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.

In my bones
and in my skin,
I can feel it,
all of it.

My heart pumps
warm blood
just to meet the freezing
of the coldness inside,
and the coldness outside,
the ice of every look,
the crystal of every saying,
the burning cold
of a perhaps deserved indifference.

Suddenly, the phantom of your touch
heat all of me in my endless fury
to repeat all my mistakes once more.

It hasn't anything to consistency,
Neither with rigidness.
It isn't a state of hardness,
Nor a form of perennial existence.

The ground is solid, but not rigid;
A carpet is solid, despite of softness.
There's solidness in the harsh feelings of parenthood.
Solidness means being contained
Within a specific space.
Solidness means being able to,
Whenever reached critical moments,
Acquiring liquid form.
Solidness means being elastic,
But only up to a point.

Weakness is not not being solid.
Weakness is just pretend
That being solid
Is the only state possible.

Any state can happen,
As long as conditions
Allow them to be.

Procrastination,
Powerless,
Tiredness,
Persistence,
Accomplishmen­t,
Temporary death.

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.

Today's gray heaven
hides a bright sky
above the clouds.

Heaven, the Earth's limit,
seems closer today,
in a homogeneous,
tedious gray.

Distant buildings,
somewhat tall buildings,
seem like a printed landscape,
almost as gray
as the gray cloudy sky.

I can hear fading airplane sounds
hidden in the vast grayness,
and I can hear pigeons
competing against cars,
singing joyfully,
ignoring (so I imagine)
the lack of color above all.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.
Still not warm,
still not bright,
but there are definitely
light beams bravely leaking
through deep, depressing clouds.

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.

Sometimes we just go
We leave because it is the only thing,
The only reason,
The only way
To run from running,
To retire,
To rest
For staying consumes much,
For the songs and its lyrics
Are just deceiving
Symbols never to be cracked
Or just outdated.

But leaving suspends
The actions of a change
Everything remains,
But at a distance,
In strange places
Of a mazing memory.

To leave is to accept
Things as things,
Unchanged by abandonment.

But, sometimes,
It is the only reason
When all other reasons
Completely dragged power out of
Our will to stay.

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.

To hate hate is different than hate
But as far as possible to love.

That's the way with negatives:
They look like they cancel themselves
But math never found a way
Into our real lives.

There is no way to reach love
Rather than love itself.

I recognize in your look
The burning of an extinguished fire,
A new warmth to resemble a cooled one.

I return to towns
I long ago left
And the lack of creativity
Of the street names,
Of the organization form,
All the details
Teleport me from city to city,
Benjamin Constant Street, Anapolis, to
Benjamin Constant Street, Ribeirão Preto, to
Benjamin Constant Street, São Paulo.

I could only climb one mountain
For the fear of resemblance.
Every uphill and every downhill
In the search of the first time,
The first feeling,
The never returning unexpected.

I fear resemblance,
I fear the repetition,
I fear the moment where I'll see life
From the rearviewmirror
For the path ahead
Is very well known.

We humans are so good
To see patterns
That even new adventures
Seem like dull routine.

The only cure is
To watch the sunrise
Three days in a row.

I hear the sounds
Telling me change are coming.
I see a different breeze,
It slowly drifts me
Into an unexplored place,
Calm, fluid, balanced.

I never saw it earlier,
Never been there
Although the coordinates
Were always known:
Any map can lead you there,
Any compass points there,
Every single being can feel it.

Every change is announced,
Even sudden ones.
Our time is sometimes insufficient,
But warnings always exist.

To be present and steady
Is to absorb detours,
To apprehend discontinuities,
To live in ambiguity
Is to live at all.

Oh saudade,
How I miss you...
Suddenly, you became
An index of happiness,
My measure of success,
And, yet, although all is missing,
I miss you: you failed me.

Distant meadows
Hide your shallow substance,
But I'm here, nurturing you,
And missing you,
Missing to miss.

