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

The ends do not
make the ways.

Reality is an echo, a reflection
Of what can be sensed;
Eyes and ears hammering waves
Into transitory states of comprehension.

It is only possible to sleep
After something is learned,
After changed a guard shift,
After dreaming awake the next dream.

Existence without sensing
Is just a storm, a hurricane,
Incapable of stopping,
An event only noticed from the inside.

For any practical purposes
My body contains everything I own.
I do not own my food
Or my oxygen:
I steal them
From the land and the air,
For everything to be transformed
Into waste.

Nevertheless
There is an outer part,
Unreasonable,
Waiting for inconsistencies
To install itself
In the cracks of personality,
In the voids of indecision,
This part, insubmissive,
Remains unattached,
A slave of the lack of rules,
Traveling faster than light,
Unseen until a careful watch
Freezes its amorphous form.

There are complements of ourselves
On every surface touched,
Outer parts of who we are,
Of electrons shared,
Of not imagined interactions,
Rendering responsibility obsolete
Due to our limited capacity
To be affected
By the smallness
We are all made of.

If only
I could see
Farther than my ego.

There is a big "no"
Dividing, mutilating
The feelings of a fatherland,
Turning a home into
A sum of rooms.

There is a "no"
To the fundamentals of civility
Whenever it is said
Criminals must die,
Queers must be content,
Whenever racism is defended,
Although hidden into lamb's costumes,
Of the paladins of Order and Justice.

A country cannot be built
Under so many tearing premises,
We, more than ever,
Need to rescue
What it means
To be Brazilians,
To be Us, again,
Not the imbecile crusaders
Against a self nightmare
Of the enemies dreams.

Underlying all ruins,
All chaos and all lack of trust,
There, untouched,
Stands an indian-african-european child
That, without any comprehensible words,
Will present the chromatic yarns of our fabric
In which any shred
Dissolves everything.

For union, never unity.

The longer the roads
The more we have of ourselves.
Landscapes pass through
Without alarm,
Until we're awake.

Mountainside are a sculpted beauty,
The solid of geography,
But also a reminder
Of everything less than great.

Hurray to the sun,
The stars, the predictions,
And, consequently,
The way of life.

We're nothing less of our desires,
We're nothing more than our greed:
There lies our boundaries.

Doesn't matter what you think.

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.

A little house
In a little town,
In a little state,
In a not so little country,
In a little planet,
Orbiting a little star.

It's not the walls that make a house,
But the air within,
The little breeze that refreshes
At specific spots on the living room,
It's the sound of voices still echoing,
Mostly about happy times,
It's the images reflected in pictures,
In the mirror, in our minds.
It's all we can't see, hear or touch,
It's all the color layers beneath,
It's all the invisible footprints
That creates stories out of pressure imprinted.

A house is everything but its walls.

I've searched endlessly
Inside myself
Only to find
In you
What I needed
For my own company
To be enough.

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.

Take it, last or not,
feel the hot air inside,
Satiate.

Few times per minute,
All minutes in the interval
Between birth and death.

Breathe to words,
Breathe to colors,
Breathe to songs,
Breathe to forms.

We make art
Out of air.

Love is hard, ungrateful.
Give love when given hate is a gift.
Love puts us down
Whenever we see things differently.
Hate is also hard, but coldness ain't.

School teaches us to methods and discipline,
Jobs expect nothing less than full resilience
(In a deprived robotic meaning),
And we grow and grow
Closer to anything but sensing humans.

Love is weak, fool,
Specially that kind of love
Flowing between cars in traffic,
Houses in neighborhoods,
News on the TV.
That stupid love
When you say sorry after being attacked,
When you return angry with a smile.

Love is painful, today.
Tomorrow, might just be
A light mode of living.

There is this only way
I know to keep me off track.
To imbalance processes and structures,
To make tremble foundations,
To fly wingless even if heavier than air.

Often I seek other tracks
In the same grid,
In the same territory,
Same landmarks to guide me by.
But it's not as disturbing,
Different questions arise,
And, although it is an entangled web,
Every string pulls oddly.

It's the path, this only path
I can ride on it in the dark,
      [I've been hit sometimes, but it's OK]
I even forget it's sinuosity,
New buildings often change its face,
And the only way to recognize it
Is my weakened knees,
My shivering skin,
For I can feel the world falling apart.

This only way, only road, only path:
words, words, words.

If life were to happen again
It would explode
Into this,
This uncertainty,
This half lived moments,
In the mediatrix
Of fear and confidence,
Of poorness and night life,
Of starts and new jobs,
Of roads and destinations.

But this point,
From which costs more
To turn back
Than to move on,
It's the essence
Where meanings are not required,
But clarity:
What and why,
What and why,
What and why;
It is life itself,
Happening,
From opportunity to opportunity,
Floating just to decide
What's likely to exist
And what's not.

