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.

As I sit here writing
my heart beats like a hammer,
squeezing bitterly blood
to  trembling hands
busy writing words they can't understand,
guided by a brain that barely thinks now,
contained with anger and rage,
with eyes that only see red,
ears that only hear screams,
nose that smell iron and steel,
and a rough feeling in my skin,
everything flows devastating the surroundings
(but flows nevertheless),
I feel it in my toes, in my nails,
in the hair over my head,
my stomach starts digesting itself,
my gut warns me "something ain't right",
my muscles, now I remember they're somewhere,
they tighten up,
ready to fight,
read to fly.
I grow, I defy,
I occupy the space around me,
I resist,
I hurt me, I hurt others,
I scream, I lose my voice,
I write and I silence.

Then everything stops, and, suddenly,
the rapids flow into the lake.

Every time my city comes to me
I find it hard to seek my buried treasures.
They still exist, but layers and layers
Of novelties, of sediments, of landscaping
Make them miss my eyes.

Every time my city comes to me
I am in a different shape, but recognizable,
Old stories cross by, new futures become possible,
Life goes on, but never again in the same way.

Whenever my city arrives with its lights on,
Inviting eyesight and welcoming reflections,
I know I am grateful for every footprint
carved on some fresh cement on the sidewalks,
For every friend met in the way,
For the bonding loneliness,
For the distracting crowd,
For the provincial beliefs (to be conflicted).

Every time my city comes to me
I know and I don't know
The good things and the bad things,
That happened here, all at once.

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.

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.

Words cross me as a knife
In a certain kind of retaliation.
Right or wrong doesn't matter,
It only matters what people say.

I must remember
That words are not sharp
- We hear them sharp.
We let them cut,
We let them in our heads,
We let them overflow in tears,
Sometimes ours, sometimes in others' eyes.

But I carry the weight
Of bleeding someone else's heart,
And agonize myself as a morbid
And undesired consequence.

The dry blood begins the healing at some point,
Or turns to hemorrhage.
We shall take care,
Soften words,
Soften what goes out in the light,
Even though some cuts are inevitable.

Red lights around,
Low movement,
The hot air
Just above the ground,
Freezing cold above it,
And the foggy view,
Precising my coordinates:
São Paulo,
The instant karma
Or no karma at all.

The eternal rumble
Humming like Mutants sounds
Confuses my nostalgia
(What is it that I'm hearing?),
And the more I stay,
More roots turn to branches,
More passing faces seem familiar,
And your songs make deep sad sense,
Losing the sadness, losing senses again,
Never ever the same.

A city,
Just a city,
That wouldn't meet
Self esteem if it was not
For the brizzle.

You resemble anywhere
As long as one sees
Signs and the streets' names,
For no one resemble you,
But, yet, all is contained.
The right and the wrong,
The worth, the width,
The asphalt and the airplanes,
The loneliness, the crowds,
The invisibles
And the acquainted that never crossed by,
All circumscribed within the limits
Of your endless boundaries.

To say yes is a form of conquer,
Every "yes" is a position in the universe,
A pin on a very complicated map,
A self giving action,
It's establishing yourself in the world.

It maintains the direction,
It leads always forward,
It reinforces itself.
Say yes twice, and you keep going.

No is the choice hidden,
Is a different path,
A nonconstructive but, nevertheless,
Essential and transforming word.
It's just us in ourselves,
Keeping distance,
Depriving the substance,
It is to assume the totality
By rejecting that pin,
That once marked
An intransigent position.

The point is not about "yes" or "no",
But the mere fact
We do not have
An in-between word.

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.

The deepness
Avoids the surface to break up,
Just as time helps deepness
To keep existing.

For matter to be
It must be supported
By all that cannot be.

It is not important
How big a thing is:
its surroundings will always
be bigger.

To exist is small,
An irrelevant exception
To the greatness of
The infinite of openness.
But exceptions matter:
Bubbles are an insignificant,
Magically beautiful,
Exception of the vast air.
Ephemeral due to its
Lack of deepness,
Amazing for its frailty:
A perfect metaphor to life itself.

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.

I choose to be in São Paulo
As someone who chooses to be born,
As if choice was inhabited
By the fragments of what wasn't chosen.

I choose this impossible arrangement
Of someone who is but does not want to,
Or who wants to be, but is not.
Of living here plainly
Without tearing,
Of a possibility to live here,
Without the sacrifice of living here,
Of a routine forged for chaos,
To shatter yourself to be a whole
Of 20 million stories.
Of this forever transit
To settle somewhere.

