Las Ruinas del Corazon

(The Ruins of the Heart)

Eric Gamalinda

Juana the Mad married the handsomest man

in Spain
and that was the end of it, because when
you marry a man

more beautiful than you, they said you pretty

much lost control
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When
he was away

annexing more kingdoms, she had

horrible dreams
of him being cut and blown apart, or

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Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and s

wrapped
his body in oils and lavender, and laid him out in a
casket oflead,

and built a marble effigy of the young monar

in sleep,
and beside it her own dead figure, so he wou

he was alone. And she kept his body

beside her, and every day
for the next twenty years, as pungent
potions filled the rooms,

she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks

into his pot,
and memories of his young body woke her

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since

not even death
may oppose the queen, she found a way to
merge death and life

by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until

he was entirely
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the
fragrant skin,

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then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the

large intestine.
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like
testicles

and washed everything down with

sweet jerez.
Then she decided she was ready to
die.

But before she did, she asked the poets

to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the
song in marble,

and the marble to be selected from the

most secret veins
of the earth and placed where no man
could see it,

because that is the nature of love, because

one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the
young must sleep

with their eyes open, because the angels

tremble

of absence, because she holds her hands

out in the rain,
and rain remembers nothing, not even how

WHY DID JUANA THE

MAD EAT DEAD KING
PHILIP?

What is the poems

nature of love?

What does Juana and

Philip symbolically
represent?

Why is the poem titled

the ruins of the
heart?

Literary Terms
Allusion

reference
to
history, myth, Bible, art, etc.
Enjambment the running on
of the thought from one line,
couplet, or stanza to the next
without a syntactical break

Writing after EDSA

This is writing affected by the
imperial process from the moment
of colonization to the present day
(Ashcroft et al, 2).
Writing gave birth to emergent
themes
(ethnicity,
indigenous
culture, gender, feminist, colonial,
young adult, race, proletariat, etc.)

Postcolonial Writing
after EDSA
Reclaimed spaces and places
Asserted cultural integrity
(richness
of
indigenous
practices and cultures)
Revision of history (view from
the colonized peoples and the
generation after that)

In a poem, what body

part will you consume as
an act of love?
In a half-sheet yellow paper,
draw the body part you wish to
consume as an act of love.
Then, under that picture, write
the reasons for choosing that
part.
Clarity of Image 5

For the project

provide (.txt)

[For educational purposes only. No copyright infringement

intended.]
A musicalized poem of John Nist by us for our project in
WORLITE.
songs used:
Drowning Pool - Bodies (instrumentals):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYEQY...
Disney's Frozen - Let it Go (instrumentals):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r0i7...
Disturbed - Down With The Sickness (instrumentals):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFyKn...
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (instrumentals):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsHdF...
Poem: (lyrics)
"Revolution: The Vicious Circle" - John Nist

Next meeting
Experimental poetry
Jose Garcia Villa
Multiple Choice by
Conchitina Cruz