Conium Maculatum

 

Purge the minutia down to the scope. It's a process. It's not like having a coffee. Or go to the supermarket. The purging is continuous. Guilt walks with us, if we feel it. Remorse causes diseases. If we don't solve them. Forgiveness must accompany the whole process, not only others. I must do it with myself, always having the notion that I did not know before what I know now. The enhancement of the self is a process. Look in the mirror. And try to be as impartial as we can. And when the time comes to love others, may we have known how to do it with ourselves, respecting ourselves entirely.

In matters of guilt, each one has his own. I don't play anymore, there's a lot of cheating and I, as I don't master the rules, personal, group, social and additional, invented by any of you, in this social whole, aborted the plan to plan your life in your way, thick, printed plaster, and I refuse to gamble. Touché-coulé. I never liked groups or political parties. If they were good, they were called integers.  The group excludes the individual and his personality. From what I know as current, your ethics do not fit into the moral aesthetics of mine, social identity becomes dangerous, because it subverts values, and blurs from the objective and overlaps, in the measurement of dicks, in the ostentation of having, reaches peaks in the struggle for leadership and loses relevance and consistency in the performance of real skills,  by which you measure others. It just doesn't lose corruption.This group ethic that annuls the subject, because it is lost in the game of personal interests, but serves leadership, multiplying greed, easy usurpation, humiliation, in short, degradation. We're so mortal, aren't we? And the trafficking of influences and embezzlement, which is, these days, "so rare", the daily supplement, indispensable on your plate. The blame is always lost on the backs of the  group. As much as the detail in the scope. Guilt dies single. It's from nothing and no one. And then, let's be hypocrites and cry for the little children, for the elderly, for the pink media that sells themselves to the rasp. Drink children, drink, remembering the longing, enormous and talented Zé Mário Branco at his IMF. Irreplaceable. The pig is old hypocrisy! That none of you can use it except in the bad line, to escape my mouth to your viperine tongue that you adjectivate as an injection, from the syringe you give us. On election day, the budget, the camps. Your life is beautiful, isn't it, children? Let's play at the airports? What are we going to play with, children? To the suckers and the constraints on schedules, to the strikes in hospitals and what else, children? To waiting lists? To maternity hospitals? That babies in utero still don't pay taxes, because if they did, tomorrow they would open a hundred maternity hospitals, even social equality would be opened, and much more in the promise of a new wave of slaves, a new innocent and translucent herd and no one would be sent to teach at the end of the world, even a study would be carried out, the birth rate would even be stimulated. It was a see-you-ver-you-see-you-own. And I don't know why I call you children, but it's not me who speaks, it's Zé Mário Branco, Natália Correia, Zeca Afonso, Ary in me! And I go inside, wipe my feet on the carpet of parliament and welcome me Orwell in person, Orwell and the rod of the republic, the manger and the acorns, there is no straw left, only the baby Jesus, but he emigrated to Al Hilal, The joke is over, and I'll stop here, I replace his gum with the mustard that went up to my nose.  