I let water almost boil
For the coffee that is more than coffee:
It's the content of your rhythm, your flavor
Bitter, despite the sugar,
It's your story and your present
(in heavy homeopathic doses).
More is told in coffees than in books.

If tomorrow the world contains you no more,
Everything will go on.
Except the choice of what I wanted:
I want you, even though it's a wanting of not wanting.

The madness that doesn't grow
Does not fully consume me,
That keeps alive the useless sanity.

The madness that exhibits the unreal,
Making everything else real.

The madness of being what I never wanted,
or wanting what I never was.

This madness,
Crazy by lucidity,
Wize for losing itself
In the meanders of all possibilities.

I am crazy for all inexplicable bets,
Crazy to take by uncertain
All that my existence proves.
Crazy to wake up every day
Waiting for the hour to sleep to wake up.

Crazy, yet alive;
Alive, yet healthy;
Whole, complete,
Occupying the spaces
With my empty mind,
In the infinite
Of my tiny madness.

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.

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.

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.

The world expands irreversibly
With every new event
Thus, the only way feasible
Is into the unbounded
possibilities of the future.

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.

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

You've just missed
the starting gun,
and you missed again.

It is not the noise that escaped you,
it is not the muscles that failed,
it is not your brain who mislead.

Feel the track, the traction,
feel the wind slowly growing with speed,
listen your own, intense, heartbeats.
Feel your empty lungs, tired.

Fatigue, pain,
all you will feel.
Compete: lose and win.
Believe the race,
believe the run,
and they exist.

I once heard a story
That a man, alone,
Built his empire,
Dealt with all his ****,
Fought armies single handed.

He would follow his plans,
Be appreciated for his good work,
Defy all injustices,
Defeat his own corruption.

Of course it is a story,
Not because of all the accomplishments,
Or the act of bravery,
Open chest against the world.

What makes it unbelievable
Is remaining steady throughout it all.
To build oneself
Is to change oneself.

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 in need of a routine,
A habit to keep me disciplined,
To maintain my goals on track,
To make my joy productive,
To put into the world
Everything I think
I can do to make it good.

Relentlessly I fight
This urge to reach greatness,
I feed the monster father of procrastination
Delaying laurels and rejection
For an inexplicable fear.

I need a routine
To allow me mediocrity,
And the immediate consequence of evolution.

I need to act,
More and more,
Frequently,
Carelessly,
Intentionally.

Act is the inevitable movement
That accompanies the one-way arrow of time.

Every house
Has another house within.
In the smells, the roughness of the walls,
In the little cracks
That barely are seen.

The voices remain there,
The dreams remain there,
Our gentle touches remain there.

It is also in the furniture.
The same house with different furniture
Is another house, with another house.
The tables lose their colors,
And is still a table,
A chair changes until no chair endures:
It is a tree once again,
In a forest of other chairs
And doors, and wardrobes.

We cannot sit anymore,
We cannot rest,
Neither be there:
It's somebody else's house.

But between the cracks
The air blows
A distinct sound
Of every spoken words
In this house
Of fathers, mothers,
Sons, workers, masons.

Bricks are just bricks.

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 do not know the colors I cannot see,
and the frequencies I do not listen.

I do not know the ideas that does not serve as mirrors,
and the images that are not my own.

The moon remains remote without my footprint.

Everything I know, I own;
What I do not know is not mine, does not fit me

I fear the unknown because I fear what I am not:
I fear my poverty because poor I never was
I fear death because dead I have never been
I feared light before seen it for the first time

But the unknown is bricks and frames of my creation;
I only learn from things that are obscure to me.

I can only truly learn what I fear.

Every attempt to reach an answer
Is wrong fundamentally:
The premise that there is an answer.

Truth is only found
Where it cannot be sought;
Every rationalization is a lie
That, nevertheless, makes sense
If we believe in it.

Pure truth is overrated
For it is real
And real we cannot conceive.

Anxiety is the absence of present,
Is the thoughts forgetting the body
Is the victory of the boredom, of the things that may never be
Is the waiting in boarding room for a delayed flight (a real flight?)

It is the interrupted breath,
Missing the air, although sick of air,
To be drown in tricky small chances, holding up to impossibilities

The fear of incapacity,
Rejoice in our own setbacks,
The silent scream, aborted, buried in guilt, remorse and curses
To doubt yourself for no reason at all,
To live miserably and scare death itself with pain

Walk without ever reaching a corner.
To look for a bar and to not have a bar, or
To look for a bar, finding a bar and to not want a bar.

