The Country

I want to leave my heart in the country,
and learn from the art of living.
I want to part from self induced cynicism
that numbs my longing for the simple.

That’s not it.
I want to be special and unspecial enough,
to dispense the namecard, the contracts and the mind lard.
I would rather feel the velvet of the sky instead.

More than that,
I want to be content in knowing that others are growing
by pitying my simple-minded lost soul.
I long for the longing to let go of scrutiny and laugh
alongside human insecurity.

No, that isn't it. I wish them well
despite the jealousies of this condescending city life.
I condemn the frail spirit that keeps me
from ploughing the garden or reciting Yutang,
without having satire stinging my tongue,
and guilt weigh upon
my already heavy, hollow heart.

On the way to Stratford-upon-Avon

My humorous head is

married to a frustrating memory,

and much like any odd couple

quarrel over the silliest of treacheries.

But if I remember as so,

there was a neatly trimmed graveyard

where only old women would bother to go,

decorate the tombs –

with white, blue and Golden balloons.

The song of Summer trees –

savoured in flowery cobwebs

and polite little fleas,

over looking war heroes who were

you and I when the Earth took them in.

I saw a burnt down barn

simmering through its rusty skeleton,

where a boy escaped chores

and lay, in lazy hay, beside restless young boars.

And his children,

and their children, tangled with lovers in the attic –

navigating through the wonders of static whisperings.

There goes the soul of secrecy,

and the seemingly timeless murmurings of naïve indescretions by the crickets.

I felt dock leaves and stinging nettles,

wind blown hair and scratchy skin;

a world far too great to fit the one within.

So I sit at the nook of a tree

as a final blanket of sun lights with the breeze,

and the stars begin their travels with fruitful ascent.

Church bells knoll and pastor lights fade from the sky.

And as fulfilling a day as this could have been,

I seem unprepared to bid England goodbye.

The Driver

He said "Get in the car, my friend",
and I didn't know what to say.
Stepping hard, he showed no fear;
the night was young as we drove away.

He looked into the rearview mirror
and saw my youthful eyes,
then pulling on his old man whiskers
he clarified all lies.

He claimed that money was the greatest
misfortune to all our souls;
and visions seen by the bravest,
memories of which bring them foe.

He told me stories of Kathmandu,
and the Kings of the spiraling sands;
of purity in the black man's shoes,
and civilizations raised by their hands.

At last he told me that life is but one precious breathe to hold.
That he knew nothing else, other than to never let this go.

The Passing

You find yourself so Original
with kissing backs and ear lobes,
with verses of love and private anecdotes -
the source of ingenuity, truth be told,
has passed from my lover's lips to those kissing your own.
And in passionate stumbles our lovers unfold,
from being poets to commoners -
utterly sold souls.

Our love resonates in similar ways,
what only time can prove true or fake.
Though we do not whisper love words for love's sake
a world of our own we recreate, filled with
blissful encounters of stories heard before.
I'll wait to see
not too expectantly -
the tides wash away our vows from the shore.

A Fumaça

Quando eu era moleque,

os cabelos cheio de peste,

eu pensava ser dono do mundo.

O meu mundo que sumia de mês em mês,

na Rua do Picadouro, casa quarenta e seis,

até que enfim fui rebaixado a freguês.

Pois a fumaça que cercava o telhado

com papo de adulto e cheiro de gato molhado

caiu no alcance das minhas unhas ruídas.

Agora que sei lavo bem as mãos,

derrubou-se a casa de telha à chão

e a ideia se foi num cheque de barão.

Enquanto encanto meninas com minhas histórias sofridas,

de cabelos de peste e unhas ruídas –

meu mundinho, memórias pica-dor meu coração.

Take Me Back to Star City

Things are a little fuzzy now. I dream that I’m awake; walking with my eyes closed. A floating brain, a pine tree in Cape Town, a cape tree in pine town. Take me back to Star City. I want to dream of the place that tastes like 1997 and steals my second breath out of every three.

Didn’t have Ol’Doc play the harmonica when I was a kid, but I miss him anyway. My tongue tries to wet the cracklings of my lips, flailing about for excuses but I got none. Cracker jacks and lollipops, band-aids and cough drops. What the hell are Cracker jacks?

