seceding from the human race.
Eric Gamalinda -
America: the name itself is synonymous with imperialism - you've taken the name of two entire continents & claimed it as your own, & shut out anyone else from using it.
Eric Gamalinda
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Let her remain where she is. A constellation away.
Eric Gamalinda -
I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me.
Eric Gamalinda -
I'll remember your apocalypse if you'll remember mine It will be a holiday of the senses.
Eric Gamalinda -
He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
Eric Gamalinda -
People who think they have the full support of God, any god, think they're invincible. They will do anything and not even think twice about it.
Eric Gamalinda -
Today, as I look back on those years, I realized there is nothing to understand, that everything is clear to everyone all along.
Eric Gamalinda
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Forgetting: that, too, was the heart's slow way of healing, but it could only be done alone. Love and loss turns us into the most solitary of creatures, their mysteries can never entirely be shared.
Eric Gamalinda -
I love the excesses of beauty, there is never enough sunlight in the world I will live in, never enough room for love.
Eric Gamalinda -
In the landscape of despair, everything was a miracle.
Eric Gamalinda