I recognize in your look
The burning of an extinguished fire,
A new warmth to resemble a cooled one.

I return to towns
I long ago left
And the lack of creativity
Of the street names,
Of the organization form,
All the details
Teleport me from city to city,
Benjamin Constant Street, Anapolis, to
Benjamin Constant Street, Ribeirão Preto, to
Benjamin Constant Street, São Paulo.

I could only climb one mountain
For the fear of resemblance.
Every uphill and every downhill
In the search of the first time,
The first feeling,
The never returning unexpected.

I fear resemblance,
I fear the repetition,
I fear the moment where I'll see life
From the rearviewmirror
For the path ahead
Is very well known.

We humans are so good
To see patterns
That even new adventures
Seem like dull routine.

The only cure is
To watch the sunrise
Three days in a row.

Freedom is to understand
What are the rules that imprison us
And use it to evolve,
Like the water of a river,
Restrained by gravity,
Keep going down
In order to grow
Inevitably to meet
A more tempered version of itself.

Every word
Invokes dozen books
Hundreds of stories
And all my 940 million seconds of life
Building up to a super story
In seek of a masterpiece
To say "I did it".

There will be no masterpiece.
All words found their way
Into a dance of images
To be where they fitted the most
With sometimes unclear roles
And an improvised script
Even after exhaustive rehearsal.

Negligence is my way
To be excused
For not having the right inspiration,
A sabotage
To bear a failure.

I should stand
Against a more primitive error
Rather than a sophisticated one:
The error of not bringing life to ideas
Instead of the error of a work done.

For more trying and less freezing.

We keep searching
Amplifiers to extend us,
We shout loud
To absorbing walls,
Sound proof, isolated,
Only to fail to hear our own voices.

It is a deed to all ears
To seek the frequencies,
The rhythm underneath
The hollow sounds of the surface.

We ought to peel
Watchful for signals
Of resonance,
Respect the echoes
That strengthen ourselves.

Life is revolving,
Every straight line,
Extended enough,
Will meet its own end,
Ending on a beautiful circle
To be part of a particular cadence,
Its own rhythm.

Everything can be measured
In revolutions per minute.

I knew what it was about,
I agreed and I wanted.
Turns out, things were different.
Now I want to explore further,
I want life to be more,
I want it to be transit,
I want melt things into fluidity,
I want to be unleashed,
I want be part of someone else's envy
(What does that say about me?).

I expected nothing
And yet, now I can't
Be where I was,
Contained.

It's not expectation that frustrates.
It is the void after a great experience.

A walk into the office
Is the run from the house
Where fears live,
Bills must be paid,
Food must feed,
Order must reign.

To walk back home
Is to run
From the anxiety
Of never have things done,
Accomplishments found like Dodos,
Value created as alchemists created gold
From nothing.

And our families
Are a bond with our past
Not so much relevant now,
But still a remaining bond
Of which getting rid of
Does more damage
Than sticking to it.

And our ideas of all of these
More harmful than alcohol
Drugs, cars, smoke, cancer,
War, conflicts, intolerance,
Cholera, ebola, hypertension,
Drowning, guns, police,
Sharks, snakes, angry dogs,
Earthquakes, hurricanes, flood,
Stairs, scissors, power plugs.

We are killers and healers
With the same vocabulary,
The same set of rules,
The same creation,
But it does not matter,
Things will happen.

There is a little bit of
Freewill for us to understand
It is only a part of the world.

I sorrow
For the choices
We do
In order to feel
Social.

A perfect type of style,
One I can't run from,
Too much craziness
To be crazy,
Yet a bit of reasoning
To refuse any order.

A type of hair
That says
"I'm mine, I'm yours,
And none at the same time."
Teeth that tells me
What you've been eating,
Feet that tells where you've been,
And everything's fine.

Though your smell
Still unrecognizable,
I have my own thoughts about that.
Maybe they're wrong,
But, who cares?

