When will I be back?
I've been away for a while,
Further and further
Every time I delay a return.

I'm losing my sense
Of distance,
I start to forget an old accent,
New monuments replace
Those old ones
That once reminded me
About discipline, order, status:
Like modern art replacing baroque.

How much my steps define me?
My twin is only different from me
Because we've been in different places?
My comeback still bring me back
To whom of the many I've been?

History is not only what has been,
It is the shape of today,
The idea of tomorrow,
An undeniable driving force
Pointing at some place ahead
We're often unable to see.

To be back
Is to be closer to the future.

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.

It's in everyone's faces
Where they're going.

The guy on the right
Eager to get home
Having watched television all night
Waiting someone to come.

The lady in front of me
All dressed for (I suppose) a new job,
That smile of excitement,
Getting used to the daily path.

The fresh eyes, certainly a tourist,
All is perceived by him,
Little things that are missed
By millions of people passing
Thousands of times through them.

The old lady, slow in her walk,
For sure fast in her mind,
Respected by most,
Invisible to some,
Carry few expressions above her wrinkles.
But her determination suggests
A recounter, a strong need
To put order to something
Long neglected:
A supermarket, helping a son,
Working extra time, a visit.

There's a guy reading
Any important book,
Hoping to come to be
An important person
(Isn't he?)

I might be wrong in all of it,
But for sure I receive those exact signals
I believe I'm receiving.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The more I do
The more I am afraid of stopping
Even though there is nothing to lose.
It is just a commitment
That no one will charge.
It is my self reference.

But I know my limitations.
I know I can change my mind.
Commitments reflect a time
That will lead to a different time,
Different characters,
Different backgrounds,
Different plots,
A different maestro to a different orchestra.

I fear lacking continuity,
To bend my own rules.
The more I know myself
The more I keep continuing.
I fear the inflection.

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.

We gotta break,
Gotta fall apart,
And amend piece by piece,
Gotta be vulnerable,
Gotta be exposed,
Gotta crack and glue,
And in new ways be arranged.
Gotta lose in order to gain,
Be last to be truly first,
Gotta die to be born.
The new is old,
Is been old for centuries.

Waking up
From a dream
Inside a dream
Where we
Were enough
We were
We're different
We're weary,
We've seen it
We'd beat it.

We'll do exactly
All of it,
But I'll do and you'll do.

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

The ends do not
make the ways.

I'll eventually die for it
Whenever life ceases to be interesting,
Or experiences starts to feel dull,
The mysteries of beyond shall drag me into it.

I hope that takes a long time,
I'm happy that now
All it takes away
Are my resting and sleeping hours
In trade of knowledge gluttony.

How I feel
About today, yesterday
And the day before:
I feel like
A building falling down
For being to heavy;
Like a car
Over a garden;
Like the rain and cold
Over the homeless;
Like a brick
In the ocean;
Like a fish
Trapped in a submarine.

I don't wish to die
For that would be
Sand in a desert.

I wish to have never existed

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.

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.

The capital of vertigo,
of the hollow structures,
of the lack of space that evidences
the abyss between us,
capital of deviations
in our ways and looks,
of the events,
of circulation, of movement,
of the people oppressed in villages, favelas,
and occupations,
of the ugly smoke that arose
erasing people,
erasing
what has never been seen.

The debris are heavier
than the building.

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.

I'm stuck in the shy vacuum
Between art and science,
The sensitive knowledge,
The logical chaos,
Rational feelings,
And, like any middles,
Indefinite,
By definition.

All I can offer is my boredom;
Everything else is already taken.
All my truths and myths,
What would be left
If I gave them away?

Piece by piece
My incompletude defines me.
My senses are left untouched,
My wounds, unhealed,
My thoughts, preserved
In an obscure way.

I give myself away,
And the more I give
The more I see,
The more I am.

When I'm lost
Nothing matters,
Just then can I discover myself.
Nothing more
Than a pool of desires,
Drowning,
Lifting,
Joking 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 watch attentively
Movements, orders, patterns,
Results, outputs, behaviors.
I depend on them.
I copy them.
I apprehend them.

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

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.

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.

Fighting battles alone
in a war that has been lost for ages.
Battles of inner struggles,
of incoherent thoughts,
of distant fading desires,
of contradictions that tortures our soul.

And you wake up
having lost a part of you,
stripped away cowardly
(and you can't even name by whom)

Loose in an uniform immensity,
in that different kind of void
with no lights, no moon, no stars
(but everything still visible),
lacking the soft and warm walls of reality (sanity?)
while time slowly escapes
the ropes of our perception,
wandering alone, with no air to breathe
Yet, unable to die.