To **** and to account at the same time,
Close the eyes and see monsters,
Open the eyes and see monsters,
Attack the monsters with other stronger monsters
(who stop, smell your fear and end up turning against you),
To know that all monsters are yours,
Fed and incited by you like dogs in a junkyard
(at some point you stop to see your own body bitten to the bones by them)

It is to quench your thirst with poison,
Build up walls around yourself to protect from your own assaults.

Anxiety, my friend, is the rise of non-sense, of the unreal.
Past and future does not coexist with present.
Just wake up.
WAKE UP, little fool.

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.

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've seen the sunset today
So I could say:
Set myself into complete ignorance,
Into the grandness of irrelevance,
Of an irreverent existence,
Just to be, once again,
A shadow, never contained by light,
Diminished by sunbeams,
Uncontained within my own forms,
Informed by anything surrounding,
Nonconformist by the rule,
A follower by design,
Bounded by a thin membrane
Half permissive to toxicity and medicine,
Filtering dreams and passions and connections
And that same red light of the sunset,
That one profusely shining million color tones in the sky,
That one that reminds me every day I forgot to seek it,
That one majestically telling me the distant limits of the world,
Pushing night no matter what.

Set me up, for night is a friend.
Set me down, make me sleep while you're awake,
Set me into a wheelchair, down a ladder,
Uncontrolled, but just for fun,
Set me with a straitjacket,
Set me with anger, **** my innocence,
Set the controls at the highest volume,
Explode my eardrums and whisper spells of happiness,
Let darkness prevail
For the most beautiful feelings
Require fertile soil to flourish.

Half ways are not halfs,
They're two thirds or more,
The midpoint does not account
For the prior doubts,
The self empowerment,
The fights against our louder inner judging voices.
They're midpoints,
But most of the world
Is hidden from space,
Things are in all 37 dimensions.

Half ways is just a reminder
That though most of the work is done,
It's the last half that lead to an end.

Prologue:
I Am:
A permanent state of being

I am:
A transitory state of being.

The poem:
I Am nothing
For every cell
Is dying, being born,
Getting old, getting replaced,
Everything is changing;
I am well,
I am fine,
I am worried,
But this are minor am's.
For I Am nothing.

Everything we see
Is a corruption of the sun.
The inadvertently diffuse trajectories of light
Reflected on a recognizable world.

Standing near the sea
Where horizon is plain and outlying,
Is as distant of a mirror we can be,
Where we can realize the negation of oneself.
That steady line hiding all storms
Is a reference for no reference,
The endless end.

To think occupies the place
Once belonged to sense.
We see, hear, touch,
But whenever thinking takes place,
We become blind, deaf, hypoesthesic.
To understand is to shut and close the world,
But all start with sensing.

Yet, we are so small
That everything we see
Are mere obstacles
To everything behind.

I resist the touch of your skin,
for your heart no longer touches mine.
I resist walking your streets
for my eyes cannot meet yours.
I resist your ideas,
for mine have grown.

The resistance is of my soul
that have seen other souls,
that cannot be mirrored in just one soul,
that cannot be filled by it,
that is fragmented in millions of souls,
millions of pieces, of faces,
of desires, of movements, of thoughts.

Every act is a resistance:
it resists everything except the act.
Like the air,
I expand until walls resist me,
and then I find the cracks and holes,
to meet the open air
where I can expand indefinitely.

I resist you, but I resist more
the idea of you.
Of what you mean to me.
I resist giving myself to you
for it is what my every cell wants,
but I'm afraid I could not
be a whole self again.

What would you do
with this meaningful part of me?

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.

It's not the light,
But the almost absence of it,
It's the improbable reflections,
The unconventional light paths,
It's the dance of imagination and odds.

The formless images
Clearer and more defined
In the measure they're abstract,
A curve and a straight line
Brought me the hammer and sickle
(What does that tell about me?),
And don't know for what reason
The other form brought me a dog.

What I see on the ceiling
Is the light of my open eyes,
My bleeding heart,
My calculist mind,
My fading memories,
All projected in a jelly
Of colors, messy patterns,
Of texture and ideas,
So maybe, through that,
I can see miles
Inside my own tiny body.

What if all my code lines
Those guiding my breakfast and my lust,
Turn out to be just a dumb shot
Of my own arbitrairities?

I would never be able to tell
If I'm right or
If I just think I'm right.

Paradoxically I only know I'm right
Whenever right I am.
It's not about being sure.
It's about the power and ability
To let yourself be sure

Walking with tight shoes
One meter sight ahead,
Trembling, feet by feet on a wonky land.

My bones cold,
My fear well fed
By imaginary hands,
And food nevertheless real:
The end of the alley, cornered.