I miss you so much
My feelings have got sick,
Faded, faded, disappeared.

Haven't I got mad;
It's just the cold weather
Remembering me
The warmth of your coldness

I mistake what does me good
With myself.
I can only be one
In the presence of others
To bound where I fit.

I am dangerously propitious
To incompleteness
Due to the lack of world, of rain,
Of wasted shoe soles,
Of hoarse voice,
Of watching a complete turn of the sun,
Of sincere philosophies,
Of anarchist desires,
Of arrogant discoveries,
And of humble advices.

But even the incompleteness
Composes me.
The absences are what define character.

Life is the exhaustive experience of absurd:
More than this is inconceivable;
Less, it's just insulting.

Every word
Invokes dozen books
Hundreds of stories
And all my 940 million seconds of life
Building up to a super story
In seek of a masterpiece
To say "I did it".

There will be no masterpiece.
All words found their way
Into a dance of images
To be where they fitted the most
With sometimes unclear roles
And an improvised script
Even after exhaustive rehearsal.

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's something when we isolate
That enlarges us, that completes us
Without the need of others.

There's something inside us
Claiming to be left to the moths,
To lose our forms and our substance
Into the nothingness of air, distance and trail.

There's something shouting
"Not me" whenever possible
Just to pass, to live in passenger seat,
To go and to come without bothering.

There's an urge to be just a self,
Nothing more, maybe to untouch
The universe, time and space wisely,
To be a bubble of own rules.

It's all illusions.
There is no world inside.
There's just us. Everything else's outside.

Soft voice and lyrics
Gently moving the air
Accompanied by a well played guitar
To be my company for the night.

When somnolence reach me
I will be far gone
Surfing scales, tones, harmonies,
Knowing not where to arrive:
Drifting in words
To be touched by the waves,
Asking questions
Whose answers will always be indirect.

The guitar invites me
To 50 bpm,
To calmer thoughts,
And, all of sudden
All I can hear
Is its reverberation
Within my empty body,
Filled only by the vibrations
To guide me to the real me:
A thoughtless being
Immersed in a mix of feelings,
Sensations, senses and faith.

I am a profound reflection that I do not exist
I only exist when I think I don't exist
I am less things
than the things I imagine I am

I am the lack of confidence
That comes from I don't know where
Or maybe from the confidence
others have for me

I am in a world that does not accept
what is not from the world

I am a peaceful way of life
emerged in a restless context;
a lack of things to do
drowned in chaos

I am what I were not
but I am what I would never be

I am the one who lost something in the way
and never stop to get it back

I am the one who found something
and not knowing where to keep it
lost it in the same place where I always lose things

I am the one who searches
only what cannot be explained
and loses interest after the explanation
and becomes obsessed to explain

I am the one who mistakes what I want
with what I want to want

I am the one who kicks everyone out of the party tired of hosting it
and locks himself out
without knowing how to come inside again
and stares at all guests on the street ashamed

I am the one who does not believe
in anything I cannot be
but never accepts anything I propose myself to be

I am the one who knows
that I'm no more than an idea of myself
and yet, the one who does not let go of this idea

I am all the contradictions I truly believe
(and by believing them, I disbelieve them)

I am so selfish that I care only about others
and forget myself inside my frailty

I am what I should be
although nothing should I be

We are fragments
who do not fit in a whole world.
If we say we know,
we lie.
If we know we lie,
we are true.
If we know the truth,
we are mistaken.
In mistakes we know.

The faults reveal the existence.
What we write
exposes everything not written.
Our creations show our limitations .

My words are the boundaries
of communication,
the fragmentation of a message,
for we are unable to read the whole.

My house is the demolition
of a ****** space,
of a space unbuilt,
the containment of the wind,
the separation of light,
a splinter of a world.

Everything is happening
Causes cause effect to be cause,
endlessly.

Let the senses expand
Your sense of the world,
Imprison reason,
Understand and accept treason,
Mock your intelligence,
Your abilities.