See, you grow up then you grow old, and if you stay young you grow old and if you don’t love then you don’t grow. That’s like loveless loving for lovers who know that loveless loving leads to letting go. This is my loving promise to not let you go. And if I do, my father Time told me to, sorry. And Mr. Time is playing tricks on our temperate minds as your youth is given much sense as my old.

Too young to act as I say, I’m forty three and the world is a little older than me. Since that’s how it goes I think it knows best, so I’ll leave the thinkers to think and the world to rest. Close my eyes and I’m back at nineteen when I didn’t know I even had a spleen and all I wanted to do was to have sex with you. Confusing your eyes with other ladies’ thighs - what a mess of an age. I’d give up seven years of what I have for one year of having that. Passionate promises, sweaty conglomerates fulfilling like a short summer dream.


I awake again and I’m thirty three. Only the devil and the postman know what is wrong with me. But there is more to the feel of a pen than the psychobabble of a blind man. I sang in the blues and my God! You knew before I told you. Doesn’t take a war to know that self pity is cruel. My mind is a lost season, my hands are a jewel. But like all things ephemeral I’ll go back to renewal.


Honey blossoms in her hair; you tell me I should be fair I feel for belonging. In a rainy day, trapped under a cheap umbrella I think of others I think I’ve loved. Like a projection of Adam’s thought, Eve is now begot. It was a different umbrella then.

Note to Self

To live
is to exercise the swelling of your lungs,
of which
little balloons shape its lining
like an interior designer dancing in the palace of the Tsar.
I am the Tsar. I am the heir of nothing in particular.

Some men have mediocrity thrust upon them;
men who looked at the sky
and were saddened by the stars
of night and light and the half-light.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams.

Tudo no mundo começou com um sim. Uma molécula disse sim a outra molécula e nasceu a vida.
I’ve seen it happen in other people’s lives and now it’s happened in mine -
six billion, seven hundred million Giraffes inhabit this world.

To the precious pressures in my lungs:
I’ve given you all and now I am nothing.
Indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
like moonlight on a midnight stream
giving grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.


Poem written out of a combination of my own words and that of The Smiths, Joseph Heller, William Butler Yeats, Clarice Lispector, Allen Ginsberg, William Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Rua da Meia Lua

Upon rooftops of old Paris
we drank cheap wine
and swore to make them hear us,
it’s all over the very next day.
Squared tops of the world
where secrets float from drunken tongues below,
of shouts and laughter in a one night stand with Saint Germain.

Father: It seems to me that we’re on a stage my love.
Mother: Our truth is script,
Father: Our passions rehearsed,
and the golden lights that make this city Molière-immersed.

Aside: Mon Sang être la derniere verse!
The verse which exudes its own curse,

but not tonight.
Tonight I am Peter, you are dollface.
We jump off roofs and glide down the Champs Elysée,
and the only curse sont les rêves.
It is cruel because I know that as grey eyes open
tomorrow -

In half moon street where dreams are bread crumbs blown on the carpet, and my verse falls apart like old cigarettes in coat pockets.

Black Widow

Working the System in the Soul-ridden Farms,
looking for love lost in stranger’s arms –
I watch someone who kind of looks like me,
have their thoughts plucked off in notable reverie.
Needles attached to their arms and legs
prick softly like the fangs on a spider’s head.
Miss Black Widow of mass eedolisation
carries out her job with admirable sophistication.
I stand hopeless – they stand smiling,
what a historic day for pragmatic frying!

Scent of skin leaves me empty-stomached,
remember that roast we had last summer?
A Chardonnay daze of stung, stricken tongues,
one hundred eyes gaze and tighten their lungs -
from fearful white to powder-hot, blood-shot:
I want a part of this,
do you not? Sign your name and just to be sure,
marvell in the idea of whose idea this was before.
Little switch flicked up –

ZAP ZAP ZAP!

10 cents a pop, made a deal with God
that the Dreaming man would be the
last to drop.

One Two All None

If a grain of sand was to be moved from the realms of the multitudes of its brothers and sisters,
levitating in a sweeping dance by the barren breath of the Sahara, floating elegantly onto a wild cat’s sleeping brow; a steady breathing for its rocking cot.

If lightning was to become a greater source of life than that of the moon; if it were to take its place as
King of the Skies
bawling his desires into open freedom. Voice shaped of thunder; earthly rattle. A colossal bolt of electric woe with nothing but black space listening.