One year, one month,
Silly calculations of an inexact variable,
My head up and down
Of every thought,
Short lenses,
Missing landscapes,
Loud chaotic songs,
Distracting every bit of me
In bits, bytes, pixels and inches
Of an infinite and small creation.

I often feel bored,
Companies are not satisfying,
Plans are not fulfilled or fulfilling,
Work is meaningless.

I feel bored
And I don't know why,
Changes seem blasé,
News are outdated.

I feel bored,
Maybe it's just
My optimism that everything will be
What it might be.

Here where I stand
I see the sublime view
of these snowy mountains,
solid, titanic, beautiful, sublime,
delicately megalomaniac.

I never saw
those who were doomed
by the cold and hunger.

I never saw
the agony of those
lonely lost in its trails,
incapable of finding a way back.

I never saw
the anxiety in the faces
of soldiers of Hannibal
with their elephant armies
crossing narrow passages
on their way to death and glory.

I never saw
the little mountain houses
where thoughts slow down,
worries are left behind
and the whole future
is just 10 seconds ahead.

I never saw
the fear of ancient men
hiding in its caves,
painting to preserve memories,
with no legacy to leave
but a hunt for the next day.

From here,
I just see the shallowness
of a miraculously wonderful
view.

In your eyes I see mine,
I see yours blue and mine brown,
But I know they do the same thing,
I know their composition,
But I'll never know their content.

Whenever difference is imposed
A new border rise,
You and me,
Us and them,
Worthy and disposable.
One's land gets smaller and smaller
With every foot of fence added:
To have a land is be lonely,
To be smaller than everybody else
Despite any comfort.

Our skin that protects us
Is the same keeping us from teaching infiniteness.

The world had to be strange,
Chaotic, unfair,
So you could be beautiful.
You cause all that's bad
Just by being so good.
Everything has to have an opposite
(Not by ontology, but for our comprehension).
Every sunken ship, every poor town,
Every ****** with power and an empty speech,
Remind me of the details of your face,
The unstable order required
To the exquisite combination to result in you.
For you to be possible,
A whole world of madness was created.

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.

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

Convicted murderer locked in his cell
Watched by guards, news and defenders of morality.

They say about the case: "Thirty years? Too few!"
They say about the judge: "He's a *****!"
They say about the policeman: "He should have killed him!"
They say about the prisoner: "Human? No, he  ain't!"
They say about the dead: "He's a saint!"

We sleep peacefully seeing the beast jailed,
the criminal act contained,
as a reward for the things we were deprived:
The murders we did not commit (but wanted),
The aggressions suppressed (but wanted),
The lack of character we did not manifest (but, hell, we wanted!),
The sick look in the mirror we learned to mask.

Killing is not just pulling the trigger.
It is about the indifference,
about all the fingers pointing out failures,
about the accumulated pain of every struggle,
about greedy desires fueled by what we see daily,
about the lack of power, from cradle to coffin,
about the eyes we meet everyday but cannot see.

What is worth a fair sentence
over an ever unfair life?
What dose of love will fall
in the remains of a life built in such lack of compassion?
Why do we keep on returning to eyes and teeth
while Hammurabi remains buried for tens of centuries?

We do not fear the murderer,
we fear our own rage, our frailty and lack of control.
We proudly watch the misery of the prisoner
for we renounced the free animal
for the imprisoned human.

Wreckages are not despair,
They are the end of a storm.
They are a chance to decide
What's worth and what's not.

Wreckages are the art
Of the nature, of an implosion,
Of a disaster,
And the opposite of the disaster:
They are the calm,
The corrosive mold now exposed.

Wreckages are the place we climb
To see the extension of the destruction,
They make, out of tears, sweat.

Wreckages exposes us to the world,
For our caves are no longer there,
There is no room for a reform,
And eyes once again meet eyes,
We feel the raw earth within our toes,
Time fractures, and suddenly,
We're animals just like ages ago,
Vulnerable,
Without past,
Without future.

The wreckages
Are raw material of the healing.

If "A" equals "B",
"B" equals "C",
And "C" equals "A" again,
Why do we have three names to call them?

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.

Into the limits I throw myself
Not to the encounter of softness
Or greener fields, or even fairness.
I seek only to dismantle
The coldness in my fingers,
The numb in my feet,
The grayness in my eyes.

Wherever I fall,
It's a different place from today:
Other landscapes,
Other language,
Other buildings,
Other people.

I cross the world
To unfit the rules I don't fit.
There's a rebellion in my laughs,
And I only sing out of tune.

I go, for coming back
Is always an illusion.