Silence, for we sleep
The grave rest of the almost dead,
The silence coming from acute hearing,
And the freezing of acting,
The silence encouraging
the redemption of the guilty of doing nothing.

The silence required
To maintain trains on rails,
Strings *******,
Rollers rolling.

This silence of a profound trance
In a quiet city,
Revealing in its sobriety,
Repealing in its exclusivity.
The silence of the order,
The silence of the steadiness.

Silence, for we continue the journey
With different names and disguises.
Productivity has other names,
Other faces, other friends,
But, nevertheless, quiet.
All of them.

Silence is our synopsis.
Yet, every word shut
Shouts greater within
The walls of our skin.

Heights and short trees,
Hot winter, red stones,
Cold water, abundant falls,
The pale green leaves
And unforgiving blue sky.

These words,
Although accurate,
Could not be more wrong.
Guimarães is your name,
Only freezing bones
In freezing was can tell
The truth about you:
Nothing human is found in you,
Not even the humanity of people
Imprinting landscapes through our half known truths,
Touching the imagination of our history
Hoping our shouts to be heard
For these same people, in the future.

Nothing human:
All is magic.

Red blood, gray mass,
White cells, blue veins.
That's what we can see,
That's what's exposed.
That's the inside outside,
The wound after the accident,
The proof we're alive,
The probe of our species.

We're made mostly of things
We cannot see we cannot see,
So distant that galaxies seem nearby,
So inconceivable that reason triumphs,
So invisible that they govern our lives.
Fabrics within fabrics within fabrics,
Up to a point description fades meaning.

The inside is definition,
Is the medium of existence,
Light and lightness,
Thought and thoughtfulness,
The hardness required to be soft,
The content of a punch,
The reverse filter
(laisse passer le poison).

What's inside is our income and savings
From the world.

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.

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.

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.

The real difference between
Failure and accomplishment
Is none.

Therefore, I wonder sometimes,
Why do I still bother,
Keep moving challenges and adulthood
Forward?

Time to time
I want nothing
But to watch a loud clock
Go by a whole round.

Just
Fall
Asleep.

Positively I crave a flag
Into where I want to be.
There is an itchy feeling
Urging from my gut
Saying in a strange language:
Claim this space,
Earn it, possess it,
Be it, live it, know it.

As I stand
I see the river flowing
Dividing territories,
Undecided, freely riding
Down the valley,
Carrying those
(often myself)
Rootless and unintended
To wherever gravity demands.

To stay is to be positive,
To be positioned,
It is to give name,
To draw a map
To be available
When anyone
Get trapped into
The vortex of wandering.

Life is the construction of a railroad,
avoiding past mistakes,
betting on a wonderful destination,
On a train, constantly accelerating,
Inevitably colliding at the end
Of what is left of a ****** landscape
With no rails to build on.

Technical books
Never made
Good people.

Only
Feelings
Do.

The only thing keeping us together
Is this friction,
That avoids slipping,
Avoids movement,
Despite of all generated heat,
All lost work,
It is, ultimately, micro physics
Of contact, of bonding,
It is a welding necessary for coherence.

Friction allows steadiness and displacement.
The difference is the direction and way of the force.

I've seen you furious as a flower,
I've seen you sweet as a bomb.
I've seen us sitting on a tree,
I've seen us oceans apart.

I've seen so little, myopic,
I've seen leagues away.
I've seen indubitable truths,
And I've seen to doubt them.

I've seen my own way
In ways I'm blind to see now.

The world gets bigger
As I remove meaning oyt of it.

The myriad of colors
only expose a fraction of possible existences;
it's not about colors, but about divergence.

The inner world
extended to contain the whole universe,
living side by side
with frozen possibilities
that never came to exist
in order to expose a truth
that earned this title
only by the chance
and rigorousness of time.

Only experience convert
thought into truth.

Round, around, surround,
Rounded, surroundings,
Tangent, tangled, tango,
Dance, dense, tense,
Intense, interior, international,
Nation, notation, notion,
Purpose, purple rose,
Thyme, lime, time,
Evolve, involve, revolve,
Round, around, surround.

Again, gain, grain.
Rain.
Revolve.
Start. Smart.

Pointless, less.
Point.

Make.
Your.
Point.
Revolve, recycle.
To the origin.
Begin.
Up.
To.
The.
End.
And.
Over.

Hungry, but too tired to cook.
Sleepy, but too early to sleep.
Tired, but too anxious to relax.
Dreamy, but too awake to fly.
Desperate, but too incapable to act.
Conformed, but too eager to leave.

That is the only gate
To the way out.

Life is actually simple:
Live or die.

Little by little
Our moments sum up
Who we are.

