Non-existence
D.H. Lawrence

We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch 
with that which can be touched but not known. 
Most people, today, are chimaera 
chimerical: 
just fantasies of self-importance 
their own self-importance 
and sphinxes of self-consciousness. 

- D.H. Lawrence
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

- Margaret Atwood
I began to forget myself
in the middle
of sentences.

- Margaret Atwood
The moving water will not show me
my reflection.

- Margaret Atwood
O que é hoje a internet? Graças ao tal do algoritmo, há um pressuposto narcísico terrível: "Eu gosto de mim", o que é um equívoco fundamental. Eu não gosto de mim. Quando eu abro o meu Spotify, o meu Netflix, o meu Prime... Eu tenho no meu iPhone a rádio do Pedro.

O pressuposto do algoritmo é que eu gosto de mim e me oferece sempre mais de mim mesmo. É a tal da bolha, a formação de mônadas incomunicáveis. Eu fico ouvindo minha rádio e acho que o mundo é eu. Eu fico vendo sempre os mesmos amigos no Instagram e no Facebook, e eu acho que o mundo é eu — o que me torna absolutamente narcísico e intolerante.

Quando eu me defrontar com alguém que não é eu, que pensa diferente, eu vou ficar chocado. Como assim você não é eu? Eu achei que o mundo inteiro fosse eu.

Pedro de Santi, Linhas Cruzadas (30/07/2026)
As pessoas estão se refugiando no diagnóstico [mental ou físico] para não terem que responder às demandas sociais. O nosso narcisismo não é apenas o infantilismo; é uma defesa, é um fechamento defensivo num ambiente traumático, instável.

Pedro de Santi, Linhas Cruzadas (30/07/2026)
Há uma dinâmica narcísica, que é o imediatismo. A medicação [canetas emagrecedoras] vai ser uma forma de eu me desimplicar. Na saúde mental também. Então, não sou eu, é a doença. O narcisismo está aí: na busca pela mágica, e não pela implicação da pessoa na própria subjetividade, no próprio corpo, na própria história — porque eu não me sinto mais capaz de me implicar e produzir resultado na minha vida. É uma grande forma de impotência. Muitos usos de antidepressivos, ansiolíticos e canetas depõem para essa instantaneidade e por essa desistência de si, em última instância.

- Pedro de Santi, Linhas Cruzadas (30/07/2026)
How you die out in me:

down to the last
worn-out
knot of breath
you're there, with a
splinter
of life.

- Paul Celan
My future is in my past
I drink the water of Lethe,
My doctor won’t allow me depression

- Alexander Pushkin
Psychological critics, do be more precise in your language:
symbols must not be confused with allegorical signs

What we touch is always
an Other: I may fondle
my leg, not Me.

- W. H. Auden
When gales assault them,
trees are always astonished,
but never ask why.

- W. H. Auden
The glass-lens
desanctified Sight: men believed
they had seen through Nature.

- W. H. Auden
Fruit cannot drop through this thick air.
- H.D.
Luna lines
Vladimir Nabokov

Spell “night.” Spell “pebbles”: Pebbles in the Night.
Peep, crated chicks on lonely station! This
Is now the ABC of the abyss,
The Desperanto we must learn to write.
low clouds and ennui
- vladimir nabokov
O recollection, piercing beam,
transfigure my exile,
transfix me

- Vladimir Nabokov
Você esqueceu de levar o silêncio
quando foi embora. Venha buscá-lo.

- AR
Cheguei cedo à lembrança.
Ela ainda estava acontecendo.

- AR
A verdade apareceu sem avisar.
Pedi que voltasse outro dia; havia muitas certezas em casa.

- AR
O espelho me reconheceu na hora.
Eu demorei um pouco mais.

- AR
o infinito

é o jeito
que o vazio encontrou

de parecer
ocupado

- AR
Roboto, Masters of the Universe (2026)

Everything begins to look around.
- Tomas Tranströmer
Weeks go by.
Night comes slowly.
The moths settle on the windowpane:
small pale telegrams from the world.

- Tomas Tranströmer
Context
Tomas Tranströmer

Look at the grey tree. The sky has run
through its fibers down in the earth—
only a shrunk cloud is left when
the earth has drunk. Stolen space
is twisted in pleats, twined
to greenery. —The brief moments
of freedom rise in us, whirl
through the Parcae and further.
Silence slowly spiraling up has risen
here from earth’s recesses 

- Tomas Tranströmer
Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
- Tomas Tranströmer
you stretch from east to west
i go north to south
this is also how a plus symbol may appear

- sumita beethi 
Testing limits
Sneha Khaund 

Take a moment
Stretch it like gum
Wrap it over your back
Pull your arms across your stomach
Spread them out to see how far you extend.
s \ l \ i \ c \ e \ m \ y \ m \ i \ n \ d \ i \ n \ t \ o \ p \ i \ e \ c \ e \ s
a n d w a n d e r t h r o u g h r e a l i t y
     //hyper-
     //hyper-
     //seizurely
leisurely
leisurely

- rushati mukherjee
I'm glad the water does not move 
Under the colourless ice of the river

- Anna Akhmatova
Day is stopping.
Everything I am feels distant or blank
as the opulent rays pass through me,
distant as action is from thought,
or language is from all things desirable
in the world, when it does not deliver
what it promises and pathos comes instead—
the same pathos I feel when I tell myself,
within or without valid structures of love:
I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed—
though the failure is not in the other,
but in me because I am tired, hurt or bitter.