You are my image,
My contours, my opera,
And nothing.
A schizophrenia,
A delusion,
Or worse,
A socially constructed ideal.

I'll fight it with every fiber
Even if it costs
The long promised happiness
Of a simple, magical and real world.

The world (I'm convinced)
Is none of those three.

All of a sudden,
Words strike
Bringing form to forms,
Images to images,
A torpid reality
Of shades, of maybes,
Of what we think.

All of a sudden
These words surprise
Into something new,
Unsaid, untouched,
Unscouted, unbelieved.

All of sudden
Words turn to maps,
To directions in the fog,
To whistles in the woods,
Magnetic fields,
Useless until discovered.

New words,
New worlds,
New sense of living,
Something new
Put into pages
To remark time,
Characters, faces,
Traces, History.

Hail to what has been
And could have been told.
Everything else
Is vanished in the maze
Of weather, memory,
Sand, dust, dirt, clay, mud, earth.

Hail to what is now,
The descendants of Ozymandias,
The remains of Tutankhamen,
The blow of Aristotle,
Nothing could be now
Without anything that has been.

We
Just happen.

Somethings wound on the surface,
Somethings go deep.
It does not depend
Only on the sharpness of the knife
But also of the strength of the body.

Sometimes we know
Words mutilate
And, deliberately,
We mutilate
For the sadism
To see the red blood running.

But we mostly want to heal
Yet many damage is made
Without the need of intention
As if we can't handle
The power of a knife
We can't drop
But refuse to master.

We keep cutting.

Every sheet of paper
Desires nothing
And continue to be
A sheet of paper
After been drawn
A fine art draw.

It does not matter
What things are
But all their history,
What they've been through.

Picasso turned into Picasso
For histories printed
Into canvas
Turned into Picasso paintings.
Not the other way around.

We are the history
We imprint the world around.
Objects are just
The touchpoint.

If I get something to hide
I'd say it would be
Nothing to embarrasses me,
Nothing others would laugh
If only they could find,
Nothing to put me
In an inferior position.

What I would hide
Is this sense of superiority
Heir of humility
Flavored with the ignorance
Of a child that did not had a chance
To put its finger in a power plug.

Every time this pops up
I end up dangerously stronger.

I woke up Wednesday
Knowing it was Tuesday,
In a desire for more Saturday,
Fitting your Monday's eyes,
With the Thursday's anxiety
For the never coming Friday
Expecting no less than a Sunday.

Stay, stay, stay,
Says the voice
That know
That the difference
Between stay and leave
Is a decision.

It is bold to fly,
To distance from feet on the ground,
Of the roots we try to create,
Of the soil we recognize,
Of the short (beautiful) horizon.

We need a lot to fly,
We need instruments,
We need pilots,
We need machines.

But we know it is beautiful,
We want to see new perspectives,
We want to go to other lands,
Other languages,
We'll see many other rivers
In an expanded horizon.

But finally we need to land.
To fly is easy; to land, not.
We count on a whole team to do so.
It's the way it happens that changes everything:
A gentle kiss on the ground
Or a disastrous impact on the ocean.
The same thousandths of seconds
But with very different futures.

And we are so used
To being landed
That we don't know how to touch the ground ourselves,
There's always a pilot,
A crew,
We forget to know how to recognize the terrain,
To wear a parachute,
To chose when to jump.

It's always risky,
But not to take it
Is to be, everytime,
Where everyone else is.

Aterrisage is terrifying.

In this story
Nothing is about life and death:
Everything is about life and life,
The life that has been seen,
That has been wanted,
That was never imagined,
And that was never possible.

Death is a solved problem:
We die.
Even suicide is to think about life.

To live is to decide.
Always.

Maybe the future
Is our maximum possibility
To build the bridges
Between what has been
And what insists to be.

It is where there is permission,
The chance in raw state,
The only place where ambiguities
Reside peacefully.

