Não ocorre depressão em uma sociedade determinada pelo ritual. A alma é totalmente absorvida, esvaziada, pelas formas rituais. Rituais contém mundo. Produzem uma relação forte com o mundo. Na origem da depressão, ao contrário, está uma relação consigo mesmo exageradamente tensa. Nela, se é incapaz de sair de si mesmo, de se ultrapassar em direção ao mundo, e acaba-se encapsulado em si mesmo. O mundo desaparece. Com uma angustiante sensação de vazio, circula-se apenas por si mesmo. Rituais, ao contrário, aliviam o eu do fardo de si mesmo. Eles despsicologizam e desinteriorizam o eu.

- Byung-Chul Han em O desaparecimento dos rituais
syntax
Maureen N. McLane

and if
I were to say

I love you and
I do love you

and I say it
now and again

and again
would you say

parataxis
would you see

the world revolves
anew

its axis
you
They were not kidding in the Fourteenth Century
Maureen N. McLane

They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.

It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it’s hard to say

how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.

You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency

seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.

The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.
Tortured syntax, thorned thoughts, vocabulary
like a forest littered with unexploded
cluster bombs, no exit except explosion
ripping the branches. 

- Marilyn Hacker
wanting you so much it looks like need
- marilyn hacker
The need for the past

is so much at the center of my life
I write this poem to record my discovery of it,
my reconciliation.

- Frank Bidart
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
- Frank Bidart
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
- Frank Bidart
Outlander, S08E03

equinócio
a. melo

ou tô no vento

ou tô 
no chão
There is a solitude in seeing you, 
Followed by your company when you are gone.
You are like heaven’s veils of lightning. 
I cannot see till afterward
How beautiful you are. 
There is a blindness in seeing you, 
Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.

- Witter Bynner
if truth soothes
soothing was
not truth's goal

- CAConrad
everyone paying attention
enjoy your visit
everyone else
good luck

- CAConrad
it hurts to admit I love being alive
- CAConrad
don’t let your comfort be selfish cruelty
- CAConrad
His artfully unkempt strawberry blonde head sports outsized headphones.  Like a contemporary bust.  Behold the innocence of the freckles, ripe pout of cherry lips.  As if the mere sight of the world hurts him, he squints greenly and applies saline drops.  You dream him crying over you.  For the duration of a subway ride you fall blindly in love.  Until he exits. Or you exit, returning home to the one you truly love to ravish him.

I’m alive of course
Because others died

- Sam Sax
Calling on All Silent Minorities
June Jordan

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE

AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET
When I or Else
June Jordan

when I or else when you
and I or we
deliberate I lose I
cannot choose if you if
we then near or where
unless I stand as loser
of that losing possibility
that something that I have
or always want more than much
more at
least to have as less and
yes directed by desire
I have no intention of moving on, ever. I will never love again. I won't even try.
- Stacy in The Madison, S01E02
This 
romance of self
you can't escape, and you don't want to.

- Miguel Murphy
Echo is a way to create space, is a metaphor for time.
- Taylor Johnson
cuidado —
dizem

o travessão
agora pensa

e escreve —

melhor não usar

Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes
through which time feels itself leaking.

- Joy Ladin
pretending to understand Heidegger
- Joy Ladin
God is Change,
And in the end,
God prevails.
But meanwhile...
Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.

- Octavia E. Butle
I don’t want to be a person
but there isn’t a choice

- Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
It is
the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh
about this, self-soothing engines sputtering
through a nosedive.

- Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

- Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
A. Melo

in that moment
there was neither longing
nor will—

only the end
of its pretense

then this:
a bird
cutting the air

and I,
for an instant,
mistook it
for an argument
The Testament of Ann Lee, 2025


lost in the vague geography of words
- fatemeh shams
I confess to you my inadequacies. I want to tell you things I do not know about myself. I’ve made promises to people whom I will never see again.

- Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
I don't have a whole life ahead of me. I have a very small window to be reckless, to make decisions that feed this [the heart] and never factor this [the mind] into the equation.

- Stacy in The Madison, S01E01 
eu queria encontrar um amor que me dessem de graça

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
  And went with half my life about my ways.