- Henry Cole
a man alone fills a void with words,
not to be consoling or point to what is good,
but to say something true that has body,
because it is proof of his existence

- henry cole
When a man leaves, he leaves looking
For more languages than there are
Tongues.

- Jericho Brown 
O God, my mind 
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! 

- Edna St. Vincent Millay
bewildering accuracy of imagination and dream
- louise glück
midway between
anticipation and nostalgia

- louise glück
There was a time
only certainty gave me
any joy. Imagine—
certainty, a dead thing.

- Louise Glück
faltou pouco
para o nome
explicar a coisa

a coisa
quando viu
fugiu

- AR
Literary theory
Ada Limón

Somehow the word
allow is in the word
swallow and in swallow
two wholly different meanings:
one to take in through
the mouth and another
what we call the common
winged gnat hunter who
is, in all probability,
somewhere near us now.
Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language became
more brutish: blink twice
for the bird, blink once
for tender annihilation. Who
knows what we are doing as
we go about our days lazily
choosing our languages. Some
days my life is held together
by definitions, some days
I read the word swallow
and all my feathers show.
The quiet machine
Ada Limón

I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.
my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits

- Thom Gunn
Permanecer aqui,
apesar e além.
Estar, mesmo assim,
mesmo sem.

Efeito talvez
da inércia de ser:
mesmo não querendo,
não poder.

- Paulo Henriques Britto
Falhei, tá falhado 
e não sе falha mais nisso

oi oi oi
 
Why is the earth angry at heaven?
If there’s a question, is there an answer?

- Louise Glück
becoming memory; the mind closing around it
- louise glück
How sad to have lost you, to have lost
any chance of actually knowing you
or remembering you over time
as a real person, as someone I could have grown
deeply attached to, maybe
the brother I never had.

- Louise Glück
Once you have been there, always the promise of it.
- Frank Bidart
Though everything looks as if it is continuing
just as before, it is not, it is continuing
in a new way (sweet lingo O’Hara and Ashbery
teach).

Love
is the manna

that falling

makes you
see

the desert

surrounding you
is a desert.

Makes you think dirt is not where you were born.

- Frank Bidart
Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not—

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succulent I couldn’t
breathe. I take back that

“of course.”

- Frank Bidart
Whenever Ray Charles sings “I Can’t Stop Loving You”
I can’t stop loving you. 

- Frank Bidart
Esconderijo
Ana Martins Marques

Estas são palavras que eu não
deveria dizer
palavras que ninguém
deveria ouvir
que elas permanecessem no silêncio
de onde vêm
no fundo escuro da língua
cheio de doçura e ruídos
com o ranço informulado
dos segredos
por via das dúvidas escondi-as aqui
neste poema
onde ninguém as vai encontrar
Estou atrás
do despojamento mais inteiro
da simplicidade mais erma
da palavra mais recém-nascida
do inteiro mais despojado
do ermo mais simples
do nascimento a mais da palavra.

- Ana Cristina Cesar
Palavra não tem lado de dentro
Palavra não mora no que diz
Palavra abre pra fora.

- Viviane Mosé
Everything is off-limits.
Everything is unreal.
Everything is lament and let go.

- Ada Limón
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

- Ada Limón
Unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly
- Ada Limón
Sometimes I think the memory of an event
is better than the event itself. The way
the retelling of something is satisfying.
That’s why it’s so unsettling when I can’t
remember everything in detail.

- Ada Limón
I am obviously unsure of the usefulness
of inevitable things. Even the word
inevitable is awkward and hard to spell.

- Ada Limón 
Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.

- Seamus Heaney
Unsurprisable but still disappointed
- Seamus Heaney
Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

- Seamus Heaney
Deserted harbour stillness.
- Seamus Heaney
Where does spirit live? Inside or outside
Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

- Seamus Heaney
Memory as a building or a city,
Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with
Tableaux vivants and costumed effigies—

Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,
Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:
So that the mind's eye could haunt itself

With fixed associations and learn to read
Its own contents in meaningful order,
Ancient textbooks recommended that

Familiar places be linked deliberately
With a code of images. You knew the portent
In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

O Friend! I know not which way I must look  
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,  
To think that now our life is only drest  
For show
- William Wordsworth (1802)

Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
- Guy Debord (1967)

Transparency is the new formula of legitimacy.
- Byung-Chul Han (2012)
O Santo Agostinho falava da concupiscência—que é esse desejo contínuo de se sentir atraído por determinadas coisas. O mundo moderno é um gigantesco contrato infinito de concupiscência.