In the future I dissolve
The cuts from today
And if, from what has not yet been,
I think of what is now,
I make things differently from what I would
And life is no longer the same.

If the becoming
Is so substrate,
All that not yet exists,
But somehow arranges in-between my ideas,
Create parallel futures
Of such unreal things,
They mirror the world such as it is.

To realize what does not exist
Brings life to emptiness.
There is no "not be" -
It s extremelly unstable -
For thinking it is creating it.

The becoming is microexplosions
of the instability of the "not be"
That soon morphs into the most probable
And everything is just exactly as it could be.

Change precedes the existence.

"Where" is any junction
Of two spaces,
Two parallels in the common infinite,
Finally touching,
The realization that all extremes meet themselves
Like the skin-envelopment of a body:
Everything closes in themsleves
Inside something bigger.
There is nothing analytical in it,
But two curious eyes
Dissolving what t sees
To avoid the certainties
Of this hard, impassable world.

All movement is a rearrange,
A fugue or search for balance,
But never indifferent.
There are potentials everywhere
And there is just where we get the discomfort,
That thing that puts us in movement,
That air mass that occupies
What just a moment before was my body.

All that transforms
Leaves behind
Traces of the irreversible,
The dust that no longer will be soil,
The cracks that no longer will be building,
The explosion that no longer will be bomb.

All encloses in the extremes.
The coldest cold, absolute,
Lean lightly absolute hotness,
And the dichotomy disapears,
Everything ends up in a circle
And what once took far
Can only lead to the starting point.

The farther we can go
Is the exact place we are.

Beneath the skin
Lies a new layer of skin,
Hiding a third level of skin,
That conceals the ugliness
Of functioning organs.

The air is the extension of my lungs,
The grass, the extension of my feet.
This skin, in all these layers
Are made actually to cover
My own body to see the world outside.

Everything I dare to say "mine"
Are those things that lie
Beneath the skin.

There is many we do
To prive ourselves
From move freely
Within structures.

We commit to truisms
We say thoughts
Born in others' minds,
We take the easy ways
Only to be away
Of the responsibility
Of being free.

It's not that we don't want to be free.
We just don't dare to.

A mattress to the floor
Bent, thin,
Something to soften
Its rough fabric
Is enough to hold
My every regret.

The sleep is heavy,
The mind is light,
Sometimes even
With reasons not to be.

There is something
Like a survivor instinct
That makes me forget
Damage, bruises,
There is a certain dementia
To keep things going on.

The mattress
Is now
About to merge
To the floor.

Remind me
Of my lack of sleep
Of my favorite singers,
Of the irrelevance of politics,
Of tenderness,
Of despair,
Of unexpected beneath predictability,
Of purring,
Of tiny paws,
Sharpen nails over my shoulders,
Of big swinging bellies,
Of strange sounds.

They remind me
Laziness is a virtue,
A kind of resistance
To the big city pacemaker.

The cats
Look at me
With blinking yellow eyes
To remind me
To be naked of thoughts,
To forget a bath,
To bring back
The humility of allegedly
Superior intelligence.

The cats cry
For we forget
How to be comfortable
With our own loneliness
When all we had to do
Was to walk around the house
Like it was the first time.

Every discover
Is a new way
To start
Things we do
Every day.

Anyway you call it
It's a label,
Virtual, invisible,
Post real,
Post truth,
Things are things
Not the name they have.

Change the names
Our minds change,
But it is inside:
the outside remains.

There is nothing more to words
Than senseless vibrations
We use to attach things.
We live delusional states
Where we think
Verbs, nouns, prepositions,
Trying to locate
Minds into grounds,
But we forget their nature,
That they're tools,
Deceiving, necessary tools,
Simplistic, manipulative tools,
Practical, addictive tools.

Lately I've been realizing
To be truthful
The only start
Is in the the anti words space,
The reverse map of reality:
All that is known, hidden,
And all that is mystery, shown.

