By AIRTON PASCHOA*
six short pieces
lemongrass
To the Bomb
We arrived and were not blinded by the Light... Finally we learned to enjoy the simplest things in life, the thousand millimetric wonders of Nature, the little flower, the little bee, the little bird, the little step of someone who will not spread their wings, the little breeze; to enjoy the twenty-four hours of another balletic turn of Strauss Gaia; to enjoy another thousand four hundred and forty minutes of full existence, atom by atom, and to give thanks, hands and heart raised, to give thanks, as night falls and on our knees, to give thanks for another eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds, to give fervent thanks to the still silent heavens, to give thanks for another day – a whole day.
Bison (or Einsteinian or Rambodian)
What will seal the last human? Hard to know. But he is quite capable of repeating the first, closing the season, scratching the walls again, a bison here, half a bison there, fading from memory more and more and cockroach cockroach cockroach rising and subsuming post-historical art.
Long live the revolution
viva
following day
opposition parade
I stop at the wall
ineluctably
roundly
decked out
Figures of speech
The government is bad, the minister is good.
– I do my part… minister and administer.
Is the door the awning?
– I don’t answer for everything.
Is the awning the door?
– I speak for Him… he declares factually and emphatically.
Is the flute magic?
– It’s not Him! It’s not me!
Is larynx a cogito? Is syllepsis a lapse? Is synecdoche a fate? Is a tangent a circle?
– The government is good, the minister is bad.
Voices are raised, the waiter wakes up, and life goes on in its ministry.
Natalina [ready made, 2003, RJ/Brazil]
For the first time in her life, she cannot spend Christmas with her children, who are staying with their father, who is chronically unemployed, in Recreio, Minas Gerais. She works in a family home and has every other weekend off. On New Year's Eve, God willing... But Natalina does not complain, nor does she have anything to complain about. She is employed, thank God, and before going to bed, night after night, religiously, she does not forget to thank Him, her face swollen with gratitude, for the miracle.
Santa Claus
A seven-year-old boy, the headline says, asks Santa Claus for meat… What a state of education in the country! Didn’t anyone tell the kid that Santa Claus doesn’t exist? At the same time, the uneducated boy should have known, as a matter of primary logic, that if the old spit was made of meat, it would have already turned into a barbecue due to the lack of access to the fireplace. Whatever the case, the strangled boy tasted the milk of human kindness. The family received a large amount of donations, the news continues, and satisfied their gluttony for eating meat – for the rest of their lives, I pray. However, I can’t help but wonder: what if the Christmas trend catches on? If it becomes a crime? If every imaginative and ill-mannered child puts his mouth on the world and only comes out steak, steak? There’s no point in vacum! You can’t bet on education, the episode teaches, whether at school or at home, which, instead of rejecting at the outset the donations, leading the little spender to savor the lesson of economics about the limits of the household budget, and by extension of the Budget of this great family that is the Union, whose spending ceiling cannot be lifted from this side, under penalty of falling on our heads, including the stigma of fiscal irresponsibility, in a bad example to the stem cells of the social organism, which, Lord, does the sweet home of the little glutton! exploits without a trace of shame the tenderness of our heart. By touching Him, by the way, with all due respect, the Almighty up there has nothing to do, on the contrary, with the state of education in the country, which is very low. Just as, I repeat, Grandpa Snowy has nothing to do with steak, whether on horseback or reindeer. If the beggar had a kite, more handy, less expensive, we would not have been so expensive. Let us educate, therefore, I pray and beg, let us educate our children, the future of Brazil!
*Airton Paschoa is a writer. Author, among other books, of Blue go(e-galaxy). [https://amzn.to/41V7Q2S]
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