How I got here?
I don't remember.
Where should I go?
I don't know.
I know I am here and that's enough.

My world is mine,
Nobody else's.
Only I see what I see,
But I also know
That my view
Is one among many.

I am not less,
I am not more,
I am the exact measure
Of what I should be,
Grateful
For everyone that,
By my side,
Compose an unique me.

I sometimes shine
And I don't know
Where that comes from.
It's something from inside,
Something I am still not aware.

Somehow I connect,
Somehow I surprise,
Somehow I am there.

But I often disappear,
And that, too,
I don't know why.
It's just an undescribable need for space.

In loneliness I try to find
This light
But the more I seek,
The further I get.
The more I think of it,
The less I have.

Maybe I should get used to it,
Surf these waves,
Hide from the storm
(Inevitable),
Float during a calm tide.

I know I have it
I don't know how to use it,
But it's ok.

It's only a matter
Of living in ignorance
And embrace happiness.

The precise scale is crooked,
The straight scale is dishonest,
The one that weighs iron
Does not weighs feather,
Or air,
Or fire.

Voices mug
Formless and weightless,
Voices destroy
What hands and songs of many other voices
Have built.

An escaping voice is the choice
Of a tone, a content,
A violence,
A judgement.

To suppress a voice,
On the other hand,
Isn't lightness at all.

We build the world
Surrounding yes' and nos,
Forgetting maybes
And silence.

A shut voice
Bears the same rage
Of a shouting one.

The incompleteness is the reason for life.
To be complete is to be inert,
And to be inert is to not exist.

The need is the origin of every movement,
The dissatisfaction is the hurricane,
Food with no soul
To eat up steadiness.

It is no wonder
That to the condemned
Movements are restricted
In a premature
And with no redemption death

The lamplights
That keep cities safe at night
Are the same
To invert
The skies viewed from above.

Each city a constellation,
A sign,
Seen from afar, inert,
Seen close up, alive,
But there is no gradual transition:
One has to choose how to see it.

When we learned to fly
We saw the world shrink, far away,
Deform,
And these lights,
Small, lost points
Like islands surrounded by darkness
To remind us
We are made of vacuum
More than of matter.

These islands,
Where everything happens
Are our reflex:
Packs on the surface,
We only go deep
Where there is richness,
We shine to those who see us from above
At the same proportion we are invisible.

We are cities,
We are light,
We are vacuum.
A the same time.
Indiscernible,
Inseparable.

In the excess I lose myself
I undress from what moves me
To run in search
Of what makes me run in search
Of what makes me run in search.

Those things I fill
I want to hide,
To put ****** aside,
The shame of not having,
Of not being,
Of not doing,
Making me a slave
Of my desire
To have a desire
To have a desire.

In this plastic sea,
In my plastic look,
In my mold,
In my substance,
Everything deforms
To adapt to novelties
Small as an ant seen from an airplane,
Ephemeral, fugitive,
Undervalued.

To live by news
Is, at the same time,
Deconstruct and complete oneself,
Take off from the body,
Arrive from time,
Float in a jelly
Half present, half future,
To discover
That every history
Is fulfill a time.

To choose the hollows
Is the precise art
Of creating meaning.

What's with my body
It seems to speak thousands of languages
I can't understand.

It would be easier
If every of my systems
Would talk in clear, plain, Portuguese.

Sometimes it's a weird arrangement,
And I think it's all going to be fine,
And I think it's not going to be fine.
But I know it'll be what will be
For we created every chances,
Within every choice.

I know there's a special connection
But what does that stands for
In such different spaces we occupy,
Such different futures ahead,
Such different goals?
We're left with a warmth goodbye
And exhilarating memories.
We have more in our pasts
Than in what's to come.
Probably.
And that's ok.

We'll still have a connection.
We'll still have contact. Probably.
We'll have written part of each other stories
And that's enough.

Our freedoms have outspoken
Plans and flesh and comfort.
But the first aim
Is to seek happiness.
At times, that meant together.
Now it means something else
I'm still trying to figure out.

To be better, always.
That's what I wish for both of us.

If there is a void in me
It's because there is a "me".
It's because there is something being
That once wasn't.
Because every hole
Is just something
Made of something else.

