I know deeply my solitude,
Its unique smell,
Its thick cloud,
Its condensation,
The solitude within my solitude.

I know I am not there when it comes,
I know that, small or big,
I become tiny,
I know the weights get lost,
The orders become vain,
The moments accumulate
In a constant unperceived passing through.

I know every search for oneself
And for belonging
Cannot be otherwise lonely.
One needs to be lonely in order not to be.

I shut my songs,
Never heard them,
Never played them,
But I insist telling me
They don't exist,
Just as the electricity
Remained hidden for thousands of years:
They are there, somewhere,
In eminence to pop,
To breathe,
To see the daylight.

I neglect them
But I can feel the beat,
I don't know who I'm waiting for,
Which colors they'll be born,
Echoing which tunes,
Heavy or light,
Until I'm able to
See, feel, touch and heal.

The songs are messy,
Brewed as they could,
Unborn, but alive,
Strange, but weirdly harmonic.
Consonant.

You set my riot.
Time is not relative. It's just our choices.
Time is there,
It doesn't even notice us.

I don't like what we became.
I don't like to have done what I have done,
I don't like watch things from distance,
I don't like that your eyes cry my tears,
I don't like that my pain hurts you.

But there's no more to the world
Than the world.
Is this where we came,
I either deal
or keep rebelling. I'll fight.
Probably.

I've just let someone in,
And, now,
I just don't know what to do
With all the spaces left.

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.

I am no more
than the sum of matter,
mildly organized thoughts
and an ambiguous willing
to contrast and to blend.

I spire down only to find
that what I've been running from
is growing in front of me.

Is the run my true fuel,
is the endless search my Stockholm jailer?

The more I cope,
the more I run,
the more I fight.

There is nothing new inside of me,
just an absurd,
an eternal stone lifter
who keeps running from faith
faster and faster.

I have no such long memory
to tell if it is a circle,
a straight line,
or just a random circuit.

All I have to do
is keep running.

The lamplights
That keep cities safe at night
Are the same
To invert
The skies viewed from above.

Each city a constellation,
A sign,
Seen from afar, inert,
Seen close up, alive,
But there is no gradual transition:
One has to choose how to see it.

When we learned to fly
We saw the world shrink, far away,
Deform,
And these lights,
Small, lost points
Like islands surrounded by darkness
To remind us
We are made of vacuum
More than of matter.

These islands,
Where everything happens
Are our reflex:
Packs on the surface,
We only go deep
Where there is richness,
We shine to those who see us from above
At the same proportion we are invisible.

We are cities,
We are light,
We are vacuum.
A the same time.
Indiscernible,
Inseparable.

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

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.

Our stories are to be told
Even in things that tell nothing about us

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.

Above god, the storyteller.
Standing before a white sheet of paper,
on the edge of the creation
of characters and worlds.

He masters destinies and faiths,
reconfigure, deforms his own built up reality,
tells what to think and what to make,
even against his own will.

Escapes logic, escapes a singular mind,
fragmented into others' reason,
collecting pieces of shattered own psyche,
exposing best and worst versions of himself.

The storyteller now stands
incapable of creating
having exhausted his own experiences
and all of its variations.
Writing (living) to him is no longer worthy
for creations now rely on a vivid reality.

He sees himself on the margin of creation
living the absurd of a fast imagination
in a slow concrete world.

As he starts typing again
the images of his hands start to fade
****** up to his own imaginary world
losing his matter, contained only in his ideas
where wander is prompt, boundless and free.

He was found three days later,
missing breath and heartbeats.
Free.

Inhale air,
Exhale your pain.
Don't search for mirrors,
Your reflex is irrelevant.

Be your own flower,
Be your own thorn,
Cry your own heart,
Learn yourself up.

There's a stop,
There's a fast lane.
Both exist for a reason.

We've got nothing about ourselves
But a room full of stories
Full of memories,
All we have is us.

If, at moments,
You feel like drifting,
Is just life taking control
Once again.

If we are all we have,
We are lonely,
But there's also
Only one way
To be strong:
Through ourselves.

Technical books
Never made
Good people.

Only
Feelings
Do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now and ever.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The cure and the disease
Stand on opposite sides,
But like Napoleon and Wellington,
Are just standpoints.

We ****
Our parasites,
We **** our brains
(Sometimes they are the disease)
We study, we analyze,
We figure and conquer,
But the only true way
To cure ourselves
Is by chance:
Just by surprise.

I keep myself suspended in thin air
Through my weak arms,
Pulling the rope in a pulley tied to my hips,
Trembling muscles, fearing eyes, missing voice,
I see the ground getting farther
As my hands force me up.
I'll hit the soil, but when?