Rip off your arms,
What's left?
Rip off your legs,
What's left?
Rip off your eyes, ears, mouth,
What's left?
Rip off your judgment,
And what's left?
Rip off your pain.
Nothing is left.

There is a you
Who thinks of you
Who thinks of you
Who thinks of you,
Or there's no one
Who thinks of you?

A dead river flows memories
But no water,
Flows past,
But not present,
Reveal it's wounds,
But completely numb.
Everything, except water, is left.

In madness we're born;
Only madness can quench.

I'm happening in between
The real and the nothingness,
Divided and undecided,
Waiting for the ultimate prove
Of a sure choice.

I'm caught between
The wheels and the leather,
Cotton and glycerin,
Fruits and caramels,
Meats and grains,
Wind and coal,
But existing in all of them at once.

There's pain, passion and desire
In the seek of gold,
In pursuit of patents,
In achieving medals.

There's a unique relaxation
In the void of beings,
In dematerializing that inner voice,
In decharacterizing oneself,
But still self recognizing simultaneously,
An identity stored in the clouds
Like Theseus' ship.

The subtle finding
Is to realize that the actually real stuff
Are the ones that can't be touched;
Everything in matter
Are nothingness, perceived only
Through the illusion
Of the senses.

Here where I stand
I see the sublime view
of these snowy mountains,
solid, titanic, beautiful, sublime,
delicately megalomaniac.

I never saw
those who were doomed
by the cold and hunger.

I never saw
the agony of those
lonely lost in its trails,
incapable of finding a way back.

I never saw
the anxiety in the faces
of soldiers of Hannibal
with their elephant armies
crossing narrow passages
on their way to death and glory.

I never saw
the little mountain houses
where thoughts slow down,
worries are left behind
and the whole future
is just 10 seconds ahead.

I never saw
the fear of ancient men
hiding in its caves,
painting to preserve memories,
with no legacy to leave
but a hunt for the next day.

From here,
I just see the shallowness
of a miraculously wonderful
view.

If you could only see the moon
I see now,
But our eyes are opposite direction,
With our sights never to cross
One another.

I remain the same child
Forever fearing being abandoned,
Being abandoned
For fearing abandonment.

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.

What we wanted
Didn't fit us anymore.
Fits us
That each should seek
I
Where there are no us.

Let life resonate.
Pulse, pulse, pulse
Vulnerably.

Maybe the future
Is our maximum possibility
To build the bridges
Between what has been
And what insists to be.

It is where there is permission,
The chance in raw state,
The only place where ambiguities
Reside peacefully.

In the future I dissolve
The cuts from today
And if, from what has not yet been,
I think of what is now,
I make things differently from what I would
And life is no longer the same.

If the becoming
Is so substrate,
All that not yet exists,
But somehow arranges in-between my ideas,
Create parallel futures
Of such unreal things,
They mirror the world such as it is.

To realize what does not exist
Brings life to emptiness.
There is no "not be" -
It s extremelly unstable -
For thinking it is creating it.

The becoming is microexplosions
of the instability of the "not be"
That soon morphs into the most probable
And everything is just exactly as it could be.

Change precedes the existence.

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.

No words.
Sword on.

To every action
There is an equal and opposite reaction.
A price is a reaction,
Value is the action.
There is always a price
Charged in money, credits and debts,
But also in heat,
In relationships,
In exhaustion,
In freedom.

We constantly negotiate
With time:
Our primarily finite asset.
Everything is at a perspective,
Charged in time.

I must learn
To reevaluate all the prices.

The awkwardness of today
Is not how much we value
The ridicule,
But our capacity
To continue valuing it
Despite its growing abundance.

In the march
There is always those on the front
The avant-gardé whose faces are seen,
Whose eyes reveal cruelty and tenderness,
Arms in hands,
Rapid thoughts of past and future,
A will to be anywhere else
And nevertheless proud.