Emptiness is necessary
To be fulfilled,
It's the space of being,
The waiting possibly,
The tiredness that makes us available,
To remove my ego and bring me you,
To approach me to what I see,
For when I see, I'm plain.

The nothingness is the permission,
The origin,
It's too be naked and protected
Of everything that can be "me"
And completeness never allowed.

Five years is my longest season.
I don't know what it is
I keep running from.

Have I hated roots so badly
I can't afford to try it?
Have I been exposed to such opportunities
I prefer to move?
Am I just curious
Or I just get bored?

I do learn a lot
But I only do little with it:
I survive and I delight.
I feel like I drop seeds everywhere
But I fail to nurture them.

What's new for me to try?
An interested phone call,
A Spartan life,
A season as a monk,
A money seeking job
Or a volunteer work?

Every answers lie
On the other side of the fear.

The mind keeps pushing body
Higher, farther, stronger,
Until it is resisted by the impacts
Of a harsh sun,
A draught,
Insensitive words,
That will mold, break and crack.

What's to be done
Is just a choice:
Camouflage the fragile collage
Or to stick it all with a golden glue.

To hide or to expose.
Our selection construct us.

I never leave
Without an intent
To come back.

I step strongly
So I can find my footprints,
I look carefully the landscape,
The coordinates, the relief,
Even the sounds.

But sometimes all traces fade,
There's no point of knowing coordinates
If one doesn't know where he is
Rather than oneself.
The only thing I know:
I'm here, wherever I am.

Even lost
Sometimes I'm surprised
With a glance of a memory;
Maybe I've been here
Ten or twenty years ago,
Maybe it resembles somewhere else.
Still comforting, though.
Memories and returns
Calm me,
Ease my anxiety,
Brings a kind of hope
That has no explanation at all,
An exhilarating and dangerous hope
That keeps me forward
With the expectation that,
Somewhere ahead I'll meet
A future long passed.

I am full of ideas
But too tired to build them.
Ideas to save the world,
Ideas to get rich,
Ideas to have time in abundance,
Ideas to be remembered forever.

I am stuck
In day to day tasks,
In faking a learning,
In accomplishing requirements for a good life,
In the fear of not be self sufficient.

Will those ideas slowly die
Or will they pump me out of the quicksand?
They can only be
What I allow them to.

There once was a lake
Where it is now a cracked soil.
I pumped everything I could
Now nothing is left.

I hope for the rain
For I am too weak to seek water.
I hope to keep living
Despite the living conditions.

The harshest moment
Was when I found myself alone.
It wasn't scary because of solitude,
Or because I wanted anyone else beside me:
I recognized that feeling latent in every other moment,
With good and bad companies,
In pleasant or sad times.

The only company is loneliness
Which is just another name
For our own name.
Now I am not scared of it anymore:
I only saw the ugliness in its face
Because it is how it was always painted
When, in fact, it was just a mirror.

We were taught
To be afraid of ourselves:
That's the only possible reason
Loneliness is so fearing.

I am sorry to say it
But it is necessary to be honest:
I am sick of my politeness.
I don't mean to offend,
I don't mean to be harsh.
But I'm not sorry for everything.
I can't say no more "I'm fine"
To every "how are you?".
Maybe I'm not fine,
Maybe nobody's fine.

I want to be told
When things are wrong,
I want to be criticized
When I do a ****** writing.
I want to learn how to deal with it.

I don't care if it hurts,
Give me truth,
Give me sincerity,
Give me crude information.

I need no more
Politeness as my own shield.
The world is raw.

To be an artist
Is to drain oneself out,
To overflow life and moments and thoughts
To blow away its content
Like a balloon
Refusing to explode.

I am the hand that writes,
The hand that whips,
I am the commit,
The judge and the executioner.

The hand that chooses
To make or let go,
To punish or to caress,
To wave or to touch.

The hand that farm
That composes,
That plays,
That pray,
That curse.

The primary form of communication
The ultimate form of transforming.

I am the hand
Just that
And I am the whole world.

There is a unique type of love
In these contemporary times
Ambiguously living together
Complex types of rages and hatred.