- A. E. Housman
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
     But young men think it is, and we were young.

- A. E. Housman
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain: 
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation

- A. E. Housman
O soul
- A. E. Housman
Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle
- A. E. Housman
Deep silence where the shadows cease.
- Oscar Wilde
I want to tell you everything.
- Willyce Kim
I never meant
to live in euphemism.

- Randall Mann
Queer, of course.
- Randall Mann
Who says
that love isn’t sartorial?

- Randall Mann
I covered up what I forgot.
- Randall Mann
I’m shifting like a paradigm.
- Randall Mann
Para o filósofo norueguês Peter Wessel Zapffe, a consciência humana não é o auge da evolução, mas sim um acidente trágico e um fardo a ser carregado.

- Thaís Oyama em Linhas Cruzadas, 12/03/2026 
O cérebro é um órgão que só opera na cultura.
- Clifford Geertz por Luiz Felipe Ponde em Linhas Cruzadas, 12/03/2026
A convicção é um luxo dos que leem pouco e dos que pensam pouco.
- Luiz Felipé Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 12/03/2026
Why do you not respond?
- Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights", 2026
Haunt me then. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only please do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you.

- Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights", 2026
CATHY
Heathcliff, why did you lie? It was my fault that we were late, not yours.

HEATHCLIFF
I couldn't see him hurt you. 

CATHY
But this hurts me, don't you understand? Heathcliff, this hurts me.

HEATHCLIFF
I will take this and more... everyday, if it spares you.

When you said tomorrow did you mean never?
- John Keene
if you have had 
           your midnights
   and they have drenched
       your barren guts
          with tears

 I sing you sunrise
        and love
and someone to touch

- Mari Evans
The Patience of Ordinary Things
Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Prayer
Pat Schneider

Mystery for whom I have no name
because all names collide, divide,
diminish,

help me.

I go down on my metaphoric knees
as I push and pull my pen
along these dim blue lines.
I feel the dust of the earth in my mouth.
I am a beggar with a tin cup.

There is a place beyond a poem—
beyond naming, beyond claiming
any righteousness or craft,
where I have nothing left
but one word: Please.
How can I feel lonely when I am submerged 
in catastrophe?

- Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
no volume máximo

·
Sex is the place where the self is shattered.
- Leo Bersani
DOROTHY
He doesn't like PDA.

LUCY
Oh, my God. Mom, can you just give it a rest?

DOROTHY
Give what a rest? Lucy, why are you such a prude? I mean, you're gay.

Scarpetta, S01E01
inocencia perdida seeking solace
- emanuel xavier
Twin stars through my purpling pane,
    The shriveling husk
Of a yellowing moon on the wane—
    And the dusk.

- Angelina Weld Grimké
Would I be more than a bubble breaking?
- Angelina Weld Grimké
I want so desperately
to be finished with desire

- Aaron Smith
O wild rose, bend above my face!
There is no world—
Only the beat of your throat against my eyes.

- Bryher
Where are we going, Walt Whitman?
- Allen Ginsberg
a rua fala brasiliano
SHERLOCK
We are not above nature. He said those words to me. He was leaving me a trail. 

MYCROFT
Enough, Sherlock. I really must insist. 

SHERLOCK
Everything by design. Not a word out of place. Survival of the fittest. The most radical, original thought of them all. We are not above nature. 

MYCROFT
Sherlock! Enough. You're making no sense.

SHERLOCK
Original. Darwin. We are not above nature. Everything by design. 

Young Sherlock, S01E08 
After Rebecca Linderberg
A. Melo

For a friend

winter inside the chest
then the small ringing of your call:
like a hinge in the quiet,
an open door 
opening
To make him smile        
I tell him I am bad at sex.

To make him kiss me
I tell him when I’m happy

I go looking for things
I haven’t lost yet.

- Hieu Minh Nguyen
I felt so much pressure to be 
Abundant.