I suspend myself in a road
Between two cities I recognize,
But stuck in a middle town,
Unknown, bizarre, half dead,
Waiting a never coming repair,
A volatile gasoline to move me,
The guidance to be back on track,
But I get used to the town,
People suddenly are acquainted,
Unstrange, polite, mannerly.
I'm suspended between those cities
By a thin web of limits,
My lack of imagination,
My despise for shortcuts,
My eyes closed to any opportunity
(Received as an horrendous spell).

I'm in betweens,
The half way,
The dissonance of the division of a semitone,
The missing particle of quarks,
The dark half of a lightbeam.
I'm suspended, panoramic.

I'm not myself anymore,
I'm not myself yet.

Not without pain
We'll build and destroy systems
An inert and abject belief
To make us more than humans:
A supreme species
With no control or self conscious,
Of individual moaning,
Of lonely joys,
Of the eternal dichotomy between
Be one or be all.

Between you and me
There's this layer,
This crust that avoids
The real me to fuse with
The real you.

How thick I am?
The exact distance
In foots and thoughts
We're apart.

But there are bits of me
That will never belong to me:
My eyes hold visions
That are no more than borrowed;
My nose grasp the world's souls
In the form of smells -  
A permission of use.

I am just a part of me,
I have my body, with a mind,
A strength and a reach,
But I also have my thickness
And my image captured
Through others' eyes,
My reflex in mirrors,
Shells that represent me,
My very own brand logo,
Glued and stuck
Without any consent.

We grow new layers of skin
Only to realize the more covered we are
Farther we are to those bits of ourselves
That do not belong to us.

To be thick is to mutilate ourselves.

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

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

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

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.

I still lack the courage
To reach my freedom.
I lack the desire to walk,
To step forward,
To dig deeper.

I lack the finesse
To understand what's hurtful,
I lack the ambition
To seek my own identity,
I lack the grit to stand out for myself,
I lack company to keep me warm,
And I lack loneliness to keep me centered.

These days
It seems hard to fill the holes
And every time
I lose parts inside me
And new lacks arise.

It is an exercise
To be one.

I could be afraid
To enter houses of unknown people,
To speak foreign languages within natives,
To sell my own thoughts to insurance
(And live afraid as a consequence),
But I won't, as far as I'm concerned.

I want more than light, I want matter,
I want more than hope, I want happening,
I want more than space, I want hardness,
I want more than voice, I want touch.

Everything requires me, myself, my mind,
To be within, inside, adjacent,
To be where I can be found,
To give the keys to the catacombs
I insistently try to hide.

Every tiny fraction
of movement and action
cannot be re-done.

Lost attention
is a lost moment,
forever a lost sight,
forever vanished
in the irresistibility of time.

Things we lose
are things we never ought to own,
are Destiny's belongings,
are other's gestures
never to be received by us,
connections hanging in thin air,
never to be captured.

Awareness is a warm gun.

Feel
My
Changes.

Tight clothes for tight time,
Elastic thinking for elastic reality,
And all leftovers are despised:
Food, light, heat, air, time, words;
Nothing can be vainly wasted.

Correct use of words,
Food enough to frighten hunger,
Heat to keep the mood right:
All is precise,
Even our behavior,
Even our calendars,
Even our gluttony,
Even our *******.

In a fluid era,
Precision is our cicuta.
Yet, it is hard to say
Which is medicine, which is poison.
So far, the best we've being doing
Is keep taking both.

Death is certain,
There is no reason for panic.
The hard part, in my opinion,
Is to inhabit the tight coffin.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

... And the train never arrived.
There are tails and the station
And trains somewhere...
But not here.

Nobody came
And nobody went,
It's just me,
A lone loner,
Trying to blow clouds
With a straw.

There's just me here,
The town is dead
With everything inside.
It's no wonder no train comes.
There's just nothing here.

Anyone knows where to go?

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.

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.

Almost thirty years I've passed
The same old Memoir Street,
With houses to be built,
Lamps to be installed
(with lights fading, and ghostly shadows),
And its 37 crossings, unknown.

Dead ended possible streets that I know not
Its unlocked doors,
hidden and tricky passages,
Non-measuring eyes,
Windows with children watching horror movies at midnight
(softer than real life).

Wastelands in surroundings,
Grids and bricks always limiting,
Dead ends of dead ends of dead ends,
Like thoughts trapped in logic,
Like heartbeats tied in the frequencies of a forgotten song.