I feel the Earth pressuring my feet,
Craving prints, marking the land,
Assuring my whole assembly up to that moment,
With that body, those clothes and that walk.

Wandering through different soils,
Gently and inadvertently projecting myself
Upward, resisting the whole planet with my foot sole,
With minimal contact to the ground
As if ballerinas were the natural evolution of mankind.

One can follow my steps
To see what I became,
Can look my footprints
And know if I behave,
Can track my shoe shopping
And know if I've been working.

It's in the way I walk,
Merely standing, barely moving,
Now and then falling, inevitably:
A certain disregard
Keeps me distant, untouchable,
I can never reach my old prints anymore;
The wind has blown them,
Rain has washed them,
But it does not matter...
It's just vanity.

He who sees me walking in circles
Can never know where I came from.

Diminish the extensions
By being just you,
Your dreams,
Your reality,
Your musics,
Eventually, you'll cease.

Forget about yourself,
Lose the extensions of you,
Forget your endings,
Your arms,
Your fingers,
Your feet,
Your toes,
Your hair.

Then, all you'll be left
Is everything.

It's only through wisdom an sapience
We discover the reverse aspect of life.

The imprisoning freedom,
The life lost through joy,
All the lightness that we struggle to carry,
The darkness that reveal all the surfaces and texture and colors,
The pleasure we trade for pain,
All these symptoms
Of a pulsing life
That dies young and is born old.

We can only foresee our future
Looking through rearviewmirrors
Pasts lying ahead,
Waiting for our mistakes to be repeated,
Hits that perfectly miss the target,
Just to see the pointing arrow
Always running against the flows of time.

The wind, the farm,
The mist,
The church and the park,
The little square blocks,
The fading Polaroids,
The walks with old friends,
Carefully wrapped and tied.

Nothing new
In our daily journey,
Except for the images and the words,
The right words,
The whispered words,
Those ones that fly through
The meadows, the plains,
That turn to tornados,
That vanish entire islands,
That reflects on Mars,
That you barely understand,
But turn you over.
Words, as if they were, at least,
Pure.

I now see
Things I've imagined, and I
Am not sure
If they are just as I
Imagined
Or now that I see
I imagine I've imagined them
That way.

It is everything, except mine.
It is me, except what I've kept from me.
It is itself, otherwise specified.
Words and content,
Form, soul, intention.
Imprecisely complete
But nevertheless complete.

It is a blossom blossoming in concrete,
It is anything it was not
Five minutes ago.

A gift,
Flourishing
Within the impossible soil:
The feelings left unfelt
Between you and me.

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.

I only wished to be your balloon,
Side by side flying
Guided by our inner winds
And the blows the world gives us.

No more being somewhat hidden in the bushes,
Half shouting, half shut,
Waiting for a response
Long ceased.

Life only makes sense through life,
Anything beyond that steals its sense:
If I ought to live for love, or for money
I shall live less for life.

And the blows,
Those blows ahead,
Know nothing about life,
Our about nothing.
Therefore, life remains hermetic,
Sealed within the boundaries of grandiosity.

Anything less than this is unfair.

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.

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.

Among the wounded and the dead,
Everyone was saved;
Everything I can put my eyes on
is invisible to me.

The pain I actually feel
cannot bother me,
and, often, I feel
only to miss it.

What is there,
that lives beneath anger
that calms me down?

The burning touch
of a sweet song
dries out these eyes
that never saw tears
for suffering is desert;
in the desert I'm lost,
in the desert I remain conscious,
in the desert, alone, I found company,
in the desert, weak, I stayed strong enough to keep living,
in the desert I remained steady to keep on moving.

The dry branches that never came to be
are the flourishing of everything that was possible.
Otherwise I would be someone else.

All of nothing,
Nothing of all,
The result is the same.

Round and round we go,
Afraid to have our time stolen,
Looking back,
Watching our backs,
Even though there's nothing left to lose.

We got used to the crust,
Living on the surface,
Immersion is hard, but there's nothing without it.
We dig oceans and oceans for some sort of glory
And left aside all deepness in speeches,
All humanity neglected, at a cost of our own.

I have not met true faith
Rather than a future always to happen.
I was not prepared to believe
Better times should escape in-between my fingers.

But the result is the same:
We fight for nothing about everything
Or we fight for everything about nothing.
We only get to choose the way.

There is a detachment I seek,
I can sense its lightness
To lead me to new routes,
Wander town to town,
But it is unreachable.

It is there in idea,
Form, smell, colors and shadows,
But never in walls, floors,
Treads, acting and feeling.

There is this impression
That I know what I want,
But that I don't know how to be it.
That I can't find the place to unearth it.
That I can't find the compass to point it.
And, drifting in the sea of everything inside me,
I lose myself in fake storms
Created to sustain my farce failures.

