By URARIAN MOTA*
The next time you meet a poet, remember: he is not a monument, but a fire. His flames do not light up halls — they burn out in the air, leaving only the smell of sulfur and honey. And when he is gone, you will miss even his ashes.
1.
The next time you meet a poet, look at him in his entirety. Don't ask him why he missed a commitment he made with you before. He has his reasons. He may have missed the meeting for some basic, simple, primary reasons, such as earning money to drink, eat, pay bills and rent. He may have missed it for those reasons that all of us outside of poetry think that poets don't have, can't have and shouldn't have.
He may have missed the meeting for even less basic reasons. Like, for example, a sudden fascination with a young woman's eyes. A glass of beer during a conversation that was as good as it was unavoidable. Or even, imagine, because he was feeling the pain of not being able to achieve that dreamed form for a poem.
For reasons, in short, stupid, idiotic, imbecile, which honorable, serious, practical people despise because they do not appear in the pages of guinness, they do not generate news, nor do they generate income at the end of the month.
The next time you meet a poet, you can at most feel like an equal to him. Like a man as only another man can be. So look at him carefully. You are before a rare spectacle, perhaps unique, unsurpassable. You are before a creator who, before justifying a place in heaven, justifies a place among the damned.
The beggars, the outcasts, whom he often resembles because of the state in which he finds himself. The saints, the enlightened, whom he often approaches because of the realities he discovers. The demons, the devils, the lords of the lights of hell, whom he often approaches because of the life they lead. Even the fallen, the men who have fallen into disgrace through weakness, whom he approaches through empathy and similarity. The next time you meet a poet, pay close attention, because you are before a sum of humanities.
Of course I am referring to poets who are fulfilled by poetry. Of course I am not referring to poets, I would rather say artists – of a distinct form of art, but artists – who are fulfilled in life by adulation, by the sticky, loose and false fat of easy praise, which is ticket and a ticket to the market. Of course I am not referring to the mountain-climbing poets, dedicated to the kind of art that always generates reward, a reward that is foreign to poetry but is the twin of success. Of course I am not referring to the poets who climb the ranks admired by the good bourgeois.
I refer to poets like this:
“Let’s keep eating junk food
Fucking the marias, drinking excretions
Making more josés who will pull our feet”
2.
Of course, I am referring to poets in the form of a tall, black, thin man. A man who speaks softly and softly. Who laughs, who smiles with white teeth in a bare chin. A man who gets drunk and doesn't stumble in public. Better yet, he stumbles too, but, slyly, he turns the stumble into a capoeira swing, as if he were performing a new and surprising acrobat's leap. A man with such refined taste that he designs his own clothes. Who could be a designer. But no, who preferred to draw when he performed his firecrackers. His incendiary bombs of intelligence.
“Thinking hurts, thinking hurts, thinking hurts…”.
Who has not heard his words, repeating verses like a blade that wounds in recital, like these:
“Eleven o'clock,
eleven years old,
a gas cylinder
suffocates the child
that climbs, lightly, the slope
and the force of gravity
will no longer be able to grow
seven hours,
seven hundred little heads
inside the sacred bus
Pray seven Hail Marys
Every seven seconds
And by the force of gravity
They will no longer be able to climb
Midnight
Brazil in the year two thousand
Explodes in artifices
Camouflages the new holocaust
Sacrifice to the calf god
And by the force of gravity
Much blood will flow
Yes, we have superheroes
They're just not on TV
Not even in leisure areas
In any difficulty
In case of overdose
And by the force of gravity
Call Batman!”
Or in these soaring verses:
“Where did I lose it?
My nationality?
What gesture or word imprisoned
My spontaneity?
Or was it my father's hand, saying no,
Anticipating my act,
Rushing to my gesture…
Or is it because I'm black, I mean,
Are all black people like this?
Why this suspicious look?
Mine, my father's, my grandfather's
From someone who doesn't know if they have permission
To laugh, cry, scream, moan, enjoy?
Permission to complain, get angry, go too far;
Permission to piss, permission to be,
To have, to be?
They still call him arrogant
The black man who does not have a subservient look: Black Beast.
I spent my whole life apologizing:
“I’m sorry for being here… for having to see me.”
Mr. Analyst: At what point in my life
Did they make me like this? What kind of washing did they subject me to?…”
Anyone who has not heard this from your mouth does not know or is yet familiar with the enjoyment of poetry that is music. Like a musical enjoyment of intelligence. That is why I say, finally.
The next time you meet a poet like França, who deceived those who saw him without his poems. A poet whose soft speech, with a peaceful face and a calm smile that changed when he wrote, spoke and sang a fierce and fine poetry with the wrath of the just. The next time you meet a poet like the brilliant França, tell him how important he is. Tell him how vital he is. Shake his hand tightly. Hug him warmly. Don't be afraid of being ridiculous. Don't even be afraid of tears. Tell him how lucky you are to be living the day and the hours he lives. Say and say it loudly what you feel, so that you don't look for another star in the sky later. Another useless, compensatory star in the sky. Speak now. Tell him how much you respect him now. You may never have another chance.
*Urarian Mota is a writer and journalist. Author, among other books, of Soledad in Recife (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/4791Lkl]
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