A selective type of love
Like gravity,
Loses intensity at square of the distance.

A different type of love
That recognizes certain gestures:
Claiming, phone calls, phony calls.
And that, at times, refuses others:
An honest "I couldn't", a constructive argue.

Yet, it only exposes
The complexity of love.
Who's to say
What it is and what it isn't
Without any chance of being wrong?

Maybe it is the particular of the feelings:
It is true in the same measure
I believe it is true.

Love coexist with different types of love,
Different types of joy, arrangements, passions.
Kind of fearing and relieving:
A scaring "what are the limits"?
But also a hopeful "what are the limits"?

We spend our time
Building mirrors
So we can see ourselves
Wherever we are, touch, see.

At times we're lost
For we don't resemble
These mirrors anymore.

The truth is
They weren't mirrors
At any time,
But instant captures,
Limited by space, time and depth.

There is nothing to define,
What's old is old,
It's in the past,
It is no more,
It is a memory,
A phantom,
The mess after a party.

Its beautiful lies
In its absence.

Its character
Is a reflex,
A reflux,
Everything it can no longer
Be.

The new
Is everything
That remains.

Pour a bit of ethic in you.
Pour ethic in you.
Pour ethic.
Poetic.

I shut my songs,
Never heard them,
Never played them,
But I insist telling me
They don't exist,
Just as the electricity
Remained hidden for thousands of years:
They are there, somewhere,
In eminence to pop,
To breathe,
To see the daylight.

I neglect them
But I can feel the beat,
I don't know who I'm waiting for,
Which colors they'll be born,
Echoing which tunes,
Heavy or light,
Until I'm able to
See, feel, touch and heal.

The songs are messy,
Brewed as they could,
Unborn, but alive,
Strange, but weirdly harmonic.
Consonant.

The engine runs
Powerful, smooth, reliable,
But misdirected:
Pushing everything towards the cliff.

There's only enough space
For a courageous maneuver
Out of the bridge
Out of the road
Into the uncertainties
Of the sideways.

Every delay
Is hope turning into risk
A maneuver getting harder to perform,
A latent accident emerging
Due to the fear of decision.

Deadlines urge us into action,
No excuses, no overthinking.

I hear the bells
And I see the lights
To request me out of me,
To update me
Lives I lived in other life,
To answer questions I did not make.

I am a filter
Or everything else is a filter,
It is a choice,
Conscious or not.
One either chooses what to see
Or is chosen,
One either has intent,
Or will be intended.

To select is the ultimate art to be learned.

Invade my breath
And occupy my spaces,
It's the world once built,
It's the world to remain.

Every violence is powered
By a strange amusement
That stands a hierarchy:
Soul over mind,
Mind over body,
Body over dirt.

We rise
Powerless but confident
Against the spell of the crowd,
Against the roles and the rules.

We rise to offer options.

It is not expected of men
Any sense of logic
Or any reason.

Maybe we're emotional,
Maybe political,
Maybe ludic,
Maybe Luddite,
Maybe lunatic.

We're attracted to frames,
To guardrails,
Afraid of the ocean,
Afraid of thirst
And of drowning,
Admirers and avoiders of boldness,
Cowardly seeking courage
But hiding when faced
It's raging face.

Maybe it's just me
But, hey, I'm one of you
(At least I put effort into it).

Each of those I see
Is my own extent,
Part of what I am,
And I am part of them
That are part of me.

You look at me as a misplaced past,
The deformed evolution of the perfect
(Or it is only a mirror?)
But I am now a better me,
With a load of sensitivity,
A trigger to a bullet without powder:
The click may tremble your bones
But my sharp edge remains still inside.
What you hear from me
Is what refuses it's own death.

No matter what I'll keep breathing,
For a thousand years
Or beneath the ocean,
I'll still pulse
Out of sight,
Without any shadow,
Bounded by no walls.

I can feel now
The pressure of my fingers in this pen.
It's the same pressure
To vibrate the air,
To load anyone's shoulders,
To explode lips with heavy words,
To keep continents still.

I bear no truth
For my own body is exactly what I can carry.
That's enough for me.
I just train my eyes
To see colors that aren't mine.