Everything happens to me today, it must be escapism, the result of idleness or some other preciousness, of me being from the North, right? That the North can only be a capital of tourism, of a district, of a capital of culture, when a horse comes to the government that is from the North, that being distinguished and good is only the beautiful Lisbon, descendant of the nobles, which here in Porto is only poor and Lisbon is more French, New York, it is China Town in London,  and I saved the big apple for Ribeira in Porto. I'm not parochial, but I'm against the monopolization of culture in Lisbon. It's not yesterday's parochialism, but the guesswork that is silent today, and Saturn is on top of me, taking my mouth to the truths, to realism, Neptune is hitting me in the neck, unveiling everything and everyone!  And we are still waiting for results from Venus in Libra, from justice, from the correction of vileness, because it seems to me that in Scorpio it must have been today. Let's take it with a building on top.  Set boundaries. Erect borders. Because when we are tolerant and accept being abducted, scrutinized, marginalized, believing that everything is fine, before us than others, we are allowing the so-called permissiveness - which is the excess of freedom and also the absence of rules and values of others - to collide with our own. And for this petition, I have already given everything I had. Not one more comma. Of course, there will always be those who will claim to themselves, especially those targeted, that they do not risk verbiage, that it is still contagious, like seborrhea, that I can have athlete's mycosis, a foot odor or flat foot. And it's also fine, each one in their own square meter. Or even, each monkey on its branch.  And freedom of expression is here, in this and that. In an apparently secular and sold out country. But what the hell does that mean? Ask your children. And if they don't know, teach them. And if you don't know, learn. Which is of paramount importance. Violence is rampant in a country without education and science. Without health and without freedom of expression. And without justice and without coherence. The men of the future who read, are not required to read! They do not obey demands, preferring to follow practical examples and proximal social models. Some are still rebels without a cause. They read the expensive and the cheap, the superficial and the profound. And so it is, offer them an example and you will get the world from them. Read on, parents.  And give them causes and ideals and infinfest them with the history that does not come in the manuals and the cause of things. Children and adolescents read because they see others who do. The people are slaves of ignorance, but I have never seen slaves of culture. Art and culture are two-way streets, they give pleasure and teach. But this thing of being an artist is so elitist, that only sweet soap operas and media talkshows are consumed, and there is no more world. Artists are allowed to die in the artist's house, like beggars who once served you to brighten the days, in the revue theater, of your autistic life. Let them die, don't they, children? Let them beg for the arts in the asylum, in shameful hunger, in precarious unemployment! Because working eight hours a day is not enough more. Apps double at the speed of games, your children learn what they have and what they absorb.  Therefore, it is for them that I write, so that they do not die on the beach. They have to read prose and poetry, political science and indulge in the theater, go to the bowline of a jet plane, learn mythology, occultism and philosophy, and a lot of poetry, to start with Fernando Pessoa as a herdsman, so as not to divert their route of exercising the brains. The tobacconist, the whole message. And they go to all of them. Above all, to your dreams. Do not listen to the dreams of others, your parents did not fulfill, they lacked courage, that you do not lack the courage to fulfill your own. And read foreign authors, read the Portuguese, consume everything you can. The matrix is screwed, it's brown and horny. Time is pressing. We have learned nothing. We are left with the names of rivers and reservoirs and no quality time to spend it by your side. We know the capitals and the countries, but we don't know what they produce, what they export, what they conquer and add to them, of characteristics, which teaches them to think. You don't read it, and we are all sick, you need it to read, to open your mind and keep it open, to play your little games, and flirt and travel, but studying is necessary, reading is necessary, producing culture and taking art to the stature of not being necessary, for it, to die of love and hunger. Listen to music, various strands, from baroque to pop, from classical to heavy metal, rock and reggae, through rap, not only the artist's commercial music, but delve deeper into the authors, and don't forget RAP, humor, Vascos Santanas, Hermans and Nicolaus, Brunos Nogueiras, inspiring personas who through laughing at our misfortunes,  channel what needs to change! Actors who not only doubled our laughter in times of crisis, but who challenge us to get out of the box, who motivate us to go further, to give more, and to study the biographies, which the men who fought against illiteracy are made of. Or we would live in a dictatorship still. That for some of you, it is even the case of laziness due to the excessive use of diminutives, emojis, which are uglier than neologisms, the words are supplied, swallowed, like spaghetti threads, along with laziness, as if it were sausage, which is chorizo to fill and I even bet that they still stick to the edges of the wallets,  In the middle of college, the chewing gum, all chewed, as they did in the basics. And we want a new society, thinking differently, made up of people who don't read, don't write, don't compose, don't sculpt, don't paint, don't run, don't wake up, don't play, it's just anxiety, so much anxiety and fears, curbing dreams, doesn't cultivate arts and doesn't dance, doesn't expand and doesn't let their children play. Because you live among war strategy game apps, no, you're not to blame. It is the cold land, and the war hot.  