Which joy or pain survive
under soaking rain?

Which fear or rage remain?

No rain – how hard it might be
Shall ever fall to wash out
The labyrinth of words
The irrationality of doubt

Where to torrents run
Spreading fragrances of south?

I shall erase your memory
with the cold blood gentleness
of a butcher

The day my heart
can contain the sea
I shall love again
the way it was
the way supposed to be

Listening to the silence of the stones
I erase from my skin the word love

It’s not a spring of ideas
Doubts it’s all I explore
That and a forgotten grave

Rivers flow, words don’t
No one can materialize love
A tattoo that will never fade

I write because I bleed
Of walking the mountain
Between love and me

I picked two aspects for my last best of 2011: 1) My attempts to produce an African Christmas cake. 2) The very last moments of the year.

Concerning the cake, I have very little to say. I baked two acceptable cakes mixing traditional ingredients, like raisins and spices, with African elements, like Amarula liqueur and cashew nuts. I offered half of the second cake to neighborhood friends and was delighted to hear that they liked it to the point of fighting for the last bite. Still, I know it can be improved.

Finally, I put the last moments of 2011 into a poem:

Distant Love
Dress six makes gentle white waves
Promises of perfection they are
You saw me above the city lacteal neon
Shining like a solitary bright star
Your eyes said you could love me forever
With such a nerve I have never seen
Magically you vanished before the lights
Hoping to mask that you are only a teen

As if they were mere statues along their paths
Men target women with eagle precision
I should have saluted you, irreverent knight
Since to love myself I don’t need a reason
We could be twin souls, the love we seek
Sacred ground, a match made in heaven
Yet time travellers accept time forceful logic
And we are just the very last moment of 2011

That same night I also wrote in my own dear language:

Silêncios
Existem silêncios tamanhos
Silêncios a que dei morada
Não sangram, não me magoam
Só me deixam extasiada

Be it told or heard, the truth can be hard. Frequently we don’t want to hear it (even when it’s told by ourselves) and most of the times (thankfully!) people don’t bother to say it.

I couldn’t feel myself, being myself a much happier version of the one I am today. Months turned into years. As we usually have more than one reason to feel miserable, I’ve been deluding myself with a few…

So I decided to stop writing until I had the courage to tell myself the REAL reason of my uneasiness. It took me 57 days to drop the bomb.

I am not equipped to face difficult problems. My father and mother smoothed paths for their children and I’ve been living in such kind of environment up to recently, when Andy, one of the pack, showed signs of bad addiction to alcohol.

It has been a long war and it got worse during the last months. Addicted people are time consuming. I started living his life. Mostly I talk about him. I only worry about him. I follow his defeats and victories. And I got tired. One day I reached the point of admitting that happiness could be never hearing about him again. That day I understood the source of my troubles. I started to feel a lot better. I just had to say it loud and clear.

Surprisingly, my attitude seems to have shaken things a lit bit. He has been more careful, knowing that he is a burden for some of us. And it looks like we are entering an active phase, as we try to help him in a different way. A clever way.

It is possible that I feel like writing again. At least I felt that I couldn’t carry this matter inside of me to 2012.

Only Sorrow
You pull my hair and I drown
This liquid anguish is absurdly intense
Yours is not my own affaire
Still I despair as I go down and down
Around the nape of my neck
Your hands take me back to dark depths
Where rules no longer apply
And reasons are semantically inept

Now I know
Only sorrow springs from wallow