Nosso Tempo

[I]
This is a time of division
Time of broken men

In vain we go through volumes
We travel and color ourselves
The anticipated hour crumbles to dust in the street
Men ask for meat fire shoes
Laws are not enough lilies do not bloom
From the law my name is turmoil, and it is written
In stone

I visit the facts, I don't find you
Where do you hide, precarious synthesis
Pledge of my sleep, light
Sleeping lit on the balcony?
Tiny certainties of loans, no kiss
Climbs on the shoulder to tell me
The city of complete men

I keep quiet, I wait, I decipher
Things might get better
Things are so strong!
But I am not the things and I revolt
I have words in me seeking a channel
They are hoarse and hard
Irritated, energetic
Compressed for so long
Lost their meaning, just want to explode

[II]
This is a time of boundaries
Time of cut people
Of hands traveling without arms
Obscene random gestures

The street of childhood has changed
And the red dress
Red
Covers the nakedness of love
Outdoors, in the valley

Obscure symbols multiply
War, truth, flowers?
From mobilized Platonic laboratories
Comes a breath that crests the faces
And dissipates, on the beach, the words

Darkness spreads but does not eliminate
The substitute for the star in hands
Certain parts of us how they shine! They are nails
Rings, pearls, cigarettes, lanterns
Are more intimate parts
And pulsation, the panting
And the night air is strictly necessary
To continue, and we continue

[III]
And we continue it's a time of crutches
Time of talkative dead
And old paralytics, nostalgic for dancing
But it's still a time to live and tell
Certain stories have not been lost
I know this house well
Through the right one enters, through the left one goes up
The large room leads to terrible rooms
Like the burial that was not done, the forgotten body on the table
Leads to the room of sour fruits
To the clear central garden, to the water
That drips and whispers
Incest, blessing, departure
Leads to closed cells, containing
Papers?
Crimes?
Coins?

Oh tell, old black woman, oh journalist, poet, small urban historian
Oh deaf-mute, repository of my faintings, open up and tell
Girl trapped in memory, old cripple, archive cockroaches, creaking doors, loneliness and disgust
Enigmatic people and things, tell
Cover of dust from dismantled pianos, tell
Old emperor's stamps, broken porcelain devices, tell
Bones in the street, newspaper fragments, hooks on the seamstress's floor, mourning on the arm, doves, stray dogs, hunted animals, tell
Everything so difficult after you fell silent
And many of you never opened

[IV]
It's a time of half silence
Of cold mouth and murmur
Indirect word, warning
On the corner time of five senses
In one the spy dines with us

It's a time of drab curtains
Of neutral sky, politics
In the apple, in the saint, in pleasure
Love and unlove, mild anger
Gin with tonic water
Painted eyes
Glass teeth
Grotesque twisted tongue
We call this: Balance

In the alley
Just a wall
On it the police
In the advertising sky
Birds announce
The glory
In the room
Mockery and three dirty collars

[V]
Listen to the formidable lunch hour
In the city the offices, in a moment, empty
Mouths suck a river of meat, vegetables and vitamin pies
Quickly jumps from the sea the tray of silvery fish!
The undergrounds of hunger cry soup broth
Liquid dog eyes through the glass devour your bone
Eat, mechanical arm, feed, paper hand, it's mealtime
Later will be the time for love

Slowly the offices recover, and business, indecisive form, evolve
The splendid business insinuates itself in traffic
Crowds crossing it do not see it's colorless and odorless
It's disguised in the tram, behind the southern breeze
Comes in the sand, in the telephone, in the airplane battle
Takes over your soul and extracts a percentage from it

Listen to the sprawling return hour
Man after man, woman, child, man
Clothes, cigarette, hat, clothes, clothes, clothes
Man, man, woman, man, woman, clothes, man
They imagine waiting for something
And remain silent, they drain step by step, they sit down
Last servants of business, they imagine going back home
Already night, among faded walls, in a supposed city, they imagine
Listen to the small nighttime hour of compensation, readings, appeal to the casino, walk on the beach
The body next to the body, finally stretched out
With pants off the annoying thought of a slave
Listen to the body creak, embrace, ebb
Wander in remote objects and, buried under them without pain
Trust what matters to me
Of sleep

Listen to the horrible job of the day
In all countries of human speech
The falsification of words dripping in newspapers
The unreal world of registries where property is a cake with flowers
Banks gently crushing the sugar's neck
The constellation of ants and usurers
Bad poetry, bad romance
The fragile who surrender to the basilisk's protection
The ugly man, of mortal ugliness
Strolling in a boat
In a sinister Saturday twilight

[VI]
In the family's basements
Orchids and options
Of purchase and divorce
The electric pregnancy
No longer brings raptures
Allergic children
Are exchanged; reformed
There's a relentless
War on cockroaches
Stories are told
By correspondence
The table gathers
A glass, a knife
And the bed devours
Your loneliness
Honor is saved
And the cattle's inheritance

[VII]
Or it is not saved, and it is the same there are solutions, there are balms
For every hour and pain there are strong balms
Class pains, of bloody fury
And placid face and there are minimal
Balms, repressed ignoble pains
Injuries that no government authorizes
Nevertheless they hurt
Unbribable melancholies
Anger, disapproval, disgust
From that old hat, from the muddy street, from the state
There is weeping in the theater
On stage? In the audience? In the seats?
There is above all weeping in the theater
Already late, already confused
It blurs the lights, engulfs in the linoleum
It will undermine in the warehouses, in the colonial alleys where night rats walk
It will moisten, in the ripe field, the undulating corn
And dry in the Sun, in bitter puddle
And within the weeping my mocking face
My eye that laughs and scorns
My total repugnance for your deteriorated lyricism
That pollutes the very essence of diamonds

[VIII]
The poet
Declines all responsibility
In the march of the capitalist world
And with his words, intuitions, symbols and other weapons
Promises to help
Destroy it
Like a quarry, a forest
A worm