- Oliver Baez Bendorf
you can never take
that flower from Billie's hair

- Cornelius Eady
These clots of syntax
- Cornelius Eady
Nothing
isn't song:
a leaf hatching
from its green shell,

frost whorling
across a windshield,

an open door
opening

- Rebecca Lindenberg
give us new breath
for new words,
new chances to listen,
new chances to be heard

- rena priest
I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

- Nâzim Hikmet
Ninguém é mais crédulo que um desesperado.
- António Lobo Antunes
I tried to solve
religion.

The only solution
was solvation.

A. Melo
Outlander, S08E01

Yearly Service Check for Your Mind
EJ Koh

You matter
Little to the universe.
in the silence it is clear
- michael malachowski
O psicólogo Carl Rogers falava que o sofrimento mental nasce quando há um abismo entre o eu real, que é quem eu sou, e o eu ideal, que é quem acho que eu deveria ser.

Thaís Oyama em Linhas Cruzadas, 05/03/2026 
Silence    the sound of  what happened
- Chase Berggrun
My imagination tinges everything with ill adventure
I suppose a cry clears the air    as other rain does

- Chase Berggrun
Time and distance trembled in my body
- Chase Berggrun
The me within only me and me only
          is a difficult one
                 prediction-shy

- Chase Berggrun
I am that bird wanting only a corner of ruins
- Nadia Anjuman

Os românticos são vinculados a ruinas, à ideia do mundo em ruína, um mundo que acabou.
- Luiz Felipe Pondé



Places have thoughts
- Tommy Pico
I don’t care
about cocaine
mixed with
sedatives. I care
about mourning
your long gone
smell. 

- Leila Quinn Ortiz
Yemaya, what is to become of us
I drag my body around lovingly but
it still won’t let me go

- Nikki Wallschlaeger
It’s not easy dying
without dying. Before I ever took the pills
I took so much. So much was taken. I’m
done. I’m here. A fish thrown back
to the river can't help but swallow fistfuls
of self.

- Shira Erlichman
At what precise moment
did my brain tattle on itself?

- Shira Erlichman
jchrist is queen by his solidarity with queers
- lucas de lima
Parallax
Rindon Johnson

the state of being apart
literally aparthood
My boyfriend is smarter than me
He’s writing a dissertation on fascination
He says queer doesn’t mean anything anymore
Too many people co-opting for heterosexual positions

- Doug Paul Case
He made me disappear inside myself.
- Dave in Sweetpea, S01S02
THAÍS  
Pondé, o mundo acadêmico valoriza ou pune a autenticidade?

PONDÉ  
Pune a autenticidade, porque cada vez mais você precisa aceitar fazer parte dos jogos de poder institucional e corporativo dentro da universidade. Isso transborda, inclusive, para as agências reguladoras do governo, que agem sobre a vida acadêmica. A ideia é colonizar as agências dentro dos interesses políticos.

Há também, além dos interesses políticos e institucionais, os temas que estão na moda ganhando mais investimento. E aí aparece o mal-estar romântico: alguém que quer estudar alguma coisa, mas acaba estudando outra porque o professor ou o grupo de pesquisa que recebe financiamento quer que estude aquilo.

A pessoa tem que abrir mão do seu objeto de desejo, de conhecimento, por ter que lidar com a pressão do mercado acadêmico — e é punida se seguir seu desejo.

THAÍS  
Curioso, eu imaginei que a academia buscasse a autenticidade, porque a autenticidade traz originalidade; originalidade é conhecimento. Estou muito surpresa.

Linhas Cruzadas, 05/03/2026
remember that I had a body &
that was my first sin

- Aida Bardissi
On my best days I remember to be dialectical 
- Dana Ysabel
poetry as necessary abstraction 
for concrete analysis

- dana ysabel
I admit I am a product of my class. 
Too easy some nights dreaming utopia. 
Searching jasmine flowers for meaning, 
deboning language, abstracting war. 
Some poets reimagine the past & others hold a
gun. How to demand nothing encased in amber.
How to carry the hammer 
& use it. 

- Dana Ysabel
Reasoning about impossible crevices
my vertigo may have fallen into.

