I wish I was different
In a way I can't be sure
If I would still be me.

Then even colors would be different,
The path Earth follows
Would be slightly different,
The moon, either closer or farther,
But altered.

In essence,
Nothing would change:
Another person among billions,
Another ideas within an ocean,
Other undetectable interactions.

Still, incrementally different:
A different gravitational field,
Tenuous distortions in trajectories,
Touched by other winds,
Colliding with new molecules.
In thousands of years
The future would be so recognizable
I would say:
It all could only happen
For I wasn't me in the first place.

I changed so change could happen.

From the clay
In between Araguaia and Tocantins
(The last, which I've bathed)
I was made.
But Guarapiranga, Billings, Tietê and Pinheiros
Settled me.

Here my story was tailored,
Here life showed the rush,
The vibrancy, the flourishing.
Life was made important by the second,
By intensity, by chances.

All we got left
Are our stories,
We are our main characters,
The storyteller,
The author, the god.

We tell, we do, we fight.
We hurt, we cry, we learn.

Yet, a beautiful story
Is meant to be
just an old story.

There are no snowy winters
Here in São Paulo.

When he skipped that bit of time
He saw himself millionths of millionths of seconds
Heading up to the same road,
But he was a bit ahead,
Trapped into two instants,
Conscious and powerless,
Awaiting for a future he could always foresee,
But nevertheless inevitable.

He could not act,
But his feelings could change,
He learned to keep distance from the sights,
That bit did not change the course,
But changed his structure,
His pulse, his synapses, his chemistry,
Until that multidimensional version of himself
Started turning into eternity.
It was the same bit skipped,
But sounded like a lightning waiting for a thunder.

When he saw his own death, it was already too late:
He has always lived life out of his own pace.
He was too early to be present in any moment.

Carbon,
Hydrogen,
Oxygen,
Nitrogen,
Small little other things.

Now and ever.

I saw him today,
All the way from Korea,
Gray hair, kind aspect,
Whose appearance would miss
The precision in his hands.

Once in a while
His foot would hit the floor
So loud the piano got smaller.
But he could not help it
(It was clear in his movements).

Rhythm took over,
He got possessed:
It was not him anymore.
The space between the keys would bend
So he would reach anywhere he needed.
A precise clock would tick perfectly, inaudible.
Air would cease to resist the speed of his movements.
Notes and tunes would now be an integer part of him,
Physiology would only happen to keep music alive,
He would be able to predict the future
As long as the song goes on.

At the end, tired (the piano),
A gentle gesture towards our culture
To make me feel once again:
Greatness and kindness are much better together.

Roll a stone up
roll and roll,
the mountain top
is still out of reach.

Roll a dice,
I know what it will be.
A six, and I'm out of reach.

Tell me your life,
hand me your fears,
I'll reveal your secrets,
and I'll lose interest.

Distance keeps me burning,
I live on the corners
looking for leftovers of lives,
looking for hidden spots,
unknown thoughts,
unspoken chances,
unseen shades of light.

I live today for a tomorrow
I cannot foresee.

"Us and them
And after all we're only ordinary men".
That said, what's left?
The two worlds, that one living in me,
And that other one, living in you,
How different could they be?

Everything to us, nothing to them,
I cannot be hurt, except
My skin are theirs,
And my pain as well.
I earn their money,
I wear their clothes.
I am a different person,
And, yet, depending on the distance,
Exactly the same.

Between us and them
There can be no we.
But we can be heroes,
Any day we want
(Maybe, for unknown reasons,
We just don't want to).
We fight for our rights
Whenever I can't.
We change by voting
Whenever I can't.
We are a country
Anywhere I'm not.
We are the world
Where I, alone, can never conceive it.

The world, by itself,
Is just a floating rock
Tempered with moving molecules
Unable to see farther than the eyes.

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.

First there were farms
And we were worried
It would rain too much,
It would not rain at all.