And is this, the war that awaits them outside, in this outside that is, already, there, in this future called tomorrow? Yesterday was the year sixty-eight and I was born. Today I am fifty-six years old and it seems that time has turned into a hungry clock, riding in the present. Sorry, past. Riding in the present. Sorry, already in the future. Tomorrow we will not be here, and you, how will you be if you are not informed about the policies, the rights, and being citizens committed to your planet? And not everything is the fault of the State. But rather the state of things that make society diverge and let go of the most important way to move forward and get out of chaos. The edifice of education. Teachers far from home, away from their families, their children, and closer to violence, that aggressiveness that is not having a home, lap, floor, shelter, and paying bills with sweat, with sadness and demoralization, that disease that keeps them elsewhere, which is the balance between what should and what to have, that it is necessary to pay bills and mortgage the life that is left to them,  To continue paying, maybe to work overtime, or to give private lessons, to lose marriages, to grow broken families, and it's all a fish with a tail in your mouth, you know? That you caress the dog that bites you. That you bite the dog that strokes you. That it's all a game of hide and seek, the teachers lose motivation, the students, happy with the gazette, with the extra time, with being free to be the distraction and we put an end to the rest, the teachers are the target to be shot down, they who were the masters within the nations, displaced and excited with a loose and juggling carrot that does not solve,  it only postpones, only pushes the problem with the belly. Learning and teaching are equally important. The displaced teacher is as penalized as the student without a support network at home, without motivation from the teacher. And if it is not instigated to fight, through reading and the arts, there will be culture dynamiting itself, the foundation that shakes, but does not fall. That the government does not allow, puts a bandage and heals, forgets, accommodates. Because reading is taking for yourself what is valid and discarding what is not useful. And this thing in me is growing, getting too big, and I'm too tired, we're all tired of the sameness, of the lack of attitude, of not exercising citizenship, except when it's to vote, to say that what is expected of us has been fulfilled! And the increasingly scarce conditions, the creativity to prescribe, with the pressure of injustice, the always ugly news, the meager, scarce harvest. As for me, I have already taken an internal measure. Implosion first. Then the exercises come down as a form of my social intervention. Literary exercises for me go beyond purgation, it is a personal way, mine, of raising my index finger, to what surrounds me, in a creative contestation, so as not to tell anyone to get lost, where I have already been lost. All of us who write, we believe we have something to go through. And it is not because we are not read that we stop writing. It is a fight that we cannot lose. Therefore, when I write, I try to translate the texts, in several languages, with musical appeals, with photos and informal messages and rhymes and jokes. We need children to be children. We need men to be men. Let them not take away their talents, let them not be underestimated, let them not clip the wings of creativity. The arts are therapeutic and motivate, all of them, anyone, a simple collection of calendars or philately, to cultivate music, to inspire the world. The child that is born today needs compasses, encouragement. I write to be read, I don't write to be distracted. That's when I breathe. When I sleep. When I listen to music, what inspired me. And I write to add something to the whole, even if it is in a single seed. And in this way I try to alter, in my own way, the illusory reality. I wanted to see children thinking outside the box, I would like to see them, not weights in their backpacks, but inspiration to hope. The intention is not easy, nor orphaned. Sharing my experiences also makes me feel alive and useful.  My texts are not excellent, they repeat the same message a lot, as if I were defending myself from the world that created me. There is more than you imagine, and many will be made even more and more, like me, created to God Will Give, if it is possible. You can't make omelettes without eggs. I was once a project of the future, in the 60s! And it is up to me, as a citizen of the world, of the country, to see another course defined and define my space, to add, to multiply, to point out recursive ways of getting around this, education has been sick for a long time, convalescent, between bypass machines, cancer will progress. There may not be tomorrow, in a people dumbed down by the matrix. And I fight with the weapons I have. The way I know. So that I don't get confused with a herd where I don't even recognize myself. And I know that there are many like me, who do not see themselves, who do not identify, who do not accept this way of living of make-believe that everything is fine, in a schizophrenic, pathetic, démodé, social facilitator outbreak, the ladder of political correctness that society demands. Pretend that there is teaching. That the students do not pass without favor. That everything will be pushed to doctor. Pretend that there is health, that the sick are not on waiting lists and will have an appointment in the other world, and by the way a family doctor, pretend that there is justice, you buy the judge, with kid gloves, close the eyes of the prosecutors and work a cohesive and expeditious team in the conforming courts, to postpone the damn, the pagodas of the system are paid for with dinners and this or another delicacy,  lawyers are fed with appeals, but we are the bears, and pretend that the wronged are not paying for the crime of the condemned, pretend that the innocent killed in the previous