To lay down the arms
Is not easy,
It is not only a question of position:
It is a message,
It is a gesture of grandness,
But a difficult one,
An act of love
Beneath all the violence,
Often unnoticed.

Armistice is the ultimate
Brave movement.

We touch, and suddenly,
my mouth is the whole me,
and I give everything I know I am
(what remains of me
is everything I don't know).

I found you along the way,
and I found myself, then, happy,
for the chance that gifted me,
for the sky that smiled with all that blue,
happy for the chain reaction
of a cosmic accident,
a divine lapse,
that put us together, there, in the same place,
with all that contained energy,
the spark of a thirsty bomb,
uncontrollable, devastating,
a seducing destruction
of millions megatons,
semitones, shadows and lights,
skin tones,
skin, that I felt
cover my own flesh,
to enfold all my body,
completely blind, dumb and breathless
by a kiss,
as if the grass itself,
that bore our weight,
was our feet
burying and entangling themselves,
feeding just of ground, air, water,
glutting myself of everything I'm not,
like if the world, at that moment,
started to shrink and became small,
a little bouncing (untamed) ball
that we suddenly could reason
all its mysteries and secrets.

Then the air occupies the space between our lips
and everything returns to normal.

Sweating I try to remember
The cold days I used to complain.
Then came heat
And I can no longer feel
The annoyance I once cursed.

I keep hating heat,
Hating cold,
Hating sameness.
Dissatisfaction is my engine.

Deep inside I had this hope
That I could bear us, and
The unforgiven would be just a bad memory.

I had this hope
That yesterday's problems wouldn't resist
The cruel test of time.

I had this hope
That our new found love
Was born differently.

I had this hope
That I would resist strongly,
That I would fight for my sanity,
And warm, calm waters
Would occupy all the trenches.

Hope is just hope,
With no past, present or future.
Hope is a wanderer,
A promiser,
A guest never to arrive,
A cure for other's disease,
An oasis one mile away of him who died of thirsty,
The imminent accident of which we'll all die someday,
And all we can do is live to wait.

We live for concepts
From which we take nothing in the end.

From difference I learned the normality,
From heterogeneity I discovered space for all,
From diversity I reached farther than I could.

Yet, we continue to seek unity instead of union.

Keep on turning, little gears,
keep the machine running.
Don't bother this feelings of yours,
don't pay attention to this pain.

Forget your thoughts,
I'll fix them all.
Be a leader
but not for yourself.
We'll tell you what to wear,
who to talk to,
we'll congratulate you
for an useless work
just to keep this little gear turning.

I don't want to see
your home or your family in your face.
If you smile, may it be
due to your achieved goal.

Everything I tell you
is for your own good.
I myself comply with all these rules.
I'm your boss and I have a boss,
who has a boss,
who has a boss,
who has a boss,
who has a boss,
who has no idea what's happening here
(but he has the money, so that's okay).

Give me your time
(at full attention, please)
and I'll give you a purpose,
and I'll promise heaven on earth
fancy luxury cars and empty apartments
(just maybe, though)

I can't understand jazz
But I keep listening,
Intrigued by it's messy,
Searching inexistent patterns.

I can't reproduce it,
Even if I were to play perfectly.
I feel my molecules swinging
To match the vibrating air,
But the precision of the notes
Is not enough:
The tones in transition
Keep the song going.

My innocence
Keeps me closer
To things I know about.
Jazz is more in me
Than any style.

Late at night
Problems are up,
And in my head
A slight shade
And running thoughts
Quietly and calmly
Slow down
With the fading chords
of a Chopin piece.

Everything else
Remains the same:
Problems will still be up
In the morning,
Restless and relentless.
But those chords,
That song,
Fluid,
Will, every night,
Carry me in that
Zero gravity machine.

I cannot exist
For it is impossible
That existence itself happens
Without me.

I must travel further
Than fueled only by reason.
I am consistent
In the exact measure
I'm incomplete.