Then came the cities,
Roads, cars, banks,
And we got worried
All life would drain
During a fatal robbery.

Then came the jobs,
And more jobs and
Lack of jobs, and
No matter what,
Money will be short.

And we worry now
Time is precious but
Viscous, uncontainable,
Irreversible, and to
Waste it is to die a little.

If everything is worrying
Why any of it is, actually?
Maybe its not a question
Of what is worrying, but
Of who is worried. Am I?

I don't have an address,
I don't live in a street.

I don't live in a city,
I don't live in a country,
I don't live in a neighborhood,
I don't live in a house:
These are all concepts,
We can't live in a concept
(this is schizophrenia).

I live in a piece of land
Above a piece of land
Above a piece of land.
I live above the earth
And beneath the sky,
I live guarded of danger, cold and sunburst,
Also guarded of stars and moonlight.

There's nothing mine here
Except what I see, hear, touch, smell, taste
And what my mind does with it.

The only judgment ever to be made
Should be that our own lives
Matter most
Than anybody else's.

Your ruler cannot measure me.

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.

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.

I am not the sum of what I was,
I am the product of moments and feelings,
I am the rest of what divided myself,
I am the depreciation of values and d morals that does not fit me,
I am the interests of what I sow and grow,
I am the odd combinatory that detour normal standards,
But, in a smaller sample, I'm the mode.

I set myself as fractals and, therefore,
I discover in my elementary parts,
In cells, molecules and atoms,
My exact reproductions.

I am not an explicit fonction,
I'm not linear, but chaotic,
Exponential.
I'm always farther of what to be tomorrow
Than of what I was yesterday.

Every position
Is denying any others.
It is conquered
Through all that is learned,
Through intuition and grit,
And, that, is the only possible position
Oneself can be,
At those circumstances,
At that moment.

The result of billions of billions of billions
Of tiny particle forces,
Together in as much combinations,
To happen into only one solution.

Yet, time and time again
We divert that position,
That self constitution
Relative to the place of values
And beliefs and dreams and wishes,
Where we stand, bravely.
The distance between we and our ghosts,
The self imagined ghost,
Our own view from above
(untrue, but real),
This ambiguous gap
Eventually leads us farther,
Away from our core.
But be not mistaken,
We go. The ghosts stay.

The gap is only imaginary,
A concept, as any concept:
Ceases to exist the moment
It is brought to life.

Happiness does not flourishing
In the minimal spaces
Left between
The unsoiled feelings
Occupying our anxieties.

We find the fertile lands
Where we don't seek,
Where our thoughts diminish,
Where heartbeats are heard
In the intensity of the rush
Warning us
That any of our ideas
Are less than useless.

It's not the routine,
It's not the daily walks,
It's not the regular fatigue.

It's the desire to remain in bed
after remain in bed after remain in bed.
It's the constant thinking,
The ever close but untouchable past,
The consuming fear of being no more than a name,
The wish to be altruistic in an egocentric body,
It's the fight against the fight,
It's the latent pain that never hurts
But about to burst, smelling all vulnerability.

I'm tired.
Of being
Tired.

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.

Maybe I were
Two different people,
Maybe I could not fit
Within me.

I was sure
To be in the right way,
To discover a new way,
So life could go along
Within me.

What is left
Of what we were,
Of the days we traveled,
Of the futures that never came
(But we were sure to make them happen)?
What is left
Of those complete smiles
That were to compensate
Every tear ever dropped, before or after?

I leave us as a different person.
For better or for worse, different.
An expanded person
For which I'm forever grateful,
But, still, grieving. Hurtfully grieving.
Dreadfully grieving.
Cursing my existence grieving.

If this ever ought to heal,
My only wish is:
May it never suppress
Those light moments
We gave each other

In the absence of a future
To guide my past,
I carry the moment in my shoulders,
With any baggage within.