- Luiz Felipe Pondé, Linhas Cruzadas (23/07/2026)
THAÍS
O excesso de linguagem produz uma escassez de significado?

PONDÉ
Com certeza.

Linhas Cruzadas (23/04/2026)
We dream of  lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,
a word is worth a thousand pictures.
What you say doesn’t have to be true.
It only has to be imaginable. 

- David Kirby
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
- Wallace Stevens
I think language is more than capable
of looking out for itself, don’t you? I mean, when was 
the last time you looked at the list of synonyms for
baffled? They’re among the best in the English language: 
puzzled, nonplused, discombobulated, flummoxed, stumped, 
fogged, bewildered, buffaloed.

- David Kirby
Like a door
the body opened and
the soul looked out.
Timidly at first, then
less timidly
until it was safe.
Then in hunger it ventured.
Then in brazen hunger,
then at the invitation
of any desire.

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

- Sylvia Plath
To be both author of
this statue, and the statue itself.

- Frank Bidart
You wear your body as if without
illusions. 

- Frank Bidart
The poem is a veil
Frank Bidart

V  E  I  L,—as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
high at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see
catches, clinging to its physiognomy.
Reality is not, reality must be sought and won.
- Paul Celan
Frank Bidart

Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within
me as I die dies with me.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
- Hegel

The way to approach freedom
was to acknowledge necessity
- Frank Bidart

P.S. Bidart recasts Hegel's philosophical proposition as an ethics of acknowledgment, shifting the emphasis from conceptual recognition to existential acceptance.
with an interest, and regard, and affection
- frank bidart
semioteca

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;  
not in silence, but restraint.

- Marianne Moore
To a snail
Marianne Moore

If “compression is the first grace of style,”  
you have it. Contractility is a virtue  
as modesty is a virtue.  
It is not the acquisition of any one thing  
that is able to adorn,  
or the incidental quality that occurs  
as a concomitant of something well said,  
that we value in style,  
but the principle that is hid:  
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;  
“a knowledge of principles,”  
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.
(...) sooner or later
you will have to name me, and,
as you name, I shall focus,
I shall become more precise.

- Thom Gunn
Havien dit que el desig pot trucar
a la porta del no-desig,
i que, si està tancada, s'hi va ficant pam a pam.

- Tònia Passola
Ripples of fluid sorrow
- Argyris Stavropoulos
Farther
Ursula K. Le Guin

Adrift adrift
on the sound of rain
on a windless sea
in a sailless skiff
Self-islanded by thought and dream
the solitary soul
forgets the deepest depth, the earth
that joins us all

- Ursula K. Le Guin
In the vast abyss before time
- Ursula K. Le Guin
My eyes can see a star,
but not my mind.
The more I think, the more
I am unfamiliar.

- Ursula K. Le Guin
But even a silent interlocutor adds
something to a narrative, which turns
in spirals, auricular labyrinths, to add
conjunction and conjecture.

- Marilyn Hacker
History
cycles over in place, unless we learn
something from the cycle
—learn to unlearn
what’s overdetermined.

- Marilyn Hacker
Parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi.
- Montaigne
This morning
at five fear seized me and clung
like a leech, a tick, napalm:
what could calm its ravening?

- Marilyn Hacker
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir, que le monde est petit.

- Charles Baudelaire
What you regret you redress
if you can; use; don’t forget.

- Marilyn Hacker
Crave nothing, accept the morning’s washed and proffered air
brushing blued eyelids with an oblique desire.

- Marilyn Hacker
I tell myself:
“Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”

- Frank Bidart
A solução do problema da vida percebe-se no desaparecimento desse problema.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
my baffled infatuations
- frank bidart
up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

- Frank Bidart





Sarah, Heartstopper Forever (2026)

CHARLIE
Do you need me?

NICK
Yeah. So much.

One sound is saying, 'You are not worth tuppence.
But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe.'
The other says, 'Go with it! Give and swerve.
You are everything you feel beside the river.'

- Seamus Heaney
Telemachus' Detachment
Louise Glück

When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
Another thing: name one other person
who doesn’t have furniture.

- Louise Glück
passionate,
like Maria Callas

- Louise Glück
Por um momento, permaneceu imóvel, tentando apreender a estranha imobilidade ao seu redor. Era como a tentativa impossível de criar uma imagem sensorial da existência. Não havia nenhum atributo da realidade a ser percebido, nada além de sua ausência; não existia movimento, como se aquilo não fosse um trem, e sim um quarto num prédio.

- Aynd Rand, A revolta de Atlas
The soul is silent.
- Louise Glück
I don’t want to be a thing
I want to be becoming

- Dorothea Lasky
Nothing is anything if you say that it is
It is quiet and not a sound

- Dorothea Lasky
The Tao that can be spoken is not the constant Tao.
The name that can be named is not the constant name.

