Procura da Poesia

Do not write verses about events.
There is no creation or death in the face of poetry.
Before it, life is a static sun,
it does not warm or illuminate.
Affinities, anniversaries, personal incidents do not matter.
Do not make poetry with the body,
that excellent, complete, and comfortable body, so averse to lyrical effusion.

Your drop of bile, your grimace of joy or pain in the dark
are indifferent.
Do not reveal your feelings to me,
which prevail in the misunderstanding and attempt the long journey.
What you think and feel, that is not yet poetry.

Do not sing your city, leave it in peace.
Singing is not the movement of machines or the secret of houses.
It is not music heard in passing, the sound of the sea in the streets next to the foam line.

Singing is not nature
nor men in society.
For it, rain and night, fatigue and hope mean nothing.
Poetry (do not take poetry from things)
elides subject and object.

Do not dramatize, do not invoke,
do not inquire. Do not waste time lying.
Do not get bored.
Your ivory yacht, your diamond shoe,
your mazurkas and abuses, your family skeletons
disappear at the curve of time, it is something useless.

Do not recompose
your buried and mournful childhood.
Do not waver between the mirror and the
memory in dissipation.
What dissipated was not poetry.
What broke, crystal was not.

Penetrate silently into the realm of words.
There are poems waiting to be written.
They are paralyzed, but there is no despair,
there is calm and freshness on the intact surface.
Here they are alone and silent, in a state of dictionary.
Live with your poems before writing them.
Be patient if they are obscure. Calm, if they provoke you.
Wait for each one to be realized and consumed
with its power of word
and its power of silence.
Do not force the poem to detach from limbo.
Do not pick up from the ground the lost poem.
Do not flatter the poem. Accept it
as it will accept its definitive and concentrated form
in space.

Come closer and contemplate the words.
Each one
has a thousand secret faces beneath the neutral face
and asks you, without interest in the answer,
poor or terrible, that you give it:
Did you bring the key?

Notice:
devoid of melody and concept
they took refuge in the night, the words.
Still moist and impregnated with sleep,
they roll in a difficult river and turn into contempt.