Let it explode the pain,
Let earthquakes build shelters
No calms can destroy.
Let pain explodes
For what I don't see
Is stronger than every color;
What I deny and exclude
Conduct me more
Than what I accept and embrace;
All that explodes
Cannot be hidden anymore.

I expose open wide what makes me small
For I choose to be great.

Over time, distances increase in matter.
As we start to perceive the world
Every other discovery is farther apart.
We learn only to left out of real knowledge.

As we grow older
We learn to put apart
Moments of joy
In between vast moments of production.

We slowly put distance
To subtle kindness
To others we know not how to call.

We get used to
Leave home less and less
- A different type of distance -
Until outside
Is a bleeding discomfort.

We talk slowly
In search of meaning
To fill filling silences.

We resign to see our brothers
Few times a year
Only to be thankful
To be able to see them
Only before their deaths.

We attach to ideas so much
Each time takes longer
For we to change.

Until, inevitably,
We are as distant as possible
To the present
And our lives.

What remains is only two options:
Death and schizophrenia.

We live through encounters
In a space of prominently
Failed encounters.

What we'll meet
We'll only know
When we meet.
So what's with chance?
Whose fault it is?

Fault itself ran free,
Free to err continents and seas.
Isn't fault old news,
A worn coin
Recycled just for the sake
Of a conscience relieve,
A frailty of our self judgement?

There is always a quest.
But we don't find Grails at their ends.
Are the quests that turn
Into what we seek.

There are transformations,
Never endings.

You are not free
For anything given to you.
Freedom is conquered
Through self violence,
Though greedy battles of this.
Freedom is earned for the voices spoken.
Freedom is screamed
Or it is just a fading breath.

Deny yourself
Deny the effortless routines,
Deny chance and deny steadyness.

Freedom is on the other side of truths.

Orders are paths already crossed.
Chaos is lack of understanding.
What we sense is the ultimate reality.
What we know is our deceiving mind
Cheating ourselves into presumption.

I didn't find the way out,
I didn't find answers,
I went through the longest path.

I've discovered new ways
When everyone said I'm brave
But couldn't support,
I've understood rules
When they stood in the way,
I've checked what was not
To be checked, just to see
How far I was gone.

All I learnt, all I'll learn,
It's useless unless
People.

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 leave behind
the matter that carried me on,
I vanish in the air
like the smoke of an almost off cigarette.

The lightness becomes heavy,
like a stuck anchor
of a ship that must sail.

To retain life in my hands
is to die little by little,
die of steadiness,
die of lack of excesses,
die of a not exhausted life.

Re-write my own story
is to **** who I have been,
undo the trips I have done,
swallow old laughters,
live backwards;
what I am and what I did
could only lead me where I am now.

I expect a great past ahead of me.

The skyscraper
Sees much from above,
Imposes, marks the landscape

He thinks he's big
But he'll never
See another city

I can always do better next time.
That's the curse of time:
The end is a never happening event.

There's no such thing
As a perpetual motion.

To be precise
Is to lack broadness.
The world is limited
For I am limited.
The world extends me
To include myself.

I'm defined by my outside,
The negative position of being,
I am my joy of living,
The decision to remain,
A choice,
A place,
Wordless definition,
A completion of the space.

I am. The sum of all possibilities
Could only lead to this.
I am a result,
A process,
But I am a creature creating.
Because all of this
I can only be insufficient:
Otherwise I would lack existence.

Everything is a lesson
That I am sure of.

I find it hard to understand
What is the course we're taking.

Life, love, friendship, work,
It's all a whole lot of baggage
To carry on from class to class
Only to find out
The only thing that matter
Can only be discovered
After the end of the course.

We'll learn what to do here
When we'll long pass being here.
The joke, my friend, is in all of us.

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.

I tried to hammer
"Together"
Into "love".

It blew,
And all that's left
Was "me" and "you".

Feel
My
Changes.

In the eagerness
Of not being wrong
We miss brilliant opportunities
Of being dreadfully wrong.

Ships that miss their destinations
Are the ones that discover continents.