And you aren’t even thinking of me
- Dorothea Lasky
Brief reflection on the word Pain
Miroslav Holub

Wittgenstein says: the words ‘It hurts’ have replaced
     tears and cries of pain. The word ‘Pain’
     does not describe the expression of pain but replaces it.
     Thus it creates a new behaviour pattern
     in the case of pain.

The word enters between us and the pain
     like a pretence of silence.
     It is a silencing. It is a needle
     unpicking the stitch
     between blood and clay.

The word is the first small step
     to freedom
     from oneself. 

In case others     
are present. 
The silence was inviolable
like the surface of a mirror.

- Miroslav Holub
Go and open the door.
    Maybe outside there’s
    a tree, or a wood,
    a garden,
    or a magic city.

- Miroslav Holub
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again.

- Miroslav Holub
You only love
when you love in vain.

- Miroslav Holub
Pray for one thing:
deep earnestness- that which proved fatal to many 
But pray for one more thing more,
a thing that only the strong are granted:
taciturnity of heart.

- Karin Boye
‘Perspective brings significance,’ we say
- Philip Larkin
All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire.

- Louise Glück
If I could write to you
about this emptiness

- Louise Glück
On depression
AR

They look at me as a was.
Not an is, nor even a to be.
A done me. Or worse—
a forgotten I.
Paralysis, or peace,
Whichever

- Louise Glück
Limiar
AR

Não entro.
Não saio.

Penso
a porta.
I found you by design or
was it your design
or: we were drawn, we drew

- Adrienne Rich
Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop
A withered petunia’s crisp
the bud sticky
The flower engulfed in its own purple
both are dark
So common, nothing
like it

- Adrienne Rich
The signature to a life requires
the search for a method
rejection of posturing
trust in the witnesses
a vial of invisible ink
a sheet of paper held steady
after the end-stroke
above a deciphering flame

- Adrienne Rich
THAÍS
O capitalismo conseguiu customizar até o sagrado?

PONDÉ
Ah, você compra o sagradinho em qualquer lugar.

Linhas Cruzadas (16/07/2026)
Todo lo que en tu ciudad esté vivo proclamará tu nombre y te verás
honrado alabado y honrado

y tú mismo dirás tu nombre como si te miraras al espejo

porque ya no distinguirás entre los adoradores y el ídolo

Probablemente serás feliz

- Julio Cortázar
how beautiful it was to know that you
were there like an oasis

- julio cortázar
the light that fell in love with statues
- howard moss
A silence already filled with noises
- John Ashbery
There are parts of you
that want the sadness.
Find them out. Ask them why.

- Yrsa Daley-Ward
love doesn’t always mean you should stay
- yrsa daley-ward
panacea
yrsa daley-ward

You told me I seemed haunted.
It was three a.m. and you could still smell
the storm clouds under my skin.
You can’t quell depression by making
love.
But we tried.
But we tried,
oh, we did.
You’re so quiet you’re almost
                                                 tomorrow.

- Ocean Vuong
I called him, but he gave no answer.
- Caravaggio (1986)
Caravaggio, 1986

Commuter Tanka
Tarik Dobbs

     I am told the cows
               accept new cows on the spot.
                                                What iteration
               of events will we live through
at sunrise on Highway Ten?
Color of the flowers
has already faded away
while in idle thoughts
my life passes vainly by,
as I watch the long rains fall.

- Ono no Komachi
passa o espaço da palavra com sua selva sem margem
- mário chamie
I am not my body. Get me out of here.
Hope
is a charred skeleton
of a house visible from a road that snakes
through the valley of memory
where fig trees burst from the ground like throaty laughter.

- Tommy Pico
If language is a structure born
of the desire to communicate, can I really be blamed when Money says
anxiety is only real when the face breaks and I’m chipping like paint?

- Tommy Pico
left alone to spiral into the abyss of maladaptive delusion
- madisen kuhn
The ageless lust of an elusive closeness.
- Madisen Kuhn
Love consists in this, 
that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

- Roland Barthes
And I can’t pretend to know the watermelon lollipop 
Without the tongue that exists only to melt it away

- Madisen Kuhn
Maybe the chaos will always be there but 
I’ll find a way to break it down into mulch and grow 
Pears and herbs and gardenias from what’s left of me
It takes a while to accept that the shadows matter

- Madisen Kuhn
Where does it come from
The longing 
The need to be loved by the things that we love
I hear a song or read a poem and I’m on my knees

- Madisen Kuhn
I told you I’m always afraid to die 
Except when I’m reading Mary Oliver

- Madisen Kuhn
Haven’t I lived long
enough to know that the sand falls at the whim of my own hand? I’ve been
saving it up, but for what, I still don’t know.

