The sponge

I am soft and full of holes,
Preserved by smiles
That host soirees in my belly,
Every once in a while.

Forest fires snuffed out
By the swampy stretch of shallow summers;
By the mountainous intimacy,
And the cold blood pumper.

I am the overzealous draught
Puffing up the wrong trail,
Where Circe’s shrubs grow dull
And Rosemary’s spell tickles your snout.

Their nymph dance clouds the air
And you stare, as the same shade of ash
Stains the ocean and sky.

I smile at your glassy eyed eagle eye –
You are at sea with my oddly set genes.

My two-minute love, I am
The train of thought you couldn’t follow,
The prospect turned to vapour,
Floating up to be a cloud
And raining down to wet your dreams.

Don’t expect me to bloom
Just because it is spring.

You amaze at the flowery insights
Budding off my frivolous tongue,
At the bleeding emotion
Ejaculating from my ripe fat fruits.

There is a pureness and ease
To this elephant happiness.

But the sickness, you see,
Has been breeding for months
And the worms inside are waiting
To rush down your throat and smother you.

As you press your feverish mouth to mine,
It is your weakness that will rot you.

I lie before you, truthful and bare.
Trust me darling, all I really am
Is a few padded memories of childhood,
Waiting like dew to dry up in the sun.

I have soaked up more than any barnacle could bear
So just give me a squeeze, and I’m done.

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Photograph of view from Punta di Circe, San Felice al Circeo, Italy

A carnalidade

Poem originally written in Italian for my great uncle Gilberto Grasso, who I lived with in Santarem, Brazil, over the summer. It is very special to me, as is my uncle Gil, who, at the age of 80, still burns with what Pasolini (one of his favourite Italian authors) would call ‘desperate vitality’. Thank you for overwhelming me with your immense love for life, literature, cinema, romance, fun, debate, and all the ups and downs this world’s got to offer.

Zio Gil and his friend Deonito, Language professor at the University of Santarém, helped me translate the poem into the beautiful language it deserves to be in. (Below a rough English translation for those who need it).

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A carnalidade jogue tudo na brasa.

Eu, que sempre mergulhei nas gentes,
A procura de um tudo
que apagasse cada minha curiosidade.

E que sempre mais esvaziada me foi acordada,
Apagada-se a duvida
Que era a minha vitalidade.

Tu es demais incontrolável para mim,
Demais fora do lugar.
Eu, que cambaleio nas margens da loucura,
Ainda demais regulada.

E me pergunto se tu
és verdadeiramente livre,
Se o homem verdadeiramente
pode aprender em ser livre.

Quando o teu ser fica marcado daquele momento,
No qual tu abaixas-te para afivelar a bota
Ou em olhar uma linda mulher e não uma outra.

Aqueles momentos te acorrentam a este mundo
Que nos acompanha sozinhos,
dos vinte e quatro aos oitenta.

Quando penses saudoso ao passado,
Naquele que é, que não foi.
E quando procuras de viver desesperadamente
Para não te sentir apagar totalmente.

È bem verdade que nÓS poetas
somos calculadores – niilistas miseráveis.
È bem verdade que eu, sou espelho ornamental
Das emoções que me cercam.

Mas absorvo, te garanto que absorvo.
E estas vidas que cabem em mim,
Estas luzes que cabem em mim,
Saiam de mim mais coloridas, cheias.

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Carnality turns the world to ashes.
A life spent diving into people,
Seeking fullness to quench curiosity.
Yet rising emptier each morning,
Extinguished the doubt, extinguished the clout.
You’re too unruly for me, too out of place.
I’m still staggering on the margins of madness
And yet I am still too restrained.
And I ask myself if you really are free,
if a man can truly ever learn to be free.
When you’re tainted by that moment
when you stopped to tie your shoelace
or lay eyes on a pretty girl and not another.
Moments like these glue you to this word,
that chaperones our lonely journey
from age twenty to age eighty.
When you think, with ‘saudade’, to the past
to what happened and what didn’t.
When you try to live desperately,
to not fade out entirely.
And maybe what you said is true:
Us writers are calculating, misery-breeding nihilists,
And maybe I am, indeed, just an ornamental mirror
Throwing back the life and emotions around me.
But I promise I sponge it all up
And these lives that soak in,
These lights that soak in
Come back out more colourful and full.

Travel post # 3 – First days in Santarem – Are poets big fat liars?