If a melodic note could not only be heard but also seen,
unleashed from the hollow wood or the sharp brass; aroused by the accrual of others to absorb the very infinity that encases them.
The waves clash once! Once more they thrive against the abandoned ceiling of the musical vault.
Fairy notes play hide-and-seek through cracks under rows of dusty chairs and into pockets of unused suits. Reflecting diamonds on ageing necklaces they spiral back in racing, multi-coloured lights, corresponding to their place in the hierarchy of sounds:
Each string for a voice, each beat for a thought.

I see the grain of sand moulding onto the shape of the King’s nose, as I gently step on the soft heap it once lived in.
I see the King’s tears cascade down the black skies as I gently step on the layers that have been shed before.
I see the King come to life as he explodes into several rhythmic constellations of noise, while I gently step on the reverberating floor boards.

I see the pasty area that one would call your face.
I suddenly see my face as yours and am deafened by the silence that comes with the glass between us.

B - effect

There is beauty in the calling,
when frantic bird shit is falling, and the
sky is open wide to those who believe this story.

There is beauty in the trace of a spirit crawling, at
one million light years per fucking second
and your eyelids rest mourning.
Lovers that part ignoring the spectacle your vision has just lost this morning.

There is beauty in not knowing the Last bre-
ath before the First hit,
ecstatic nerve-ends embrace the bliss
as the art of anticipation is gone,
like the lovers who counted them wrong.

There is beauty in customising:
red shirt, shit mood identifying,
you and me and everyone’s lying.
Intuition stands as the last great ‘undying’,
so you know all you’ve been un-doing -
that is the beauty of losing.

A Minha Língua é Minha

It rockets downwards like a meteor in flames,
burning its way through the infinity of black skies.
It comes in the form of Ellie, and fire, and smoke;
it comes in the form of Miller, and life, and being alone.

It is in the steps of Cesar and the Montague's reproach,
found also in the tip of the tongue
of Nietzsche and Donne,
and forever in Adolf's inexistent son.

It's in my father and your father and our
father’s demise.
In the prominence of youth, seen through
their eyes.

It is in the diseased words of Cazuza
and of Generation AIDS.
Aussi bien que dans l'âge du rêve Américain,
but aren't they both the same?

It comes from the now, and the then,
and the what if's of when.
From knowing the great -
to those that should have been so.
We could have been so.

As she sets the world on fire,
and he pulls it back together,

A Minha Língua é a Sua.

My Language is Yours.

Moon

What a manipulative moon is this thing called woman.

As you let go of the month she shows her Janus face. 

You miss her for the other twenty some things and almost fail to remember why you spiralled to this place.

When she is out though, it is worth the wait.

In reappearing, her humble brilliance kidnaps your song and morphs you into a slave-like tide, 

so you are left in a dreamy wondrous shore 

for something you have to wait another twenty eight days for.

Every end of the month we meet for the very first time. 

You offer me a private spectacle; I am keen to hear your stories in line.

It’s no use avoiding, because when she is present 

she’ll seek out your voice, and follow the crescent -

you will love her audacity again and again.

For the rest of it, you miss and anticipate, crave and endure, 

nurture and pretend to forget 

the effect Diana has on your core.

Mine has been stolen with your moon mirrored Iago;

an icy cold shimmer that burns through the pores of my chest

into an incomprehensible arduous zest of

something which feels not unlike sin.

But my loss moon is not your win,

for as you shadow your sections one by one

letting go of secrets behind the veiled sun,

I lose segments of mine own, my rivers, my venus and my unknown.

Only your full blown presence shapes me into something I once was.

Your phases cyclical, your freshness unending,

yet the lines by my sight work harder in welding

the skin of an ageing poet digressing:

You were born in a new moon -

what some call dark.

Heart of summer, the twelfth of June;

a black sheet riddled with stars.

Misleading me with your trickster light shining where there was no shine before,

bringing life to where, by morning, there will be no more.

A ray which strikes at twelve and I am the only one alive.

But for the greater part I just wonder where

have you gone my allied moon, play me not so.

How very youthful of you to come and go,

as you please, as I fall – you have my eyes you have my all.

And I am left to write words that take of me full and without;

the fiendish linger of a channelling doubt.

Your heart, my head: a hollow balloon,

release my strings so I may follow the moon.