- Madisen Kuhn
I think I’ll never grow tired of the echo
- Madisen Kuhn
Poem Number Two on 
Bell's Theorem
or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love
June Jordan

There is no chance that we will fall apart 
There is no chance 
There are no parts.
believe it love 
believe

     my lover 
lying down he 
lifts me up and high 
and I am 
high on him

- june jordan
plum blossom plum jam 
even the tree becomes something 
more than a skeleton 
longing for the sky

- june jordan
I can relate to that.

Tuner, 2025
Tuner, 2025

what do you call a feeling
that no longer lives in your body?

do you call it a memory? do you call it an ex?
do you call it and beg it to come back?

- olivia gatwood
I don’t socialize because I’m afraid
I’ll disappoint people. I have spent
so many hours talking on the phone.
I still love chat rooms. The only thing I trust
about myself is how good I am with words.
I can make anyone fall in love with me,
as long as they aren’t close by.

- Olivia Gatwood
What do I do with my hands
when they are just hands?

- Olivia Gatwood
Four nights in, I still don’t know his name. And each kiss
is the aftertaste of pills, a white cloud on the tongue. He hates
the names I give him: Tantalus, Orestes, Ganymede. I don’t
need a name he says, sky-high in the shower, the birds leaking
into stains on his stomach. Orange bottle in hand,
I answer Hyacinth and Vicodin. I answer Xanax and Zephyr.

- Saeed Jones
The most beautiful part of your body
is wherever your mother's shadow falls.

- Ocean Vuong
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney
Dark matter 
Rebecca Elson

Above a pond, 
An unseen filament 
Of spider’s floss 
Suspends a slowly 
Spinning leaf.
My bingo cards are empty, because I’m not paying attention.
I can’t hear the numbers, because something inward is being given
substance.

- Henri Cole
Lately, remembering anything involves an ability
to forget something else. Watching the news,
I writhe and moan; my mind is not itself.

- Henri Cole
He was doing lines on a mirror and had sugar spots on his nose.
It made him seem focused, with a conversational prowess.
I was in some kind of low-oxygen dead zone. You flee or suffocate.
Only jellies survive. Maybe I was afraid of emptiness—horror
vacui.

- Henri Cole
My lips were not yet content
with stillness. We were on our way home
from a nightclub. I adore you, Miguel moaned,
but have to return now. Remember
death ends a life, not a relationship.

- Henri Cole
Raiva
Adelaide Ivánova

Depois de tudo que passei  
ficaram os cacos:  
Tinindo  
Transtorno de estresse pós-traumático  
Dermatite atópica  
Disidrose  
Eczema  
Síndrome do intestino irritável  
Asma  
etc.  
I stayed silent for many years.
Nothing came of it —

neither good,
nor evil.

- Ryszard Krynicki
Cats
Ryszard Krynicki

The Lord God got cats right—
Wisława Szymborska sometimes says.
Sometimes she adds: Only.
Sometimes: The best.
Silent, soaring,
early autumn light
glowed past the window.
I miss you.

- Ryszard Krynicki
In this country? Yes, I stayed in this country.
Exile comes in many shapes
and places.

- Ryszard Krynicki
Nothing, night beyond the glass
looks through me with the non-gaze
of the boy I was, am

not, won't be.

- Ryszard Krynicki
The seer and the visible reciprocate one another.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What we see only lives in our eyes by what looks at us.
The act of seeing attains its fullness only by opening itself in two.

- Georges Didi-Huberman
The world is not what I think, but what I live through.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Respect is possible only where there is distance.
- Byung-Chul Han
With all its eyes, the creature-world beholds
the Open.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
- Iris Murdoch
The age of progress liberated demons
of which the Middle Ages
never dreamed...

- Ryszard Krynicki
Progress and doom are two sides of the same medal.
- Hannah Arendt
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; 
it does not exclude, it exhausts.

- Byung-Chul Han
Beyond a certain point, tools turn from being means to ends.
- Ivan Illich
Technique has become autonomous.
- Jacques Ellul
Where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

I don't know if I have the right
to speak, keep still, touch
wounds. I pray. No
words. He
Knows.

- Ryszard Krynicki
Who'd understand your sense of equality better
than your pedigreed dog?

- Ryszard Krynicki
Where do you hurry, my heart,
as if still seeking
your incarnation?

- Ryszard Krynicki
e tudo é transparente em cada forma
- torquato neto
toda palavra guarda uma cilada
e qualquer gesto é o fim
do seu início

- torquato neto
Não me faz em sombra o sol.
EU NÃO EXISTO.

- Torquato Neto
sem vontade de esperar o tempo
- torquato neto
Anyone you love will leave
was what you proved to me the year you did.

- Marilyn Hacker
Will she be in love with me when I’m fifty?
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
- Simone Weil
How to depict attention that surveys
ground for reflexive confidence. Delays
are legion. 

