Give me another excuse

Tell me I'm too ugly;
tell me I'm too stupid;
tell me I'm too boring;
tell me I'm too cold;
tell me it's too big;
tell me it's too small;
tell me it's disgusting;
tell me it's too crooked;
tell me you're afraid to hurt me;
tell me you're afraid to hurt yourself;
tell me it's not fashionable;
tell me you're afraid of whatever comes out of this;
tell me you think I'm gonna think you're a bitch;
tell me I don't deserve it;
tell me YOU don't deserve it;
tell me you're trying to torture me;
tell me you've undergone a trauma and are trying to recover;
tell me you want to make me anticipate it as much I can;
tell me it's too submissive an act;
tell me you've been brought up to be a nun;
tell me you've been brought up by your brothers and they will kill you if they find out;
tell me you're ashamed of what God might think;
tell me you're too selfish;
tell me I'm pushing you too hard and this is your revenge;
tell me we've done all the rest more than ten times, but it's still too soon;
tell me you're afraid I might have some disease;
tell me you've made a promise to your favorite saint;
tell me your saving it for Prince fucking Charming.

I could take ANY of these.

But don't tell me you won't suck my dick because you are insecure because that doesn't MEAN anything.

"Do you like reading?"

Opinions about reading I got at my job. And how I wish I could respond.

From A to Z!

A. "I don't like reading books." "Ever tried?" "Not really." "You suck."

B. "I believe reading is unimportant." "Your belief is unimportant and sick."

C. "I don't care to know anything about books." "You don't care to know anything about anything other than ruminating your dinner."

D. "I don't know why people like reading." "Because we have the ability to read and understand beautiful things."

E. "People who read are lonely antisocials." "I smell books burning. Do you smell Fahrenheit 451?"

F. "What does it matter that millions consider it high art? What's that got to do with me?" "Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Art is valuable. It's got nothing to do with you."

G. "Even though I know that reading will bring me benefits, I don't get even close to it." (This one appeared when I recommended graded books for studying English. It made me sick.)

H. "Reading is a waste of time!" "And listening to you should be forbidden."

I. "I can't concetrate in reading because my mind is set on more important things." "Don't gimme any of that! Your brain is set on standby!"

J. "Reading books is schoolyard punishment. Teachers provide readings when they're too lazy to teach a real class." "Your teacher must have given you Pauno Cuelho to read."

K. "Literature is for faggots!" "Agreed. Faggots are statistically more intelligent."

L. "It's literature! WHO can UNDERSTAND literature?" "Certainly not you or your family."

M. "The objective of my existence is making money, not reading books." "The objective of your existence is being a moron."

N. "I've never read a poem." "You never went to school, either."

O. "I can't understand poems." "You never went to school, either."

P. "Dictionaries are for stupid people." "You must have a million back home."

Q. "English-English dictionaries are stupid! They don't translate the words!" "Why do you think that's so? There's your picture in one of them. Look up 'retard'."

R. "The only book worth reading is the Hole-y Bible." "Because it was written by God, right?"

S. "Of course I like reading! I've read all Harry Potters, The Da Vinci Code, Kite Runner and now I'm reading Twilight!" (pronounced Twee-light, most of the time) "You should start reading real books, if you really wanna try."

T. "Of course I like reading! I buy Capricho every month!" "And you'll get a boob job when you're 13, too."

U. "Of course I like reading! I have a Veja subscription!" "Is that your brain coming outta your nose?"

V. "I'd rather see the movie." "I'd rather see you walking away."

W. "I'd rather read the summary." "I'd rather read a note about your whole family in the obituary."

X. "You like reading!? What a nerd!" "Thanks, neanderthal."

Y. "Fun??? How can READING be fun???" "It's funnier that talking to you."

and last, but not least:

Z. "Reading won't make me any more intelligent than watching Big Brother." "Pull out .45 and shoot until I'm relaxed."

February 31

"I was wide awake and I had this dream
we were making sense and we were both clean
we were standing on the corner of parallel streets
the perfect time and place for guys like us to meet."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Lawrence?
Not the best time! Have you finally gone insane?
Help me paddle! Quick! Against the currents!
Can't you see the mess you did with our plane?"

"There was another man on the streets with us
the watermelon he held was all covered in rust
your dog was running backwards, just like you
One of my eyes were yellow - the other one, blue"

"You're going to die if you don't keep swimming!
Our raft's torn and the... am I upside down?
What's going on? Why am I on the ceiling?
Where's the ocean? Are we safe back in town?"

"You tell me. It's a time of constant change
Believe it. Your mind can rearrange.
I tell you this because I need an explanation:
Is the world we live in merely a hallucination?"

