I don’t know if anything I can tell you that hasn’t already been said and redeemed. Or written, or perhaps vomited on a dark street, by one of those geniuses of LED lamps that accentuate the blackness of chilly souls.
We wander, the so-called networks, search engines, where everything and nothing persist, besides this taste of lime in the cold mouth of my fingers. The importance of things is gone. It was, after all, dew at dawn that the sun should not have broken and exposed the vain things, the successive pharmacies. We would have stayed in eternal night, still with a chance (the last one) to tack the nightmare. The one we imagined to eliminate.
Today the world burns. Let it burn.
Seen at a glance, it is worthless: the nightingale is not worth it, which is now silent to make way for the sun. I lack the clouds, the blanket sky, the indecisive moon; there remains the fear of not being and merely being, while something here screams in amazement. It must be nonsense, ant misunderstanding, an idiotic fight that I carry until finally fainting, at the terminal station, as if sleep is still driving something away.
I’m going to sleep, I mumble. And I doubt this truth of seeing me lying somewhere. I wanted to forget, it is true, to wander through a beautiful and clean desert. “It’s clean,” said Lawrence in the film. But that desert does not live in me: dusk brings night, as dawns will bring dawn. And nothing, nothing, saves us from notation. We remain, we eat; eventually, we would make love, if love were something to be made and not found by chance.
Poets die every day in my country. Camilo, Fernando, Herberto. They remain unburied.
Why so much fanfare and so much broken dishes? It’s life, it’s fado, you say and you must be right. But if so, is it worth it, when the soul does not exist and the street is so small?
Because. This is not the case. And we walk, because there is no other way out, there is no door without being hurt. I am blind, deaf and groping. And I’m just not mute because the voices in between do not calm down and if my mouth didn’t scream it would surely explode. The day returns. Another day and another day, which chase us without remission.
What for, asks the bad voice, that infinite voice – sick, obsessed – just memories of a past that insists on not resting. That’s enough, I scream inside. But that does little good. It persists, sometimes old, of other children. Still a compulsive sound. It’s the song I don’t want to hear anymore.
Radio Carlos. Shut down. Let me sleep, let me be there, but for once, rest. Why so much fanfare and so much broken dishes? It’s life, it’s fado, you say and you must be right. But if so, is it worth it, when the soul does not exist and the street is so small?
It smells like verbena, banana, azucena. But even if the smell enchants us and sometimes hallucinates and behind a curtain something is finally exposed, why put on brakes, if in fact the fingers are empty? I don’t see rivers or suffocation from another bank. Anything that resembles courage seems in vain.
A stream passes by the door of my house. In principle, it will slide to the sea. Your glide is beautiful. The fish hide, thirsty for water, on the rocks. Troops arrive. The pinwheel is spinning in the sky, a distressed machine in a starry universe. One knee to the neck. Refills the people who are made to refile. Parade everything in today’s entrudo without mint. The morning rises raw, the sepia afternoon, the night, always haunted by you.
This week a poet died. He’s not going anywhere. Poets die every day in my country. Camilo, Fernando, Herberto. They remain unburied. That is the fate of the poets: the mass grave of the days, the sad morgue of the nights. Not even in death to be of any use. They don’t complain: they knew that just breathing is important.
*Director of the newspaper Hoje Macau