- Marilyn Hacker
We need a breather from the personal.
- Marilyn Hacker
If I fail friendship, what felicity
left? Words crystallize despite our lives, select
emblems from hesitations and suspect
feelings. 

- Marilyn Hacker
Unsubtle truth can blanket subtlety.
- Marilyn Hacker
Reading poetry
we expect truth, you said, and I agree.
Truth, in particulars, I can define.

- Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You went as deep down as I’d ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air, I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

- Marilyn Hacker
Lo que no duele ha dolido.
- Luis Muñoz
I practice silence. I am reading about men who strove to lose affections.
- Richie Hofmann
 I love you because you can’t be destroyed by love
- Richie Hofmann
Eros enters, where shame had lived.
- Richie Hofmann
O Nietzsche é um filósofo romântico. Um filósofo romântico é meio que o oposto do estoicismo, porque ele valoriza o pathos, a paixão. E uma das questões centrais do estoicismo é o que se chama apatheia estoica, é manter o pathos longe. Então, do ponto de vista do Nietzsche, os estoicos se defendem da vida — porque ficam tentando construir uma paz interior que, para o Nietzsche, não significa nada. Paz interior? Que me venham as paixões.

- Luiz Felipe Pondé, Linhas Cruzadas (09/07/2026)
Então a modernidade é ansiogênica e o estoicismo é ansiolítico.
- Thaís Oyama, Linhas Cruzadas (09/07/2026) 
We recognize each other only in echoes.
- Donika Kelly
Refuse the old means of measurement.
Rely instead on the thrumming
wilderness of self.

- Donika Kelly
And we both wrote poems we couldn't write
- Anne Sexton
The days are horizontal.
- Anne Sexton
So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
- Anne Sexton
 I have been momentary.
- Anne Sexton
Victor, Silo, S03E02

O homem é um animal político. 
- Aristóteles

O inferno são os outros.
- Sartre

Não há fatos, apenas interpretações.
- Nietzsche
VICTOR
Why do humans rule the world and not the apes?

DANIEL
I don't know. [...]

VICTOR
You reach out to people and you tell them a story. You take a set of data and  you weave meaning around it. It's what we do; it's who we are. We're storytellers, meaning-makers. [,,,] We're really just a collection of stories we've told ourselves. Memory is our internal biography—information that we've hopped up with meaning to tell us who we are.

Silo, S03E02
It just so happens that I gather emptiness in my shirt pocket
and run like I have things to do or I’m chased by some
illusion

- Nasser Rabah
Peter Schmidt no Roda Viva (29/06/2026)
(trechos)

A ideia importante é de que a atenção é muito, muito mais ampla do que attention span, janela de atenção. Uma máquina não pode medir, nem pode gerar tipos de atenção como carinho, imaginação, criatividade ou amor.

— • —

A atenção é a matéria da experiência de ser humano.

— • —

No discurso popular, pelo menos nos Estados Unidos, se fala economia da atenção, mas a gente acha que essa frase não expressa a violência do que está acontecendo agora. A gente propõe outra metáfora para entender a situação. Essa metáfora é, em inglês, human fracking, fracking humano.

— • —

A gente precisa de santuários, isso é um conceito central de nosso trabalho, de espaços protegidos da pressão do fracking humano.

— • —

Novas tecnologias produzem novas formas de exploração, novas formas de exploração produzem novas formas de resistência.

— • —

O que podemos aprender desse momento na história é: quando você está sofrendo e todas as outras pessoas estão sofrendo também, tem que se juntar, tem que se unir, tem que conversar.

— • —

Tem duas forças históricas em jogo. Tem a força da tecnologia e tem uma força, um modelo de negócios, que explora as pessoas. São distintas. Agora, a tecnologia apoia esse modelo de negócios, mas não tem que ser assim. Então a gente acredita no mundo onde a tecnologia vai avançando, mas tem que nutrir a vida humana em vez de extorqui-la.
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
- Wisława Szymborska
I let myself be invented
- Wisława Szymborska
I TEACH silence
in all languages

- Wisława Szymborska
I exist not in myself,
I’m an element’s function.
A symbol in the air.
Or a circle on the water.

- Wisława Szymborska
O perilous, altruistic mute god of love.
- Bianca Stone
I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget
it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers
cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up
with more meaning.

- Bianca Stone
Maybe humans are the failed AI of Nature.
Maybe Nature made something it thought would tend the garden.
Maybe Nature made something sexy, to watch
clean the pools with long butterfly nets
and a sunburn—the retainers of Nature.

- Bianca Stone
how can someone not become
heartbreaking in one sense
of the word—not find
they are a stranger in their own household
of truly
     unnamable need?

- Bianca Stone
We must risk delight.
- Jack Gilbert
Time does not go beyond its maiden name.
And anyway, right now, everything tastes good.
All the male poets’ poems, and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake.
I swallow it with a glass of milk.
The crumb crawls down my throat
and enters me. The power of Christ compels,
     not I—but the wish to be changed—
everything is challenged
by the sudden flame of joy—
how uncomfortable we are with happiness.