Em busca do verso perdido

hoje é domingo
pede cachimbo

CACHIMBO É DE BARRO
BATE NO JARRO

o jarro é de ouro
bate no touro

o touro é valente
bate na gente

a gente é fraco (sic)
cai no buraco

o buraco é fundo
acabou-se o mundo

You can forgive me, but I'm going to hell anyway

Everybody was laughing around the coffee table. Someone had just told a great joke about a person we all knew. We were at my place. I’d been drinking with my old time college friends for some time so I think that’s why one of them shot: “We used to hate you in first semester! You used to be obnoxious and annoying. Some of the people couldn’t even hear your name, so disgusted they were.” My expression changed slowly from drunken laughter to slight shock. I felt suddenly offended, frustrated, diminished, demolished.
“When you came back from that trip in Europe you were such a different person! No one even recognized you!”
They all went “yeah!” and I couldn’t yet feel the ground below me.
They were all laughing and smiling like it was a great war story they were telling me. But I felt like when someone tells you you had been getting cheated on by your wife who died some time ago and whose passing you’ve already gone through, but then you have to stir the pot all over again to re-evaluate the whole thing and then you don’t know how to feel. I didn’t know how to feel because they’re smiling over me all the time and their smiles are true and it’s supposed to be a good thing. Everyone’s drinking happily and heavily and they shoot something like that on your face like it’s so easy to take it.
“I didn’t change a fucking thing!” I said.
“Yes, you did, Mister Clever Aleck! You used to bring people down all the time. You used to think everybody was stupid” said one of the girls. Her name was Cameron, but I don’t think that’s her real name.
“Yeah. You used to laugh at people right to their faces!” said Julie.
“I did not!” I tried in vain to defend myself, but I couldn’t deny that they were speaking very earnestly and they seemed to have talked that over before. Their ideas matched too well. They were smiling and laughing, though. It was quite bizarre for me.
“Yes, you did! And you would say something like ‘Oh, my god, how stupid!’ and everybody around would shut up or something like that.”
“Or they would either look at each other like ‘why’s he so mean?’ and change the subject or leave.”
And then I remembered some scenes. People became silent and left.
“I mean, like, we LOVE you now!”
“Yeah, we’re, like, BEST FRIENDS!”
“YEAH! We are the closest group of friends from our old classroom and I know it. I miss it when we studied together” said a guy whose name was funny. Lovegod. He didn’t seem to be in the group of people who hated me back when.
And then I remembered.
We were studying language in college and some people just didn’t know how to write. Some people wrote almost absurdly well. Others just couldn’t. They would make mistakes which were seen with utmost despise by some. They knew little about the basics, so they learned barely nothing from what took more gray matter.
There was this girl. She was sitting on the coffee table now. She was one of the drunks who said she loved me after I came back from the trip. Her being there means she wasn’t one of the illiterate girls in the classroom.
I mean, not that literacy has anything in the world to do with how I judge people more interesting than others, but I was lucky to have befriended only people who could take care of themselves without having to ask god for help. There were a lot of religious people, mainly girls because there were only five guys in that group of 42. They would all sport their holy bibles in class and make compliments to each others’ long skirts, long hair. It was very interesting.
So, this girl, she had written pages of notes in this pink notebook with pink lines and using different colored pens and one of the colors was pink. It was Julie’s.
There was another guy who wasn’t sitting at that night table because he had quit drinking and smoking pot and whatever the hell “took him out of his center”. His name was Andy. We called him Necro. It had something to do with his last name. He borrowed Julie’s notebook during the class. We needed some of her notes for some test that was going to happen soon.
Necro was one of the guys who shared the same despise for grammatical mistakes.
“Check this out” he whispered, poking the notebook at my stomach “it’s BEAUTIFUL.”
There was some class going on and we always sat in the back of the room.
“Jesus, look at all this…” I was fascinated. I was having fun. I had found an oasis. We pointed out innumerable misspellings, punctuation problems, all kinds of shit. “Let’s give her her marks!”
We circled and crossed all the crap we saw on her notebook. There were about a hundred mistakes. We laughed in silence in the back of the room. Julie was sitting on the row in front of us. We had to be careful not to insult her with our laughter.
We gave her a C-. Below average. We wrote her marks on the top of the first page. We closed her notebook and returned it to her. We had forgotten all about the notes we needed.
She didn’t speak to me for weeks. I thought it was normal. No one spoke to me very often then.
Much later, I learned that Necro went and apologized to her. Maybe just a few hours after class. He went without me and didn’t tell me he’d done it. I think that was the worst part. Whether he apologized on my behalf or not, I didn’t go any time. She’d cried to our other friends. She liked us and it had made her consider quitting. She told him it was just notes and she wasn’t trying to be Shakespeare so she was really mad.
I did pretty well in the test. I passed with remarkable grades. My father took me to Europe. But what does it matter? Passport stamps won’t take away the awful taste of the beer that had been warming up on my lap while this movie played on my gray matter screen. The people smiled and so did I.

Avoid extermination

sometimes I wonder
if I have
(or have lost)
faith in mankind.

some people's brightness
is still
reliable,
but most of them
have lost
their color.

should we rely
only
on the brightness that is left?

have we forgotten
how to paint?

Modern approach for the study of plants

from the high top
of the plant I admire
I see all the rest
altered, or in disguise,
moving

my body in
slow motion
my mind flies swiftly

the waves of music,
an ocean
I am near the water
when I cover my
eyeballs
and unravel my ears

my plant is a cloud,
my mind flies swiftly,
and I am only
inside my mind

the air I inhale,
warm and beautiful,
makes all the difference
when I play games
with my
head

no need, actually.
everything is real now.