Why the language
Not my own,
Not from my land,
Not in my garden,
A cold, simple language?

It is my boundaries
And also my tools,
A mixture of leverage and numbing.

It's a strange stranger language,
Unnatural to me as a third eye
Yet, still, it improved my sight,
Enhanced me,
Enlarged me,
Ridicularized me,
For the sake of my pride,
At the cost of my sleeping hours,
A joke waiting to happen,
A trap I've built
And which I'll fall.

My poems are about me,
About the world I created,
About the world that ceases because of me,
About the poverty of my belongings
And the richness of expectations.

That's why I write:
To put the blanks between the bricks,
To keep the sky at sight
Despite every ceiling,
To make of the bitter taste of despair
A pleasant journey.

Poetry is the slow death
Through immortality,
To unattach from life,
Making me less alive,
But eternal.

I love from dying bit by bit
For it is the closest to me I'll ever be,
The maximum to get from life;
The world is a world of ends,
Our wills reminds us of that,
As the sun or the constant now.

Poetry is to exercise the intensity through calm,
The transformation through the steady,
The moment through time,
To vanish every weight through the supreme weight.

Poetry is the victory
Of ink over men,
Of the possible over the real.

Short poems delight me
Despite a particular fall for Ginsberg.
They often say much
Or say nothing.

But they can be
No more than subtle:
Great in content,
Short in strings.
A paradox that defy
Any communication theory.

Unfortunatelly,
I cannot always
Write long enough
To create a short poem.

My own pleasure
Denies itself.
I spend my moments
Within others' needs
Inside others' heads,
Fulfilling others' desires.

I want to be me
But how can I be?
I want to discover what I'm here for
But where I am?
I want to be complete
But what do I miss?

My pleasure is not mine
Or it is my pleasure
Pleasures that are not mine?

I dream of freedom
But I have no idea
What ties me.

The pleasure
Is something to be understood,
Maybe just lived without considering,
But surely experienced.

To be self centered
Is the only path
To being something else.

I know deeply my solitude,
Its unique smell,
Its thick cloud,
Its condensation,
The solitude within my solitude.

I know I am not there when it comes,
I know that, small or big,
I become tiny,
I know the weights get lost,
The orders become vain,
The moments accumulate
In a constant unperceived passing through.

I know every search for oneself
And for belonging
Cannot be otherwise lonely.
One needs to be lonely in order not to be.

Not without pain
We'll build and destroy systems
An inert and abject belief
To make us more than humans:
A supreme species
With no control or self conscious,
Of individual moaning,
Of lonely joys,
Of the eternal dichotomy between
Be one or be all.

What are the insanities
I use to keep me sane?
Maybe a consuming job,
Or a will to keep flying,
Or saying yes,
Or a self disbelief
To be resistant
To my flaws.

I have to give away
A love, a cat, a car, an apartment,
A traveling bag, a loved shoe,
The phone signal, a guitar, a world map,
intense moments,
So I remain sane and free
To choose a prison to live in.

I shall be naked,
Eaten, chewed and spit,
Until I'm left only
The bones of being
So filters would all be broken
And things would appear
As they are:
No front, no verse;
Whole.

I still lack the courage
To reach my freedom.
I lack the desire to walk,
To step forward,
To dig deeper.

I lack the finesse
To understand what's hurtful,
I lack the ambition
To seek my own identity,
I lack the grit to stand out for myself,
I lack company to keep me warm,
And I lack loneliness to keep me centered.

These days
It seems hard to fill the holes
And every time
I lose parts inside me
And new lacks arise.

It is an exercise
To be one.

I wish I could be
So wise and sharp
My truths were spread.

Would they be more truthful?
Every mindset makes sense
Based on its set of premises.
Would they be any truthful, in fact?

In face of a shapeless modernity
What are we but carriers of self truths
Never to be integrally shared,
Never to echo freely?

We are bearers of our inner worlds
And nothing more,
With a somewhat amplified voice
Equally toned, merging, absorbing every intensity
Until it remains just an indistinguishable grunt.

To be sharp
Is to distune from the crowds,
To make yourself heard
Even if the most difficult part
Is to identify
Which sound is our own.