life, and in divine justice, enact a way to call the flock again, that we are magnanimous and have already allowed them to be more human, pretend that the churches do not need to pay taxes, and that there is no shame, that God our Lord needs our crumbs,  Come on, sheep, give me your crumbs to feed you with honey, or the gall you need, damn opium, damn cocaine, - and they pay the sheep for the church and still give alms to the priests to pay for the roofs of their rustic houses, they are so humble, and the people it, pretend that social security pays subsidies to the unemployed,  and that is why he has been threatening for a long time that he may not have money to pay for pensions to those who have paid all their lives. It pretends that Social Security does not know that for every private and public home, there are not 100 undeclared public-private homes, in inhumane conditions, and that it even sends them half a dozen And when the bedpans get angry, there comes an anonymous complaint, another scheme that implodes and who comes to the gray-haired ones? These are numbers, but everyone has to live, right? And that enter into the dynamics of the Chinese, I open from month to month, I close from door to door, or on the contrary, I open from door to door and close from month to month, which is a safe account, I keep the salvage for another county.  Creating infrastructure to ensure that children and the elderly have dignified conditions is not necessary. Pretend that this government will be better than the other, that when they are demagogues no one believes it anymore, but if they talk about per capita and piggy banks and rewind the numbers, adjust half a portion in the accounts, they silence us with the numbers. By exhaustion and the tiredness of sameness.  The numbers are proof of government work. Inflation is x, but the salary is y and the GDP will be something meritorious, in the oratory between the elections and a referendum, which divides it, if it goes well, at the apex of the next government, which perhaps with ingenuity and some art, we will be part of. Don't take note of such a mention, don't let the newspaper or television, those who are from another club, get us an itch so we don't get out of this one, lean! Let it go from valley to valley, evading, from twin to twin, from colonialism to correction, that I am like the Pharisee, first I speak (with my mouth), then I exemplify (with my hand on paper, in pen), and with the other I still take a selfie, I disassemble the piece in two acts and hide the rest, as political art and let it be recorded,  Don't say what I do, do what I say!  Certainly, the cushioned dinners, the favors and the hand-kissing will always be on the pawn table, that is, on the bedside table of the doctors, of the government that, being so tense, cannot even appreciate such praise and honors. And families, which are the smallest group in society, if it goes badly for them, if they are not Ceos, capitalists, Epicureans, the longed-for ataraxia touches everyone, the owners and the young, pleasure has not yet been privatized, if they do not have small companies or specialties, or influential "friends", they can also aspire to a vacation credited, particularly, in any good bank, which eats the interest in soft installments! You also have the right to change cars or motorcycles, pretend that yes, you have the right because you are the brute force, the driving force, the vote, the root of your perch, the laying hen that lays you real eggs, for presidents and cardinals and others, as you well know. And the woman who arrives late from overtime, and is not even able to correct the duties to the kids, is all happy if her husband arrives early and makes dinner, unless he is emigrated, so that he can keep the bank quiet, paying for the fucking roof of the family that he does not see,  but if she is not yet an emigrant, and if she makes dinner, she is tired as she is, and she will be born to be to deaden the anxiety and pressure of the of her husband and goes from this, pretending to have had an orgasm, pretending that they are happy, that they are not exhausted, dead tired. They pretend that they had no other dreams. And when they go to mass, walk along the waterfront, or to the shopping center, they are more dead than steel of not knowing what disappearance the dreams they once had once had have taken away. And if they have a north, the children will have better luck, more prosperity, more conditions, more truth, but otherwise, it's more of the same, the government washes its hands, the butlers in the stately cathedrals sigh for the holidays, but they are all like funeral homes, they don't want anyone to die, they just want their lives to run away, and the procession goes deluded,  to the Porto-Benfica game, to the new brothel that opened on the corner, which is for boys and girls, not because they are horny, but because they need to forget that it is from their hand that the country is born, the roads, the necessary, to feed that chosen class that will suck their thumb, sorry, the blood, as proved by the Zeca Afonso in his vampires. The people will rise again, through exhaustion, part of the same equation, and they skewer them to the horns the censorship that does not make explicit, and the numbers, taxes increase, insecurity and fear are added to them, and they will soon forget that there are masters and slaves. There you have the recipe for foolishness. And go on to beat the portrait that our very dear Eça de Queiroz made us, of a macabre and depressing people, who not even the ears shake to ward off the flies.  And when the flies land on us, we are only ballast, without rudder or mast. We are the ghost that forgot to leave. In other words, there's no point in pretending, because, really, if you look closely, under the cover of the dossier of the powerful, in the servant account, you work from sunrise to sunset, but you're shrapnel, you serve to pay for their dinners and the bones you bring. And you realize that pretending is what keeps the gambling service on their side. You are the fool, you were dead and did not know it!  Wake up!