- Bianca Stone
Knowledge invades him, yet he shrinks again
   And sickens to live still
Upon the green slopes of his isolation

- Thom Gunn
I search for meaning, studying to remember
What the world was, and meant

- Thom Gunn
The lover burns without knowing what is burning.
- Roland Barthes
Instruct me how to find here my desire:
To separate the matter from its burning

- Thom Gunn
I was presence without full being
- Thom Gunn
I’ve learned the doctors learned of learned helplessness
- Solmaz Sharif
I want to be surrounded by splendor, but beauty is capitalism. 
This is to say purchase power is how I was taught to love things  
& now I am exiled in a country where living is only spectacle & roses, 
never bread. How do I feed a village when my only skill is personal 
acquisition, not distribution?

- Yesenia Montilla
AR

rise, zooplankton,
from the perpetual twilight

feed—there's plenty of
phytoplankton

living soup everywhere
in this viscous world

thank God
(is there a god in the darkness?)
for your amazing appendages
it's what we don't say

o fog
borra a vista do que está para lá da ponte. aperto a pedra do parapeito com
as mãos para ver melhor.

- alice sant'anna
impossível sentar-se diante de tantas cadeiras
que aguardam o momento
em que serão úteis

as costas espalmadas são pacientes
podem ficar para sempre na espera

os pés das cadeiras quando tombam
apontam para cima
são insetos de casca redonda
que não desviram sozinhos

- alice sant'anna
tenho te escrito com calma
cartas em um caderno azul
arranco da espiral e não posto
por preguiça ou nem morta
tenho medo da espera

- alice sant'anna
Nowhere a meaning, nowhere a definite goal
depois de hesse
o maior obstáculo não é a tragédia, mas a opacidade

depois de weil
a aflição extrema rompe a ilusão que nos impede de perceber o real

depois de dickinson
a compreensão vem em lampejos

depois da linguagem
toda origem é uma tradução

- AR
Oh, if only for a moment
Between me and the light that lasts forever
A storm would be kind enough to shatter the fog.

- Hermann Hesse
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man.

- Hermann Hesse
Now I drink pain in every delight
- Hermann Hesse
Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.
- Hermann Hesse
I would believe only in a god who could dance.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
A Swarm of Gnats
Hermann Hesse

Many thousand glittering motes
Crowd forward greedily together
In trembling circles.
Extravagantly carousing away
For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,
They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,
Shivering with joy against death.

Whole kingdoms, sunk into ruin,
Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered
Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,
Have never known of so fierce a dancing.


I don't mean to sound 
ungrateful. I am grateful 
as a weathervane 
finally struck. 

- Cameron Awkward-Rich
I’m alone in this room 
empty of me, though 
I’m in it.

- Cameron Awkward-Rich
"Só depende de você."
"Você precisa reagir."
"Pense positivo."
"Levanta dessa cama."

Sobreviver
é uma forma
de velocidade
invisível.

O corpo
aprende
uma física
sem testemunhas.

- AR
Do all people fall in love?

Or is there always someone searching,
unable to rest, finding nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

- Alex Dimitrov
History
Alex Dimitrov

The turn in the day
when it’s no longer morning.

Men I loved
and haven’t spoken to in years.

What used to be St. Mark’s Bookshop
at 12 St. Marks Place.

Nothing ends.
I love knowledge. Even the fatal kind. Even the one without “use value.”
- Alex Dimitrov
I love looking at someone without need or panic.
- Alex Dimitrov
I love how the past shifts when there’s more.
- Alex Dimitrov
I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of coffee.
- Alex Dimitrov
I love people and my time away from them the most.
- Alex Dimitrov
Silences. Between the waves and beneath them.
- Alex Dimitrov
the real mystery in fact
is how we managed to make room
for love at all

- alex dimitrov
I will never have justice. But what crumbs of it may be snatched, I will devour.
- Rhaenyra, House of the Dragon, S03E03
House of the Dragon, S03E03

Do not think I am not grateful for your small 
kindness to me. 
I like small kindnesses. 

- Louise Glück
I tried to leave desire,
but it scratched at the door, tapped
its empty bowl against the floor—
I tried not to answer,
but the bulb shone—

- Solmaz Sharif
To lose even the loss.
- Solmaz Sharif
A without which
I have learned to be.

- Solmaz Sharif
Frugal musicality is how Kristeva describes depression’s speech
- Solmaz Sharif
unlanguaged
- alicia hoffman
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

My hunch is that most of what we call depression is a loss of coherence.
- Martin Picard, The Diary of a CEO (July 2, 2026)
Teoria provisória
AR

Propósito,
eu te perdi
ou foi
a mitocôndria?

Confesso:
nem fui te procurar.
Fiquei aqui,
a contemplar.
STEVEN
Again, we're theorizing here. If I don't have purpose in my life, it's gonna change the mitochondria. And if my mitochondria become more inefficient, then what? What will I notice as the next symptom?