My body, trapped in my mind,
Trapped in my culture,
Trapped in my biology,
Trapped in my reactions,
Is, still, mine.
Everything and nothing I own.

Any other way is just a hypothesis.

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.

Sixteen hours,
Three states,
Countless bridges and rivers,
A changing landscape,
Wheels rolling
To leave me
Somewhere,
Where the ticket tells me to,
Where I once were at home,
Where I see familiar faces.

I sometimes need static
To be able to bear dynamics.

Death show its ugliest face
to those who suffer across generations,
continents  and ships in the oceans;
to those who chose freely who to like,
to lay, to sleep, to live by;
to those who stood against
the ugliest face of death.

Some face it daily,
others will never know about it.
Some lie between
the ugliest face of death
and the ugliest mask of life;
some ride in gravy trains,
enjoy grapes and wines,
pulling long distance triggers
pointing at miserables.

Today, the ugly phantom of death
haunts poor, black, gay, women,
but it slowly leaks
through the cracks of well written
and yet shallow ideologies,
creating a new kind of brain police,
of modern uniformed zombies
that run castles and emperors
held by the backs of millions of Atlas
with weakening knees,
and exposed fleshes by whips
of indifference, of forgetfulness,
of inconsideration, of marginalization,
of slave ships that run on wheels,
of master captains never emancipated.

Those who never saw
the smiley face of a nurturing State,
who never saw Justice balance out
pain, misery, agony or fear,
who never saw the compassion,
the kindness or at least a look in the eye
of a compassionate and kind People,
those are the ones who see
The Ugliest Face of Death.

The returning phantom of a dictatorship
is revealed by a heinous political crime,
and Death, awaken from his sleep beauty,
rejoice for the victory of violence.

A poet once wrote
"Knowledge is a deadly sin
when no one sets the rules",
but the truer message followed the utter:
"the faith of all mankind
is in the hands of fools".

Deepness is more valued than shallowness:
There is glory in death,
Oil costs more than water,
Soul over body,
Roots over branches,
Icebergs are ****,
Gold over green,
Complexity over flatness,
Volumes over areas.

The strange thing is
All our senses and connections
To the outer world
Can only connect to surfaces.
The ninety percent underground
Will always be
The unsolved mysteries.

Questions hit me hard.
      Will I be successful?
            My roads lead where?
                  Why did I choose to be me?

Questions do hit me hard,
they hit me in forms I can't even feel,
in 5th or 6th dimensions.

Questions are an insult,
Doubts are heresy,
Doubts are immortal,
truths are fragile,
Truths are lack of intelligence,
but still I seek them relentlessly.

I'm broke to search things I do not believe:
to look for oceans inside a desert,
to look for laws and axioms in chaos,
to look for stories never to be told,
to seek and seek answers
that brings reasonable meaning to the world,
to **** absurds,
and to birth coherence.

I took things absolutely,
I believed unquestionably in nature's laws,
I believed in authorities,
I legitimated aesthetics,
I thought I learned,
I talked and spread words not mine,
I walked in firm soils
(but never knew their plasticity underneath me),
I assured,
I was,
I am

I.

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.

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.

The little sillinesses
Wanders and drifts away
Until you realize
The color of your shirt
Doesn't matter anymore,
The car you drive,
The ceiling above you;
Truth is not cruel, it is only cold.

The roads are different today,
But they all lead
To same is destinations,
And my obeying foot walk by them
Just to not be stuck.

Those smell that once
One could almost touch,
Delicate in all tones,
Desaturated, are only smells once again,
Distant and forgotten.

We merged so strongly
That we've wrecked in our way out,
And now I don't look for fixes anymore,
I look on functioning,
Completeness,
I look the other way
(It doesn't look bright either).

Leave it all behind
Is just another way
Of carrying the weight

To live is to be proven
Again and again
About our consistency,
Our mechanisms.
But to be unscathed
Is to remain over time.

Every inch of growth
Comes from millions millimeters of inadequateness
Over parts of our body
Unaware to our nerves.

The same growth and changes
Are dying symptoms
But nevertheless symptoms of life.
Changes are cause and effect of living,.

There is no memory
In being unscathed,
There is no construction
In morosity,
There is no adaptation
In nihilism.

Never be where you are
Is to extrapolate life,
Is to neglect the absurdity of it,
Is to embrace riot to the nonsense,
Is to give meaning and spit it,
Move, ****, move,
And you'll die living too much,
But it's the only thing worth
Dying for.

I'll say it plainly,
No hidden messages,
No flourishing,
No adornments:
I'll miss us.

"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.

Those who never pondered
Even for a minute
If life is worth continuing or not
Still don't understand life's value.