When we live in society, this is how society wants to teach us, we do what we see it doing. Well, I tried and I didn't do well. But within what was possible for me, within your political correctness, I found a way to pass through the corridors, without big quarrels or paraphernalia. From precarious to precarious. Without attacking anyone, without entering into competition, at all levels, including at the labor level. Without being disloyal, nor hypocritical. Neither insensitive, nor rude, nor unscrupulous. By my communist colleagues, I was called betinha. By the little ones I knew, it was called a commune, a "reaction" and the devil come and swallow me, if I worry more about what you think of me! To each one his reward: freeway with no return.  I never intended to be a model of virtues. Nor perfect. Nor adequate. There are recipes for berlin balls, for egg chestnuts, for the beautiful sweets of the Algarve, even for diarrhea, scurvy, the recipe for dictatorship. Stir well.  That routines for many, are the simplified way to reduce efforts, a ramp to planning and strategy, I understand, but I don't surrender like this, I see myself, I don't sell myself, I don't need it, I've always liked jazz and improvising in curves, for me, routines kill everything, marriages, families, parliaments, it's the killing of creativity,  the slow death of love, wide open, an inhibition to the spontaneous. A subversion, in which you exchange what inspires you for habit. Investigate. Until it dissolves. Or give up. Or satiate. Or insist. Or practice. Dissolve. It is also true. Passionate about arts and people. I should be conjugating these terms in the past participle. Because I'm not exactly like that anymore. I must be being pushed to the wall of the blog by Pallas. And the fucking mirror repeats to me that I've had better days in that past and I spit him out the no, that he is wrong. That only now do I really prioritize myself. That only now, in the last three years, have I learned the word no. No, I won't, no, I don't do, no, I don't want to, no, I don't care. I export everything, even the sizo. That only now, I begin to appreciate my value and to pay homage to those who have departed and were similar to me in the this and that we are all made of, the particularities. That only now have I discovered that this does not change with empathy to the point of canceling yourself, that the pride and intrigue, the greed and the lack of verticality, of which this and all societies are made, which are a kind of "let's play doctors, but I am the one who gives the injection and you either accept or get a slap,  or you claim to have no disease and run out the back door."As one of my ex-husbands used to say (me comparing myself to a star, Elizabeth Taylor ipsis verbis, 7xs), about not liking to get a red, or being put in goal for lack of ingenuity, or would it be commitment? and by wounded pride; Out of a tantrum, he asked the coach to go to the bench and left in the middle of a game and went to send a fax. I never know if I understand the lesson they want to give me, but I left in the middle of the game. And I've even sneaked out of any game. That's what a heart attack is. It is to cut the link. It was a blackout, a flashback, a moment of sadness, stress. From weaknesses, I make strength. And as they want me horizontally, I play dead. But I'm not lukewarm! Hemlock pros who choose to shrug their shoulders and stay on the bench. I went out and went to send a fax to the youth who will save you from the coiro and get us all out of this rain, but it's only for some, this omen that is to live in filth, in the pigsty, with piglets. My time has come to scream, I no longer live with the javardice. 

From The Game of Patience.

And I finish the structure to the scope, the detail is later. As in the game of the berlinda, for a demagogue and chaste audience, I dedicate this last stanza of the composition, in the form of a hug, to those who hang from my window, begging for a subject, ejaculating a curse, who entertain themselves by talking about someone else's name, without knowing its smell and less its name, I have never been your bagasse, nor the cup of the still where you drink,  not even a decorative and chic vase, from the delicacy shop where you go, before the house catches fire, before the smell of sulfur arrives, before they soak their beards, clear the door, I have already given you plenty of it, before "Chico" comes to refute your trap, the trap, the stirrup of your discomfort, you pretend,  now, that you didn't understand the message, read in the scroll down of the page, Chico plays dead, and, after all, you can still call me an artist and drink a Port to my health, which I don't care!