MARTIN
Probably fatigue is the next thing that starts to pop up. You feel drained. You don't feel like you have enough energy...

STEVEN
Burnout?

MARTIN
[It] probably feels like burnout, and you start to lose enthusiasm for the future. You become more pessimistic. There's a kind of constellation of things we call depression or burnout—we put labels on these things, but really every person starts to experience life as less enjoyable, less purposeful, less meaningful, regardless of the diagnostic title we put on.

The Diary of a CEO (July 2, 2026)
I know, Lilly. I know.

The Sheep Detectives, 2026


Whispered Poem
Mary Oliver

I have been risky in my endeavors,
I have been steadfast in my loves;

Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.
All real living is meeting.
- Martin Buber, I and Thou
Today is a day of
dark clouds and slow rain.
The little blades of corn
are so happy.

- Mary Oliver
Don't think, but look!
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (§66)
For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which 
we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: 
the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (§43)
On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.

How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and how many formations might they make

and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?

- Mary Oliver
6.522
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

7
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
litografia
claudia roquette-pinto

mas se eu uso uma palavra nova
como tivesse uma pedra na língua 
áspera troca tranca trinca
maxilares dormentes

cada síbaba faz-se displicente
o acaso de estar intrometida
entre outros rumores ainda
mais dizeres

pronuncia-se esta pepita 
com lábios de desagravo
enquanto em segredo relevos
de quartzo

chacoalham num alvoroço
de dentes e ditos e datas
custa o tempo de um tropeço
lapidar uma palavra
Foolishness? No, It’s Not
Mary Oliver

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it’s reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds again.

But it’s not. Of course I have to give up, but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder of it—the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?

- Mary Oliver
Absolute attention is prayer.
- Simone Weil
Branches without leaves over bare ground
pretend to reveal everything.

- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
stillness turns in its well
- mei-mei berssenbrugge
Yet suddenly: silence.
- Georg Trakl
I refer more to relation than beings.
- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
- Paul Klee
Being is not the straight line a photon travels, but fractal, 
like the edge of a borealis. 

- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
You can rise to a level of not knowing that’s untouched by entropy. 
Out of uncertainty, openness: order is maintained.

- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
We now find ourselves in a world where we understand how everything works
but we know the meaning of nothing.

- John Lennox quotes Iain McGilchrist, The Diary of a CEO (June 4, 2026)
I think I must be somewhere else, not here,
not in this city, this heartland of pure noise.

- Ai
in the silence so complete
- ai
my mind empty
like the Buddhists tell you is possible
if only you don’t try.
If only I could
turn myself into a bird
like the shaman I was meant to be,
but I can’t,
I’m earthbound
and solitude is my companion,
the only one you can count on.
Don’t, don’t try to tell me otherwise.
I’ve had it all and lost it

- Ai
AR

o amanhã
nunca falta

quem falta
sou eu
Remember Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road?
There’s no pot of gold at the end,
but we keep walking that road
- Ai

I've discovered over the decades that humans are incredibly short-term oriented. And that they have an enormous predisposition to optimism. They're looking for optimistic news in everything. They're looking to avoid unpleasantness.
- Jeremy Grantham, The Diary of a CEO (June 30, 2026)
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something 
you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.

- Lauren Berlant
What is real is process.
- Ernst Bloch
Thinking means venturing beyond.
- Ernst Bloch
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds 
of statistical laws and their probability...

- Hannah Arendt
depois de arendt 
caminhamos porque cada ação pode inaugurar algo novo

depois de bloch 
caminhamos porque o mundo ainda não está concluído e contém possibilidades latentes

depois de fisher
caminhamos mesmo quando nossa capacidade de imaginar 
um futuro diferente foi profundamente reduzida

depois de berlant
caminhamos porque somos afetivamente presos a promessas que podem
nunca se cumprir — ou até nos prejudicar

- AR
In the fields, the silos open their mouths
and let the grain dribble down their sides,
for they are overflowing.

- Ai
Wishing I could get out of this alive, I hug myself.
- Ai
To have understood some small piece of the world
more deeply doesn’t have to mean we’re not as lost
as before

- Carl Phillips
Final Curve
Langston Hughes

When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.
Somewhere in the memory bank.
- Verity Spott
Espera
AR

Espero.
Não por alguém.
Pela possibilidade.
Negativo
AR

Aquilo
que falta

também
estrutura.
Conceito
AR

O conceito
não abraça.

Ainda assim
é onde descanso
por um instante.
A noite
não promete nada.
Mesmo assim amanhece.

-  AR
Ainda estou aqui.
Não como resposta.
Como vestígio.

-  AR
Perceber
o peso
da xícara vazia sobre a mesa.

- AR
In deep autumn, on a busy
London sidewalk, I want to
summon myself to be free.

- Mary Jean Chan
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