I'll let myself
Be again and again
A fluid mistake,
Sink to find Atlantis,
Space out to conquer stars,
Dream of being Napoleon
(In a recurring Waterloo),
I'll scream for the sake of nonsense,
And shut when everything is out of place.

A mistake, no more than
A mistake.

At least, I'll be in movement.

"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.

Let the cannons come:
My flowers are awaiting.

Suspend this city
Above the earth that contains it,
See beneath,
See the underground,
See what's hidden in its tunnels,
Feel the breeze of a moist air
Trapped withing galleries.

Differ its layers:
Air, asphalt, gravel,
Subway, electric cables,
Piped gas, sewerage, ferrous oxide,
Magma.

Go deep to go properly.
The surface is not the story.
Atmosphere is just a limited point of view.
The movements happen on a tiny shell.
But there is more.
Thousands of kilometers,
Countless weight,
Unimaginable diversity of elements,
Unobserved, untouched, never thought.

Up and the vast infinity of nothing breaks us to dust,
East, west, north, south, and we remain where we were.
Down: what has left to be discovered.
Nautilus and Nemo knew it all along,
Overflowed from an ingenious mind,
So everyone could then be aware of it:
We got nowhere else to go,
And the problem is settled.
To dig is to reach painful grandness;
To stay is to sustain a comfortable sameness.

Whenever I'm remembered
I'm forgotten in fact.
What I am remembered for
Are my outter world,
My shell with its impressions,
I'm remembered for my image,
Nothing more.

All I can be to others
Are visions, icons,
Messages,
All encoded complexly,
A sign not to be understood
For thinking about it
Is to be farther,
To gain distance.

Whenever my name is said
It shuts the voice
Encapsuled by my body,
And whatever I say
It's not me anymore
For my words have not
Ten percent of the real meaning
I intended them to be:
They lack colors,
Texture, roughness, softness:
They are digital and plain.
We're more, multi dimensional.

Whenever I'm recognized
For some work or accomplishment
It's just the manifestation
Of my inability to be authentic.
He who sees himself in anything mine
Steals my bits of identity.

There's no fame
But in anonymity.

Incompleteness is our destiny.
We build tools to reach longer,
To carry heavier loads,
To go faster,
But in essence, we are just
Admitting our ineffectiveness.

The rain reveals
The sewer lines
Tired of being invisible,
The rats, its undesired inhabitants,
The worms drowning on the soil,
Cockroaches in despair.

The rain reveals
What was hidden
But was there all the time.
What wasn't to be seen,
The undergrounds of a life
Exposed to appearances and nothing more.

The rain reveals
The superficiality
Of empty plastics,
The inherent lightness of lack of content,
The inextinguishability of the bottles,
Trails of the inevitable return to the sea.

The rain reveals
Our blurred vision,
Our need of a shelter,
Our frail grit
That fades with thunders,
Our discomfort aversion,
Our windows to disconnect the world.

The rain reveals
The violence of the beauty,
The victory of the unpredictable,
The animal and amoral cruelty
That lays over the homeless
And the human and immoral cruelty
Of us, who feel only pity.

The rain reveals
And nothing more.
Reveal itself and, thus, exposes,
But it isn't what it's here for.
It comes, simply, and ends.
It is and desires nothing,
Has no purpose nor role.

It happens by getting heavy
And crumbles as it can.
It happens for being unbearable.
It happens for it  was sea once
And sea it urges to be.

It could be anything but water
But chose to be what it could choose
To be solid, gas or liquid.

The rain reveals
That the strength
Is in transformations and movements:
All roots shall succumb.

If I were to write to you
I'd write that I love
That we were what we were.

I'd write that we went far,
Maybe too far,
And now home is a distant idea.

I'd write I love you,
But that'd be silly
And rather difficult to deal with.

I'd write that I see
Through the fog in front of us,
And that would be a lie.