He who has not,
Even for a minute,
Pondered whether its own life
Should continue or not
Still misses the value of being alive.

Diseases, falls, shots,
None of them kills;
We die for unasked questions,
We die for self ignorance,
Little by little,
Until we are replaced by amnesia.

To breathe is a daily choice
Whether we question it or not.
What we take for granted
Decides how to live,
Where to cross a street,
When to quit a job,
To fight or to freeze,
To jump, to act,
To turn to a monk
And set yourself on fire
Or to ramble on
On commutes, highways,
Air bridges and cruises.

We miss the important questions
For the fear that we won't survive
Their answers.
But questions are not about answers:
They are most certainly delusional.
Questions are about
Discovering the value,
Choosing the weights,
Iterate balance,
Reduce propagated errors.

Life is more appreciated
At the verge
Of our perceptions of reality.

How many of me
Are the ones who live inside me?
What fulfills me is myself
Or just
The reflex of the reflex of the reflex
Of what I see?

Of the world I belong
What form contains my form?
What lazy wills
Assemble the pieces that move me?

I am the dust of the moments
That time insists to maintain,
A skin with no touch
Of the happenings
To surround every boredom and passion.

I am the greatness of the void
And the megalomaniac smallness
Of an expanding universe.
My universe.

I am the content of the last drop
That overflows the jar
Into verses that could not fit me.
And, in every verse,
The worlds of what I should be made of
Replicate themselves indefinitely,
Revealing fleeting opportunities
That only a mindful existence captures.

There is what I do not see,
Or reflexes would have life on their own;
I feel what is not,
Or feeling would be concrete.

I am the filter that sort out
The possible from the impossible
And, thus, to dignify me
I made of lonely verses
Infinite universes
For the impossible choice
Of being in me.

I want to see the rebirth
Of the poetry in everything
That made me dust and shadow,
That absorbed the glow
Into a processed good
To be used as per convenience.

I want to see the light
Hidden in every despair,
The day we end struggling
For we just see no reason anymore.

All the prophecies failed,
The stars are useless,
The books, blank,
We can only count
On our 50 years (or less) left.

Fate gave up picking chances
And we must star the play.
I see that light.
I see the light bright burning my forehead,
Watching me and making me watchable,
The light of the stage
That covers the sight of the audience.

I want to read the full script
Where we reach the turning point,
The plot twist to a different end,
The story where lessons are learned,
The story where memories are clear.
It is not a matter of hope
But of evolution, survival.

With so much in our hands
We can't choose what we want
But we keep on grabbing
With the fear of being naked again,
A cave man with nowhere to go,
The fear of being powerless
Even though we give power away.

We can only have so much
When we have nothing instead.
The art of losing isn't hard to master
Said a poet once.
It is.

Unless we have no choice.

Those who never pondered
Even for a minute
If life is worth continuing or not
Still don't understand life's value.

Anywhere behind the hills
A lazy sun sets
To create the expectations
For the night to come.

My horizon is short sighted:
A kilometer far, at most,
Shortened by the buildings surrounding,
With an eventual glance at the ridges
As a reminder of an outside world,
Limits to civilization,
The extent of our greatness.

Still it is my horizon and I love it.
I love the blocking buildings,
I love the engine noises
Contrasting an inverted clearing
Of trees resisting within the concrete.

I love my sunset,
I love my multilayered sky and its unnamed colors,
I love rooftops I see at a range,
I love the windows blinking,
I love people walking by the street.

That's the thing about horizons:
One either choose a complex view
Or a longing view.
To have both is to have none.

Is it hopeful
To expect a failure
In order to learn deeply?

Is it hopeful to be right
Even if the result is catastrophic?
Or to hope for a blackout
For a dark night to sleep in the city?

What is it hope gives us?
A small carrot in front of our noses,
Or the ability to be super-human?

Is it hopeful
To not believe in hope
But still believe in a brighter future?

Hope is the very most useful thing
Among the useless things.

I still feel the pain
For those who sailed
Through ships towards the unseen.
I ache for their courage
And for their unjust fate.

The world was never the same:
A new order,
A new richness,
New types of suffering,
An unthinkable set
Of both greatness and meanness.