Beyond the ends
Lie the limits of ourselves
For the universe
Fits in our eyes
Like a shell inside an oyster
Inside a shell.

I still am
What I should not be,
I cannot contain myself:
I'm to big for me.

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.

The freedom from inorganic paralysis,
The birth of information,
The cliché of the ephemeral,
The never ending search for complexity.

Is it just a temporary prison in our weak bodies,
in our insecurities, and our worries,
Or is it an unique cosmic opportunity
that we should exhaust every fraction of a second
into something productive, enjoyable and selfish?
How much would we sacrifice
To never need to deal with death?

Does it have a worth in itself
(therefore question it would be stupid)
or does it have worth for the things we can do with it?
Has the organic life any contribution except for life itself
(in a broad perspective)?

What makes life so great that makes it, though, small?
We try so hard to define it
and, yet, it is the most incomprehensible concept.
Tirelessly fighting against universal laws
of equilibrium and disorder and chaos and constancy
(will purpose subdue chances?)

Maybe, the greatest value of life is uncertainty.
Uncertainty of what is expecting us,
of what will we gain or lose,
of what will we experience,
of what is there to happen and to surprise.
But, most of all,
the uncertainty of what is not life.
Death is a part of life, and not its opposite.
The opposite of life is the certainty of the inanimate world.

We've taken the long road,
Curvy road,
Crossing mountains,
Infinite tunnels
Built ages ago.

Somewhere we diverged
Your tail lamps fading
In the rearview mirror
And in my life,
In the long miles
Between any start
And any destination.

We're protected
From rain and snow,
But forever accompanied
By loneliness
Of a quiet road,
Long, long road,
Where night are inevitably
Longer than days
In the drama
Of lost paths,
Bifurcations,
Clovers,
In infinite combinations,
Always leading
In the unexpected
Feelings buried
In the soft sands
Of the surrounding deserts

In this story
Nothing is about life and death:
Everything is about life and life,
The life that has been seen,
That has been wanted,
That was never imagined,
And that was never possible.

Death is a solved problem:
We die.
Even suicide is to think about life.

To live is to decide.
Always.

For those who won't live through it,
I ache and I grind for everything
I haven't done.

There's those whose temper
Could not be contained
By their own history,
Stripped from their truthiness,
The only result is to attack,
To shorten others' integrity.

I cry a cry of remorse
To the humanity
We fail to carry
When one of us refuses
To share its load.

This cry without tears
(Frailty contained,
Rage tamed
And sharpened thoughts)
Is not to be heard:
Only silent weapons are useful.

A surprise attack is imminent.
The sound is an enemy,
But silence will spread,
Contagious and strong,
A wave of love and warmth
To overcome shots and shouts.

When they least expect
We'll all be covered
With the blanket of compassion.

Where's the point that I'll break?
I'll break and I'll have no other option.
What a prison to have options,
What a limiting concept is freedom.

There's only freedom
In not thinking absolutely,
There's only love
In self interest in someone else's interests,
There's power
When there's nothing left to do.

Lack of choice
Exempts guilt and responsibility,
But cannot exempt life.
There's always life within choice.

Remind me
Of my lack of sleep
Of my favorite singers,
Of the irrelevance of politics,
Of tenderness,
Of despair,
Of unexpected beneath predictability,
Of purring,
Of tiny paws,
Sharpen nails over my shoulders,
Of big swinging bellies,
Of strange sounds.

They remind me
Laziness is a virtue,
A kind of resistance
To the big city pacemaker.

The cats
Look at me
With blinking yellow eyes
To remind me
To be naked of thoughts,
To forget a bath,
To bring back
The humility of allegedly
Superior intelligence.

The cats cry
For we forget
How to be comfortable
With our own loneliness
When all we had to do
Was to walk around the house
Like it was the first time.

Every discover
Is a new way
To start
Things we do
Every day.

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.