I’m immersed in literature, cinema and philosophical debates, here in my great uncle’s house. The hammock in the back garden, under the mango tree, is a lovely place for reflection and study. My head is dizzy from the Portuguese, the heat and the many people. The other night my great uncle Gilberto said something curious and rather provocative. He said all the poets he´d met, once skinned of their artistic and literary armour, where calculating and cynical individuals, skilled in the ability of mirroring the world´s emotions, but lacking the passion that comes from one´s own fire and beliefs. Am I really just an ornamental mirror? Perhaps one that reflects the beauty of the world in a magnified way? Is there some consistency to my words and thoughts? Or are we all just be mirrors of each other’s feeling, shadows of each other´s dreams, as I once wrote in a poem? I believe there is some truth to what he said. My poetry, my words, are a magnified version of what I see and feel and this includes my vision of myself. Just as it can be raw at times, it can also be careful and aesthetically pleasing. I suppose, in a way, that´s what all art does: it paints a picturesque and awe inspiring version of banality. It tries to inject some colour and unpredictability in the boredom of everyday life.

Here’s a few pictures taken amidst the red mist of Santarem.

Travel post # 2 – Barco São Bartolomeu III and Santarém

Barco São Bartolomeu III, Manaus to Santarém, 5th July

This chunk of wood and coloured hammocks has been nothing but an exercise in patience. Ever since we crossed over the excitement of blue and brown floating side by side, latte-coloured water has been expanding indefinitely. I wonder all the lives that have lived and passed through these waters and dwelled in this desolation, this forgotten world – most people never leave Amazonas or Para, have never seen the sea. I´ve been on this boat for 24 hours and time feels different over here. Five hours is around the corner and everything is measured in seasons and circadian cycles.  Colourful hammocks, some pets in cages, banana trees, children running wild, a boy with purple hair tearfully reading a letter, music blasting from the bar, we all proceed as ants, shifting slowly downstream and the size of the world is almost inconceivable. I have never felt so small.

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Santarém, 7^th July 2016

The carelessness, mixed with embarrassment, of two young women on plastic chairs, letting their children play by the cemetery of solidarity, which is FUNDAC*. My uncle Gil, 80 years old and yet still fiery – with communism, rebellion, and desire to help the weak and exploited – completely ignored by their ignorant glances. Don´t you know me? Your children came here, I helped you for years, I did a good thing. And you just stood there oblivious, as this temple of learning was destroyed, by drugs and poverty and ignorance. It wasn´t just the humidity that thickened the air in that abandoned playground, with broken windows and shredded walls. Not for theft, but for sabotage, for anger. Anger against what? We will always be conquistadores here, even if I eat pimenta and fish heads and walk around barefoot. There will always be hatred. Llega a tu país! The rich kid said to my uncle on the first night, as we ate camaroes and drank cold Brahma. Todo o mundo é país… and ignorance and xenophobia are always the hardest to eradicate.

*FUNDAC was my uncle´s now closed NGO, which looked after local disadvantaged children, providing them with official identities, long-distance adoption programmes and after-school activities and tuition.

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Mercado,  Santarém, 8th July

Colour clashes: indigenous, black and white blood, fruit, old faces and fat, juicy fish. It´s so hard to choose: where to point the lens, who to be, where it is that I stand here. Am I just quiet or am I an outsider to this bustling chaos? When I speak they laugh with me, and I suppose their language isn´t any more foreign than the rest of my life. Markets always overwhelm me, and I just let myself melt into its all-embracing senses.

 

Travel post #1- São Paulo to Manaus

Sun, breeze, or the extra pill. Or maybe the Sirocco numbness has left town. The blinding headache has retreated somewhat and maybe things won´t be so bad. Maybe I won´t sink into its sands but get across unscathed, but for the slight delay and heaviness. Maybe I can make myself lighter by soaking up this warmth and allowing things to come. At their own pace. The tar will evaporate slowly, with this magic combination. The feeling of dread will be left behind. I shall proceed carefully and keep light. Rapid movement might break the balance. The forest lays ahead, the humid, bug-drenched forest by the rio, and the labour to come will bring strength and promise. In a little more than a month, I will be at the edge of nothingness and I will be happy, staring down at the immensity of the world. On top of the world, chewing on coke because humans aren´t built for feeling so light. I will be real again, up there. A young explorer amidst old happy folk, ready to learn and feel pain. Ready to vomit out what´s left of the tar and see how it really is that I feel, that I am. Alone and loved by the world, I can be anything I want to be.