I'd write that I understand
What we've become,
In a vague, strange way, I do.
(Just don't ask me how we became)

I'd write tough truths
That tells  more about myself
Than what the words really mean.

I'd write how wrong I was,
And I was, terribly,
And nothing would change,
Unless time proves me wrong.
(I'd have to be wrong to not be wrong).

I'd write ****, powerful words
In an elegant combination
But they'll just be the air in the wind.

If I were to write...
What would it change?

It takes courage
To leave home,
To return and see nothing's changed,
To realize things go on,
To see smiles where tears were expected.

It takes courage, and only courage,
To fly.
It's our fears, doubts and regrets
That anchor us to the ground,
Not the absence of wings.

It takes courage
To abolish mind constructions,
To listen to different musics,
To bring love after treated with hate.

It takes courage
To stand up against time,
Against things that went the wrong way,
To see that there was not a wrong way.

It still takes courage
Just to see the courage
In knowing our very own likes and dislikes,
Our whys, our whens and our whats.

I am seasick,
And I am homesick.

I feel at home cooking,
Using my own restroom,
When I know streets, paths, regions, even trees.
I rarely feel it, but I sometimes do.

And it's good.

Feel at home is ambiguous,
Comfortable and redundant,
Brightless and efficient,
Lazy and unstoppable.
Feel at home is time and space independent,
Can be and not be, at the same moment,
Quantically.
It's, in all forms,
The wish to be somewhere
Never to be found,
And, yet, always revealed.

Impossible.

Down the road,
In between leafy trees,
There is a lone lamplight:
Sometimes steady, reliable,
Sometimes flickering randomly,
A mist of lighthouse
And faery fire.

Through its clearance extent,
The unseen horizon of its light,
Passes a man
After a woman.
Dark, light, dark.
Dark, light, dark.
And the sounds,
Untouched by the photons,
With accelerating rhythm,
Gives a sober dreary tone
To the undisclosed scene.

Not even the privileged highness
Of the witnessing lamplight
Could reach the sight of what happened.
Part of every eye
Are just not capable of see it;
Another part
Simply refuses
For the freeze of action
Would render all conscience useless.

The hidden darkness
Within every clarity
Contains more danger
Than all of them shades.

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.

Sometimes we have to stand
Upfront the immensity and the abyss of nothing
To realize the only greatness
Lies inside.

Steam it,
Burn it,
Smoke it,
Push it,
Roll it,
Pressure it,
Vapor, vapor, vapor.

Go along the trails
Discover and claim
Hills, lakes, river, falls,
For the sake of movement.
Go, machine, go,
Force yourself through ****** valleys,
Be civil,
Be the pace of progress,
The heartbeat of evolution,
The clock within a factory,
The factory within thoughts,
Push, push,
Burn, burn,
Waste all you got,
Faster you burst, guided,
Guarded, armored, blinded,
Blind, deaf, deafening,
Enraging, plodding, sluggish,
Slip the steal against steel.
Against, again,
And what's to gain?
To go faster,
To be outpaced,
To be left behind,
To remain powerless at the station
Living through a painful goodbye,
To feel the installation of hollow,
To feel only the smell of a perfume now miles away,
To be pinched by steel to steel friction sparkles,
And that be enough to have a sense of self consciousness.

Things are coming, or going.
Any direction you choose:
Either closer or farther - that's what's happening.

Let yourself be lost
In the middle of a crossroads,
No destination,
No goal.

The ends do not
make the ways.

The day ends
With another dose of order.
Million heads inside each one
Standing on bus stops,
On the way home to work to home to work
Missing the *****,
Missing the dancing,
The movement.

All enclosed
(Myself included)
Within imprisoning sounds,
Engine's music or music's engine,
Whatever works;
Feeling ***** through unacquainted eyes.

My voice shut
For I know the disease, the medicine,
But I know not the wellness;
I know rolling wheels
Riding over what I've been at some point in life.

I'm just missing a cross of eyes.