Bruise Quotes

“So begins their pursuit
of beauty: leaves tumble
into barrels of water and lye,
the green tears of plants
steamed to the clarity of human tears.

Then, the same women take up
Their pestles and pound the landscape
Into pulp. Mashing daylight and daydreams
into a pale cold mass.

Only then will the men come to drown
their fruits in water, dispersing
the remnants of plants and the aches
of tired white arms.

And having dispersed them, they redeem
with their fine-meshed nets the tissue
of emptiness we now call paper.”
― Ramon C. Sunico, Bruise: A 2-tongue job

“Words fail.... As a grudging admission, after much denial, that even as we try to preserve and create, through, with, in language, whatever is beautiful or scandalous in our lives, language fails because it falsifies. Like money, it corrupts the very possibilities it creates. Words after all the first currency. ... In trying to say what we mean, we end up saying something else. ... And yet, we have nothing else but words.”
― Ramon C. Sunico, Bruise: A 2-tongue job

“Had she stayed, I would have told her
of quite another sea.
It does not dance for tourists;
it does not dress for youths.
It arrives at night,
at the hour of deepest sleep
when dreamcrossed girls lie still engrossed
by the sweet nothings of their rest.
It shuns crowds, reflects no light.
It is our sea:
the sea where all our dreams collect
when they no longer can come true.”
― Ramon C. Sunico, Bruise: A 2-tongue job

“And so their small, subtle verbs
mince the universe into tenses,
their pronouns and articles
slice people into genders.
They infect us with the finitude
of their visions, their fatal powers.”
― Ramon C. Sunico, Bruise: A 2-tongue job