Otherwise the only thing to do
Would be to hope
To find a new continent
On everyday commute.

For those who won't live through it,
I ache and I grind for everything
I haven't done.

There's those whose temper
Could not be contained
By their own history,
Stripped from their truthiness,
The only result is to attack,
To shorten others' integrity.

I cry a cry of remorse
To the humanity
We fail to carry
When one of us refuses
To share its load.

This cry without tears
(Frailty contained,
Rage tamed
And sharpened thoughts)
Is not to be heard:
Only silent weapons are useful.

A surprise attack is imminent.
The sound is an enemy,
But silence will spread,
Contagious and strong,
A wave of love and warmth
To overcome shots and shouts.

When they least expect
We'll all be covered
With the blanket of compassion.

There can only be rhythm
Subject to a passing time.
Existence is against remaining,
Equilibrium is the cause of all death,
All resistance is change.

To stay when invited to leave,
To let live when shouts call merciless death,
To be space when asked only surface.

The thoughts of yore
Are no longer welcome
There is already too much past
Stick to the structures,
To the looks, the fears, the hierarchy,
The privileges and the possessions.

Steadiness itself
Is at a countdown to extinction,
The death of death
And the rise of immortality,
The new mindset
That will conquer galaxies and caves
Will emerge:
Always changing, always new,
Always self-discovery.

Everything else is vanity.

Let me accumulate doubts
Stepping carefully in swamps
(Please, don't bother the smell,
You may not be used to it).

I run from maps and fences,
The lenses of superb.
Believing any truth
Is less sure
Than fortresses in clouds.

All is there to do
Is to change;
To remain is to sink.
At the best case scenario,
A free fall to the uncertain ground.

I feel the pillow under my head
Make it even heavier.
Its plasticity
Conforming to my skull
Bending to my inert thoughts
Remind me of my own distortion.

My space is liquid
Yet my body is solid,
My intention to melt my body
Vaporized my space:
They are always out of phase.

In mismatches I keep finding other sides of me
In my dreams (I can't hardly remember them)
I am all the strength I want to be,
But to rest is a burden,
As my pillow
Always remember
My own flaccidity

Nothing produces more
Than obligation,
Nothing produces poorer
Than obligation.

I feel my world moving
I feel obligated to keep moving
But that can only come from
My own need to keep moving.

The problem with circles
Is that they never have a begin or an end,
Yet we inadvertently keep looking for them
In a naive effort to delegate
Vain motivations.

Things we only learn
So when they happen again,
Too late,
We regret
We didn't notice them earlier.

I need it,
More than richness,
More than butter and bread,
More than wine and dope,
And I don't know why I need it.

The addiction
Is justified,
I've been told
To be the future,
To be the hope,
To be the hardworking success,
To be free while stuck with desires
Of grandness and achievements.

The cure is yet to be found
Probably in places I can't reach:
Things I have never lived,
The forced detachment of starving,
The definite destination of a free fall,
The coldness of a star roof.

The diagnosis is clear:
To have everything
Leads to a quest
Effortless to the unreachable.

Sometimes we just go
We leave because it is the only thing,
The only reason,
The only way
To run from running,
To retire,
To rest
For staying consumes much,
For the songs and its lyrics
Are just deceiving
Symbols never to be cracked
Or just outdated.

But leaving suspends
The actions of a change
Everything remains,
But at a distance,
In strange places
Of a mazing memory.

To leave is to accept
Things as things,
Unchanged by abandonment.

But, sometimes,
It is the only reason
When all other reasons
Completely dragged power out of
Our will to stay.

Poem yourself
For nothing expects nothing from you.
You can only be
Rhyme, rhythm and content.
Everything else
Is superflouous.

I call friends
Those who
I have been drunk with,
But not only that -
That'd be too easy.

