I wish I could be
So wise and sharp
My truths were spread.

Would they be more truthful?
Every mindset makes sense
Based on its set of premises.
Would they be any truthful, in fact?

In face of a shapeless modernity
What are we but carriers of self truths
Never to be integrally shared,
Never to echo freely?

We are bearers of our inner worlds
And nothing more,
With a somewhat amplified voice
Equally toned, merging, absorbing every intensity
Until it remains just an indistinguishable grunt.

To be sharp
Is to distune from the crowds,
To make yourself heard
Even if the most difficult part
Is to identify
Which sound is our own.

He who has not,
Even for a minute,
Pondered whether its own life
Should continue or not
Still misses the value of being alive.

Diseases, falls, shots,
None of them kills;
We die for unasked questions,
We die for self ignorance,
Little by little,
Until we are replaced by amnesia.

To breathe is a daily choice
Whether we question it or not.
What we take for granted
Decides how to live,
Where to cross a street,
When to quit a job,
To fight or to freeze,
To jump, to act,
To turn to a monk
And set yourself on fire
Or to ramble on
On commutes, highways,
Air bridges and cruises.

We miss the important questions
For the fear that we won't survive
Their answers.
But questions are not about answers:
They are most certainly delusional.
Questions are about
Discovering the value,
Choosing the weights,
Iterate balance,
Reduce propagated errors.

Life is more appreciated
At the verge
Of our perceptions of reality.

How many of me
Are the ones who live inside me?
What fulfills me is myself
Or just
The reflex of the reflex of the reflex
Of what I see?

Of the world I belong
What form contains my form?
What lazy wills
Assemble the pieces that move me?

I am the dust of the moments
That time insists to maintain,
A skin with no touch
Of the happenings
To surround every boredom and passion.

I am the greatness of the void
And the megalomaniac smallness
Of an expanding universe.
My universe.

I am the content of the last drop
That overflows the jar
Into verses that could not fit me.
And, in every verse,
The worlds of what I should be made of
Replicate themselves indefinitely,
Revealing fleeting opportunities
That only a mindful existence captures.

There is what I do not see,
Or reflexes would have life on their own;
I feel what is not,
Or feeling would be concrete.

I am the filter that sort out
The possible from the impossible
And, thus, to dignify me
I made of lonely verses
Infinite universes
For the impossible choice
Of being in me.

What are the insanities
I use to keep me sane?
Maybe a consuming job,
Or a will to keep flying,
Or saying yes,
Or a self disbelief
To be resistant
To my flaws.

I have to give away
A love, a cat, a car, an apartment,
A traveling bag, a loved shoe,
The phone signal, a guitar, a world map,
intense moments,
So I remain sane and free
To choose a prison to live in.

I shall be naked,
Eaten, chewed and spit,
Until I'm left only
The bones of being
So filters would all be broken
And things would appear
As they are:
No front, no verse;
Whole.

I want to see the rebirth
Of the poetry in everything
That made me dust and shadow,
That absorbed the glow
Into a processed good
To be used as per convenience.

I want to see the light
Hidden in every despair,
The day we end struggling
For we just see no reason anymore.

All the prophecies failed,
The stars are useless,
The books, blank,
We can only count
On our 50 years (or less) left.

Fate gave up picking chances
And we must star the play.
I see that light.
I see the light bright burning my forehead,
Watching me and making me watchable,
The light of the stage
That covers the sight of the audience.

I want to read the full script
Where we reach the turning point,
The plot twist to a different end,
The story where lessons are learned,
The story where memories are clear.
It is not a matter of hope
But of evolution, survival.

With so much in our hands
We can't choose what we want
But we keep on grabbing
With the fear of being naked again,
A cave man with nowhere to go,
The fear of being powerless
Even though we give power away.

We can only have so much
When we have nothing instead.
The art of losing isn't hard to master
Said a poet once.
It is.

Unless we have no choice.

Anywhere behind the hills
A lazy sun sets
To create the expectations
For the night to come.

My horizon is short sighted:
A kilometer far, at most,
Shortened by the buildings surrounding,
With an eventual glance at the ridges
As a reminder of an outside world,
Limits to civilization,
The extent of our greatness.

Still it is my horizon and I love it.
I love the blocking buildings,
I love the engine noises
Contrasting an inverted clearing
Of trees resisting within the concrete.

I love my sunset,
I love my multilayered sky and its unnamed colors,
I love rooftops I see at a range,
I love the windows blinking,
I love people walking by the street.

That's the thing about horizons:
One either choose a complex view
Or a longing view.
To have both is to have none.

Is it hopeful
To expect a failure
In order to learn deeply?

Is it hopeful to be right
Even if the result is catastrophic?
Or to hope for a blackout
For a dark night to sleep in the city?

What is it hope gives us?
A small carrot in front of our noses,
Or the ability to be super-human?

Is it hopeful
To not believe in hope
But still believe in a brighter future?

Hope is the very most useful thing
Among the useless things.

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.

Every fight
Shall be forgotten
Even by those who fought them.
If not the battles,
At least their reasons.

So much has been conquered,
So much left to be.
Every step back
Will be a leverage
For a stronger step forward.

I shall lose my whys,
I shall diminish the need
For further fights,
But I hope at least
To keep believing
In a brighter future
Always to come.

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.