This was written about two weeks ago, shortly before my departure for Santarém, Para, deep in the Brazilian Amazon forest. As I´m on a two-month trip around the Amazon region and then Ecuador and Bolivia (I think) and as I´m struggling to maintain contact with family and friends (due to lack of internet connection, laptop and time), this website is going to temporarily be turned into a travel/informative blog. I apologise if this will cause a lack in the literary consistency and care that I usually try to maintain in my posts but I´m very tired – or ´cansada´ as they say here – confused and in a hurry. Which, now that I think of it, isn´t all that different from my usual state of being. I promise, however, to try not to bore you with descriptive information about my trip and to keep the material reflexive, existentially inquisitive and creativity/psychology related. There may also be some photographs.
And, last but not least, I´ve been admitted onto an MSc in Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, starting mid-September, so this website will return to its original state of being around that time.

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Plane FCO-GRU, 3rd July 2016

I want to breathe in the world like a noz balloon. I don´t want to see, I want to be, to feel. To sink into people´s skin, to touch, to feel real. To feel their pulse running in my veins. Human flesh, dirt, nakedness, running. The forest, the mud, the discomfort, the pain, the rain. I want to find the kindness, the humaneness, which is a waste to so many people´s lives. I want to learn how to always stop the car when I see another man dying, to never let the fear and the apathy take over.

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São Paulo, 4^th July 2016

Sao Paulo feels uncomfortable and people walk about fretfully and suspiciously. I missed my ride, my luggage was temporarily lost and I hold on to my things and myself while I wait an hour for the bus. I want to be in the forest and get out of this hostile concrete town, which screams poverty and looks down on you with its obvious luxury. The hostel near Paulista is a momentary comfort, greeting me with water, caipirinha, a joint and good people. Why do I fall in love so easily and why am I so prone to sleepless nights? I just want to slide in quietly and go unnoticed. I catch so many eyes for my clumsiness, my looks, or my curious attire. Sometimes it´s ok. I smile and they smile back, even help. Sometimes we´re immediately best friends, or lovers. Other times they just stare back vacantly, a slight edge of hostility and incomprehension. I feel guilty then, as if staring at hyenas at the zoo. But I don´t want to look at you, I want to look with you and keep you forever with me. Maybe I need to devise a strategy.

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Plane to Manaus, 5^th July

I am scruffy, tired and hungry, my shaky legs my only company on this plane into the jungle. The view from the plane window is magnificent and disturbing: concrete, concrete, concrete blocks, expanding for miles and miles (and miles), surrounded by the impenetrable blackness of the forest. Man vs. Nature.

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Manaus, 5^th July 2016

Manaus is friendly and very LOUD. Chaotic and messy, it stands rebellious and arrogant in the middle of the indomitable forest. Traffic and trafficking, cocaine and diamonds stuffed into bananas. Daily torrential rain, dirty water, dirty streets. People shouting stuff at me while I try to clean the humidity off my glasses. I arrived to curious looks and pats on the back and me and my backpack were shoved into a bus/van-thing, blasting music from a portable speaker. The driver stopped the bus/van-thing and shouted from the window for an açai. He also skilfully wrote me a list of fish to try – Tombaqui, Pirarucu, Tucunare – while navigating the busy streets of this humid mess of a city. Most importantly: I haven´t seen a single mosquito. I mean, ok that I lavished myself in repellent spray while waiting for my suitcase but seriously, Manaus makes Rome look like, well… the Amazon.

 

SHOCK

Sudden, sudden loss of control.
Your invisible blood sticks to my fingers,
The air that left you,
To my chest like alien tentacles.
Grey metal to join the blue and black,
Already nuzzled in the fields.
Who was here before me?

My pill-induced nightmare is shattered by your silent scream.

Sudden, sudden loss of control.
My biggest fear just rolled all over me:
From a distance I observed,
The war of paranoia and sedation –
The human-made virus
Spreading through the world.
Whose side am I on?

Grey streaked kind woman, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.

Sudden, sudden loss of control.
I cling desperately to the only scrapes you left me:
It works, but only just.
And only just always fills you
With horrors and questions and blame.
Only just pulls me out of Switzerland,
and right back into the rubble.

I’m at war.