Only then we are ready to realize
that every rule is useless.
Despair has taken over.

Only two paths can we take:
start from scratch
or fade.

No matter the ways we choose,
the ones we did not choose will be more numerous.
There will always be more personalities
than the ones we decide to wear.

I live as a boat that departs without announcing a destination,
choosing along the way which port to anchor on,
always regretful for the ports I did not choose.

I take with me a small piece of everything I have known
(and how could I not?)
so my memories cannot betray me,
so the places I have been can leave a footprint on me.

I follow this path blindly,
heavier at each step
(or with weaker muscles, I could not tell),
with burdens getting loaded and loaded,
with fears from other roads,
missing passions from other ports,
with nostalgia of passing landscapes.

I keep on walking to keep on living,
I keep on choosing some paths, abandoning many others,
Sad with every time I detach something,
Sadder even for the choices I did not make
(but did even if I did not want to),
I keep on sensing smells I never experienced,
touching flowers I have never seen.

I do not renounce what I leave behind
(Like Drummond: "from everything a little remained"),
but the directions I did not pick,
the river courses that never came to be,
the dry branches never to flourish,
the futures made impossible by my choices.

As I wash my hands on rough waters
I leave some of what I was,
some of what I think I am.
I let me go just a little
to keep on going.

All this ballast, this will to take everything with me
can do me no good at all
if my weight restrains the places I could be.

At some point
I'll let you down.
I don't like it,
But I'll do.

I expect too much of me
But I'm only a repeated self,
Running the board in circles,
Skipping houses from time to time,
But inevitably reaching endless wells.

It's not a lack of love,
It's a lack of self love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes
We just need
To hack our own rules
Whenever we feel
They do not fit
Us, the moment,
The vibrations,
The intention
And the breeze.

Today I disobey myself:
To write
When all my cells tell me
To surrender to the deepness of a sleep.

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.

I sink,
I drawn,
I try to swim
In this vast quicksand,
Swinging arms
To desperately grasp
Any remains of firm soil.

I feel the sand up to my nose
But I fight:
I have this feeling
That somewhere
I'll find a branch to hold on,
An air bubble
To keep me breathing.

I don't care being defeated:
It will eventually happen.
To accept it is my revolt.
I'll stand against the inevitable
For resigning is confirm it.

The revolution
Can only happen
Inside out.

Every letter that drops
Must have a purpose,
Quarks of ideas,
Matter of all immateriality,
Sparks of virtual revolutions.

Eventually, we run out of it;
The train of thought slows down,
Out of coal, out of diesel,
Little by little synapses fail,
That black image is not just a tunnel;
It's the deep ends of the ocean,
It's the cold of a winter cloudy night,
It's just a pool of ideas,
Empty even on its color.

The more energy we put,
The more tangled the knot remains.
Useless to seek nozzles or drains;
All vanishes through the cracks of breathing.

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 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.

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

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.

If only
I could see
Farther than my ego.

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

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

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

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.

After all, what's the price
Of lefting everyone behind,
Of missing our thoughts the way,
Of leaving pieces through the road
Until every bit is new,
Unrecognizable components of ourselves?

Seeking the ease of easy words,
Meaningless combinations
Just to make a misery of a sense,
Only to legitimate my own power over me.

Leaving this body is a matter of survival,
The road around the sugar cane field
That can lead in only two ways:
Backwards and forwards.
The decision is simple:

Be free in my maze or
Escape to be trapped within binary choices.

Words fly high,
Trespass walls,
Penetrate, extirpate,
Build and implode,
Code and decode,
They're just words
But much more than
Physics behind them.
Words are phenomena,
Pure causality,
Pure order spiced by disorder.
Beauty and pragmatism.
Words fly high
And fall heavily.
Anchor and wings,
Ship and harbor,
Grenades and first-aid kit,
Surgery room and coffins.

No more than words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A silent approach,
Yet painful,
Makes gravity a little stronger,
Acting over thoughts
Draining energy
Through the cracks and pores
Of a body shouting
Untranslatable screams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The challenge of finding a self center
Lead me into my extremities:
Left to right,
Up to bottom,
All the wingspan of my own being.

As I went left
I eventually caught myself
In the right extreme
With the same perplexity
Of Cook and Magellan.

Whenever an extreme was reached
A gravity, or magnetic force
Would push me
Into a lower place,
Almost indistinguishable,
Somewhat gray,
Somewhat colorful,
But always comfortable.

Every extreme
Are as close to each other
As they are distant to the center.