To be my friend
One has to have seen me
Dressed in womens' clothes,
Or have watched Juno for the first time,
Or have watched Lion King over and over,
Or have seen bright new colors together,
Or crossed an ocean with me,
Or shared during 5 years dreams of a lifetime,
Or dragged me out of a downward spiral,
Or have been invited to my parents' house,
Or new it had no locks (most of the time),
Or have played 16-bit games with me,
Or have me sleeping out of home,
Or traded a party for a school work,
Or fought with a friend to leave to the party,
Or took me for a brother, and still does it,
Or sheltered me when I was desperate,
Or took me in for a job,
Or partnered in an enterprise with me,
Or shared all toys with me,
Or hold me when I was all cracks,
Or adopted street cats with me,
Or have known me for more than 25 years
(and endured me at least 50 days a year),
Or introduced me to movies and music,
Or expanded my horizons with philosophy,
Or criticized my guitar playing,
Or have been a sister to me,
Or have jumped from a moving car,
Or shared a 16-people house with me,
Or have shown me underground culture,
Or have played in a bar with me while 5 years old,
Or have played football (Brazilian-like) at least 30 times,
Or have changed a name for a Pokémon,
Or have lived with me in a hunted house,

Every bit I am
Somehow, I owe it to you.

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.

We are nothing
And every attempt to be
We lose bits of being
Into our void.

Like a river rising itself
Losing water,
Losing power,
Remaining only scratches on a plain.

We seek grandiosity
But we are already to big to cross
The cracks of peace, of rightness,
We are too rigid when we ought to be fluid,
We are humans but we run from it
Whenever we forget
Every little moment
Should be taken care
Like an injured bird:
At the end, it must fly
In order to see a shrinking world.

The distorted mirror
Can look inside,
Can translate inner horrors
Into real actions.

Yet, we look at it,
Unbelieving,
Discrediting,
But it is out there:
We've seen it
And now that we know it,
There's nothing else we can be.

We are what we put outside,
Combined with what we nurture inside.

Now I need
Things that heal.

The distilled poison
Hidden beneath the purity mantle,
Disguised with the smell of perfume,
Can't be distinguished from pure air.

The monster of insanity,
Fed by fear,
Grew larger than ourselves.
Bravery is the only way
Whenever danger is out.  

To heal is to resist.
The absurd is to succumb.

I am tired of truth,
Of certainty,
Of data,
Of arguments,
Of news,
Of memes,
Of catchphrases,
Of ads,
Of cursing,
Of judgment,
Of coherence,
Of passion,
Of sharing,
Of exposing,
Of convincing,
Of fearing,
Of discussing,
Of trying,
Of holding the world on my shoulders,
Of hating,
Of eloquence,
Of pretending,
Of believing,
Of disbelieving,
Of being alert,
Of being numb,
Of hearing,
Of seeing,
Of being in the same places over and over again.

The time is right
To move on, and move on only.

If we have never discovered sinusoids
Any repetition would be unnoticed,
Time would be linear,
History would be unnecessary.

But every now and then
Numbskulls attempt
To awake buried ghosts
As if memory would only serve
To revive the past
Rather than being
An instrument for learning.

**** you mathematicians
For exposing the ups and downs
Beyond any logic of continuity.

**** anyone who can look at it
And still not see the pattern.

There will always be
A better argument.
There will always be
Doubt within open thoughts.

Stressing them long enough
Will lead to, inevitably, fatigue.
Not less an argument
To keep seeking
A wider truth.

Every truth ceases to exist
If tested long enough.

To hate hate is different than hate
But as far as possible to love.

That's the way with negatives:
They look like they cancel themselves
But math never found a way
Into our real lives.

There is no way to reach love
Rather than love itself.

Obvious things are not stamped,
They are hidden beneath the carpets,
They are shout in between words
(But never represented by them),
Seemingly obvious things are misleading.

Let the cannons come:
My flowers are awaiting.

There is no point in waiting,
In expecting the savior,
In hoping for the best,
In claiming and claiming.