- Derek Yen
It was a was
- Kamelya Omayma Youssef
Praise the archive of the body, how the sun dips 
pools of amber behind my eyes & how
I remember what I cannot yet understand

- Jo Bear
Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
- Hart Crane
On pille ce qu'on désire posséder. On détruit ce qu'on n'aura jamais. C'est classique.
- Lillian dans Vie Privée
A figment, a fragment.
Lifeless. Less.

- Margaret Atwood
The body, once your accomplice,
is now your trap.

- Margaret Atwood
Vestige
A. Melo

a muscle memory, like hanging a hat
on a hook that’s not there any longer
- Margaret Atwood

My body keeps you:
a quiet that breathes.

At night I turn
and gather what isn’t there:

arms closing
around the shape of absence,

muscle remembering
what the air refuses.
Peristalsis of the heart.
- Margaret Atwood
Though our feastfires have faded to candles
we’re hooked on the same old gods,
much diminished.

They no longer talk to us
but that’s okay:
we do enough talking.

- Margaret Atwood
The aliens arrive.
Their leader is a giant head.
It lives in a large glass jar.
It wants to mesmerize us,
though lord knows what for.
Oh wait a minute.
It’s a metaphor.

Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I know you are not a bird,
Though I know you’ve flown
So far, so far away.

- Margaret Atwood
this annoying noise of love
- margaret atwood
waiting in your future
- margaret atwood
The clock ticks and the day shrivels.
- Margaret Atwood
everything was never
- margaret atwood
Were things good then?
Yes. They were good.
Did you know they were good?
At the time? Your time?

No, because I was worrying
or maybe hungry
or asleep, half of those hours.

It’s late, it’s very late;
too late for dancing.
Still, sing what you can.

- Margaret Atwood
You'll be my American boy
You could be my American hot hot boy

Oh, yeah. Bow.

Hi J, I Decided to Rewrite What I Sent to You
E. Ethelbert Miller

For June Jordan

our friendship
is what keeps us whole
love is essential as air

prayer contains desire
to worship is to open
the door to one’s heart

we were looking at
the ceiling and then
we saw the sky
Epiphany
Angela Jackson

I’ve been old.
I’ve been poor.
I’ve been vulnerable.
I’ve been exploited.
I’ve been called an angel.
I’ve studied spiders.
I’ve lingered in love like a hummingbird outside a window.
I’ve likened myself to a pigeon, a dove.
I’ve been duped.
I’ve been brilliant.
I’ve been a genie in a bottle.
I’ve been let out.
I’ve been put back in.
I am in the dark.
How to get out with love in my mouth?
It is great to be involved,
To be not fearful to be unresolved.

- Gwendolyn Brooks
You, Annie Allen, were good
At heart. Superb in soul.
Worthy of memory.

- Angela Jackson
I am beautiful as I am:
Big and brown and bright.
I am beautiful enough
For flowers and gifts and honoring.

- Angela Jackson
my birth
isn’t my only origin 

- Aishvarya Arora
É uma máxima romana: "Quando lembro do que falei, invejo os mudos".
- Luiz Felipe Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 26/02/2026
But the joy will come too. It will come, I promise. It just may be surrounded by the storms. That's what I meant by believing in people, Annie. That's not naive. You can guard against the worst of people while still believing in the best, just remembering that we're all capable of great change, great love, great promise. It's a holy charge.

- Xavier in Paradise, S02E04
Esperar sem tempo, relógio parado
Tempo imóvel
exaurido

- Ana Claudia Quintana Arantes
Eu te reconheço, apesar de tão diferente
- Ana Claudia Quintana Arantes
Só sentirá tristeza quem amou.
- Ana Claudia Quintana Arantes em Pra vida toda valer a pena viver 
 As doenças também aparecem para as pessoas que se cuidam. Isso não é castigo. Não é para despertar mágoa e não anula o fato de que fazer o melhor para nosso corpo é a conduta certa. Não cuidamos do nosso corpo para viver eternamente, porque ninguém viverá eternamente. Não o fazemos para garantir saúde, porque todos sabemos que podemos adoecer. Quem faz o bem para se dar bem já errou. Se há segundas intenções em qualquer atitude, perde-se o mérito de fazer direito.

- Ana Claudia Quintana Arantes em Pra vida toda valer a pena viver 
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