It was not a discovery for a new world,
But for different ideas,
Possibilities that defied
Everything once believed.
Eventually, it somehow turned
Into a new power game.

Those who died
Died for themselves:
The world they were building
They never knew it,
They could not foresee it,
It was not their battle.
They struggled for life,
They flew away from a harsh place
To another harsh place
For they were harsh themselves.

The world would never be the same
For the simple man would never be the same.
They now knew more,
But knew also so little.
As we know little
And think we know everything.
Magellan stood still
While the Earth revolved around him.
We are still,
We are the same,
Great and mean,
The same.
Colonized and colonizers.
The same.
The clock turns around twice every day,
Rivers turn to ocean that turn to cloud that turn to rivers.
Life dies to feed new life,
We get on top to be the base to something else get on top.
We aim so high we reach the base.
We heat everything up so much things freeze.
We imagine a space so big it can only exist within our tiny heads.

The courage is to extend yourself,
But for that we need to diminish us.
We can't be big in order to be big.
We must be tiny persons,
Limited, short-sighted, blindfolded,
So we can see what can't be seen.
The courage is not
To fight storms or drift with no tools.
The courage is not to bet life in your ideas,
But to have no ideas at all
And still bet your life.

What we call discovery
Is not an act, is a way of living.
We call discovery
To arrive at a party
Everybody else was,
But we didn't know about it.
That's ignorance.

The real discovery
Was never a continent,
Or the conquer of vast rich lands.
The only thing discovered
Was the new limits to our imagination.

Something we are really lacking these days:
New boundaries for our thoughts.
We are cloistered by what we see
And still asking
What is it suffocating us
When it is just
We are forgetting to breathe all the time.

Every fight
Shall be forgotten
Even by those who fought them.
If not the battles,
At least their reasons.

So much has been conquered,
So much left to be.
Every step back
Will be a leverage
For a stronger step forward.

I shall lose my whys,
I shall diminish the need
For further fights,
But I hope at least
To keep believing
In a brighter future
Always to come.

I watch attentively
Movements, orders, patterns,
Results, outputs, behaviors.
I depend on them.
I copy them.
I apprehend them.

Like a chameleon
Whose biggest fear
Is to be spotted,
To miss colors,
To be highlighted.

Is it hunger
Or anxiety,
Or a desire to keep concentrated?
The result is
A ***** keyboard,
Sticky fingers,
Unnecessary eating
And a need to brush the teeth.

What can I do
Against myself?
I want different things
And how to choose
Between a regret now
And a regret in the future?

The desire for greatness
Is what keeps me
From doing things.

I am so worried
To be great,
To deploy perfection,
That it hurts to engage projects,
To produce,
To create.

It paralyzes me
And nothing is done.

Never to be badly spoken,
Never to be praised.
Forgetfulness or a change
are the only destinies.

Soft voice and lyrics
Gently moving the air
Accompanied by a well played guitar
To be my company for the night.

When somnolence reach me
I will be far gone
Surfing scales, tones, harmonies,
Knowing not where to arrive:
Drifting in words
To be touched by the waves,
Asking questions
Whose answers will always be indirect.

The guitar invites me
To 50 bpm,
To calmer thoughts,
And, all of sudden
All I can hear
Is its reverberation
Within my empty body,
Filled only by the vibrations
To guide me to the real me:
A thoughtless being
Immersed in a mix of feelings,
Sensations, senses and faith.

My new bedroom
Is the closure of a history,
A roller coaster of joy,
Boredom, unity, experiences and routine.

My new bedroom has a beautiful morning light
To wake me up early
To remember of a work to be done,
Of a walk out of home.

My new bedroom
Is my new status
Half way to freedom,
Half way to be stuck to my past,
Half way of happiness,
Half way of longing.

My new bedroom
Is a statement of my privacy
Although I often feel naked anywhere.

My new bedroom
Contains my vision,
My order,
My mess.

My new bedroom
Is the sign of movement,
Of stepping forward,
Even though it is inside the same house
With the same inhabitants,
With the same routine.

It is just a bedroom.
It is all that is different.
It is a conquest.
It is nothing more than a small change.