There is this light impression of control,
Of a premeditated operation, reasonable,
Which I carry at all times
Like coins in my pockets:
Don't know what they're there for,
And I'm always willing to give some to whoever asks.

But it is a light impression.
It is a fact, although questionable.
It is the principle of a doubt fed day by day
By vague thoughts,
As if they're thought by others through my mind.

It is the impression of a renunciation,
But I want it real.
As I want my breakfast
And healthy legs to move.

I want the softest of breezes
To carry me even to places
I don't want to be.

Yesterday I was a worker,
Waiting relentlessly a month to end
For another month to end.

Yesterday I was strong,
Pushing tomorrows farther and farther,
Holding ideas as hard as I could.

Yesterday I was calm
As the sleep au Clair de Lune,
Unaware of its ill.

Yesterday my stomach did not hurt
Every time I heard non-sense stories
About who should control my body.

Yesterday I felt powerless, too.
I could not seek me for I was
Hid under the ground, neglected.

Yesterday I was trapped
To believe in freedom and love,
But they all revealed incompatible.

Yesterday I was dead,
Today I live, and tomorrow,
What's the point of it?
It'll eventually
Be another yesterday,
a day for mistakes and childish foolishness.

Where to dock
If lonely ports don't attract me
And crowd ports scare me?

Where can have so much life
That one can only be satiated of it,
Where is that curiosity,
Of so much healthy, bores me,
Where is that so many salty tears
Can fill my sweetness?

Why am I so afraid of life
Of all my crying is for having it too much?
All this health sicken me,
I sink my ship in the middle of the Atlantic
So, maybe, I'm reborn in Pacific.

I've lived intensely the middles:
I came from a mid-sized town
In the mid of Midwest,
Found myself in midtown of a big city,
In the middle of extreme and opposite opinions,
With an older and a younger brother,
Half way of where I judge myself capable,
Half lonely, half accompanied,
In the middle of people (never in their extremes);
Immensely in the median  disequilibrium.

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.

Sometimes I'm a poet
But most often
I'm an ordinary forger,
Torturing words
To fulfill my sadist desires,
Watching them cry out loud
Meaningless combinations
Purposely vague to seem intelligent.

I never played around
To see what could I do.
What could I've done?
What would I've done?
Would I change the world,
Be a tyrant advocate
Of reason, of equality, of mercy?
Would I at least understand
Why I keep my bed
Always facing the (shut) door?
Or I would be the same as I am
Running over and over
For something different
That never meant to be,
And find myself
From time to time wandering
What could I've done?
What would I've done?

We are shy to show
The little tiny mess we're made of,
Like a thief,
We hide what reveals us.

The orange night sky
Says more about my city
Than the heaven above it.

There is something bittersweet in loneliness.
Something of beauty,
Something of despair.
Something of inner connection
And something of being stuck in the void.

The need to be lonely
Follows the need for freedom:
To be a prisoner of our body only,
To be limited by nature and nothing else.
To be unattached.

But there is always someone else inside:
Someone who is not me,
But can't be anybody else.
Combinations of faces, voices and ideas
Conflicting with the silence
We are behind all disguise.

To be lonely
Is to feel sad and fulfilled,
To find completeness in the missing parts,
But also to feel happy and desolated.

I am afraid
Of the stones I step,
Of the passing cars,
Of the sounds that fill the calm.

I am afraid
Of things that exist and are,
Of what I can eventually do,
Of the structures that sustain me,
Of the wind that disguises the heat.

This fear I carry
Is the fear of what I am,
Of the real, the idea,
Of what I think
Others think of me,
Of what could never be done
And I could only do.

I have this fear
Of the ridicule in myself,
That amuses me
To say embarrassing truths.

If there is a thing
Such as fear,
It is only a self fear,
The interrupted projection
Of a tenuous success,
Of the polite strength
Of words always half the way,
Seeking an order of a world
That no longer belongs to me.

Everything I am
And I would never allow me to be.
To fear is to be displaced of oneself.

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.

Does it matter more
How intense I give myself
Into creating quality,
Content or just a process?

There is a fragment of unpredictable behavior
Where all of this components
Feed themselves
And we don't know
Where it begins,
Where it stops.

The only thing to do
Is trust whatever process
To evolve into a result.

Quality follows production.

In each of my stories
The world was saved.
Saved by the fiction,
Saved by its magnificent characters,
Unstoppable, heroic, brave.

And all the world's illness
Was reduced to ancient history,
A bad memory floating,
A stain to conflict with a calm future.

But fiction
Is just an impossible reality,
Implausible connections leading
To a deceiving plot.

It is my will
To be the improbable hero
Materialized into words
That shall fail to produce images.

Fiction is an external change
To my internal demands,
Restrained by the boundaries of a page.