 

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Featured Image: ‘The Art of Paranoia’ by Peter Schwartz. Check him out here:

http://www.artmajeur.com/en/artist/peterschwartz/portfolio

Choke.

I can smell the lethargy in the air as the rain comes down.
Who told you you could write all over my skin?

Territorial disputes.

Casually manhandling death and the rain
don’t stop, the rain           don’t stop.
Biting breasts under neon colours.
Stuffing your face and drowning in the barrel-
Drowning in the rain of your pain.

Contempt for conformity. Body builders of human agony.
The vivid dreams stopped months ago.
Flashes of blood running down my neck.

This winding road is damned and this skin is too tight.
Grinning mouths with men hanging at the corners.
Unsteady flooring and gums aching.

I’m heady from the drinks, the want and the sweat.
This tube smells of metal, blood and piss.
There’s a nightmare pulsing in between my legs.
Laughing hyenas pull at my clothes.           I give in.

Vaccinate me for control.

Chapped lips in the cold. Stomach acid scratches at my soul.
Flashing streetlights, cars, dancing on my window.
Magnetic network of obligations and purpose.

Buzzing in the world and screeching in my ears.
Monotone high pitched frequencies and I’m going mad, I’m going       mad.

The itch, the itch the pulse           in the eye,

the everlasting night, the bite,

the blood.

I’m a mess of filaments,

my nerves are barbwire.

Your fingers feel like bombs.

Psychosis, migraines, want.           A hollowed out gut.

Out of body,

overlooking this city.

You stand next to me, naked and shivering.
My cigarette shakes at the lips.

It falls and I          let          myself                               fall.

Control

a blanket
on a clothes line           the stains
all washed out
I hang out in boredom,

to dry

I am sick
of the clips
that so wearily hold me up

of this washed out sanity

I am sick.

This is not the best me I can be.

Stop this, run again.

      madness
                    drunkenness
                              silliness

dance away control:
colours bodies           laughter

c a r e l e s s n e s s

the frenzy the rush
the high.

I miss life and I have lied.

burn books thoughts dreams.

They aren’t enough,

I’m going to die.

burn lists
          projects.

I don’t need to be clever and ok.
people movement fear anger           lust.

– to touch

and

be touched.

to feel alive.

Featured artwork by Jonas Fyhr. Find him at jonasfyhr.deviantart.com

Special Glasses

And I wear my special glasses
On this fortress by the sea
A broken sax and both of you,
No one sees things like we see!

By the river in Boston
Where the little white boats
Are like stars in the blue,
No one feels like I do.

On the rooftop where we kissed
And made movies of our lives,
All the silly things I miss,
No one knows like you and I.

And I wear my special glasses
When I wonder by myself
Through the fields and through the trees,
As I hide behind these leaves.

On the cliff behind the island,
All alone, while the violence
In the world breaks into waves
And I swirl within its blues.

When my lids are heavy
With departures and arrivals
And I feel the frenzied blood,
As it pulses through the terminals.

And I wear my special glasses
When I think and sip my tea
When I smile at all of you,
Or swim naked in the sea.

And I slide through many faces,
Through the laughter and embraces
I feel colourful and free,
All these eyes, they dance with me.

And I tingle as my skin and mind
Are drenched in eau de glee
I am golden, I am wild,
Warm as honey to these bees.

There is only song and colour,
Silly details make me smile
This confusion is perfection
And it all makes life worthwhile.

And we do not need the music,
We can hum and we can write
I can hear things through my eyes
As I’m gripped in life’s big bite!

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Cheers to my friends Meg, Elle and the broken sax.

Post #2 Ruta del Sol

My bones still feel humid
Above these clouds
As I soak in these days;

A song with strangers in the rain –
Una pachada.
My voice softer than ever.

Humid walls,
Faded colours, vivid people.
Bright warm darkness and so many stars!

I can feel you slowly leaking out,
Life soaking back in
With this music…

You, who filled me with emptiness,
And I bled with anguish.

Now I bleed light and love and life
I’ve been awake for days –
I am everywhere.

And you’re alone,
Lusting after your own charms:
Your perfect inconsolable pain.

I loved you fear and restrain.
But how can I look after you
Here on this rooftop, under the scalding sun?

Now my mind sees more
And my eyes run wild:
Fireworks in this cold comfort.

These dunes by the ocean
Are a smaller desert
Then your desolate company.

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