The profane History got so nostalgic
With the programmed amnesia
Regardless of goodness or badness
Of the times ever lived.

All we've been left
Is a shallow interest
To match anything
Of what we already are.

There is no place else to go
Rather than where we already are.
The only option, then, is to fight.

Technical books
Never made
Good people.

Only
Feelings
Do.

I wanted, truly, to believe
That this fire in the words and the eyes
Won't get our hands *****
Of clay, cement,
Of walls to face to,
That this same fire
Won't consume all the air we breathe,
Won't reduce to dust
All the ornament and all the content
That bonds us,
And all the remains
Are looks to the floor,
The first degree burns,
The second degree burns,
And those, more serious, but not painful,
Third degree burns.

I cannot believe
That this is a phony, fictitious,
Neither a harmless fire.
The awake of any sleeping volcano
Is more serious than those known, measured.

It is not the blow of the words
That make fire;
It is made in the stomach,
With all the acids ingested,
With poisoned food,
In the masochism of cultivating
Unnecessary pain,
In the sadism of wanting to see this pain
In any other eyes,
In the self denial as also a poison producer.

We are alone, naked, hands *****,
In cubicles, over a soft soil of the ashes,
Protected from everything,
Except ourselves.

I find meaning
In the dark shadows of death,
In the thoughts of missing parts,
Of what has been excluded,
On things our childish existence can't notice.

Whereas you, in your anchor to life,
Find meaning in the deepens of yourself,
Your body and the immanent love,
The contact with whatever can be felt,
In the euphoria of self discovery.

As a consequence,
Our house is too big for us,
The future, too repetitive,
I cannot contain life within me,
And all you do is hold on to it.

There's beauty in all of them,
It's, beside all metaphysics,
A matter of the space we occupy,
At the same time,
At the same coordinates.
Too much we compete for the same place
We end up in complete different desires.

I watch a man passing by
Doing nothing more with my time
Counting his steps,
Hearing the wooden-like sound of his shoes,
His walk was my walk,
My eyes followed him,
My mind slowly melted his.

With my body standing still
And my wandering mind,
I could exist in two places at a time,
I could see myself from far away,
While remained tied to the chair by the window.
I could open my safe of secrets,
Old rusted chambers
Where I long ago hid my shames,
My fears of exposure,
My incompleteness,
My anti-hero inherent in myself.

I saw the beauty and the ugliness inside,
I saw a oneself, myself, ambiguous,
Duplicated and conflicting,
Incoherent (but not less real),
I heard musics never written
For their lack of sense,
I found meaning within sands of logic,
I discover flaws and shouted them
Testifying my own matter.

But all from a distance,
In the walk of a stranger,
In the innocent look of shoes tapping the asphalt,
In the confused thoughts of a suddenly awaken child.
All of that can only be done
In a delusional state of being
For distance
Is our only weapon
Against ourselves.

I'm happening in between
The real and the nothingness,
Divided and undecided,
Waiting for the ultimate prove
Of a sure choice.

I'm caught between
The wheels and the leather,
Cotton and glycerin,
Fruits and caramels,
Meats and grains,
Wind and coal,
But existing in all of them at once.

There's pain, passion and desire
In the seek of gold,
In pursuit of patents,
In achieving medals.

There's a unique relaxation
In the void of beings,
In dematerializing that inner voice,
In decharacterizing oneself,
But still self recognizing simultaneously,
An identity stored in the clouds
Like Theseus' ship.

The subtle finding
Is to realize that the actually real stuff
Are the ones that can't be touched;
Everything in matter
Are nothingness, perceived only
Through the illusion
Of the senses.

We strive for numbers
To seek productivity,
Followers, approval,
But most of the time,
They come unexpected.

To think in things we see
Is to see less;
Numbers are as distracting
As distant thoughts
In things we could reach
If whatever "ifs" happened.
Feelings must be whole,
Untamed,
For the sake of whatever we have
Rather than feelings.

Numbers are lack of confidence.