August 31, 2025

I want all the rhythms

In São Paulo for work; conversations routinely start in Portuguese. Brazil, like Trinidad, is a place where I get the benefit of being assumed to belong there.

In Brooklyn, at a fete, watching Ke(e)s perform, surrounded by people who know all the lyrics. Everyone knows why we are all there on a cold August night.

Bring down the power.

Ring de bell.

Send us music for some healing, amen.

Attribution

I want all the words
Chiefly the universal barbarisms
I want all the constructions
Chiefly the syntactical ones of exception
I want all the rhythms
Chiefly the unnumbered.

I am sick of flirting lyricism
Of political lyricism
Of rickety lyricism
Of syphilitic lyricism
Of all lyricism which surrenders
To anything which is not its true self.

After all, that is not lyricism
That is only bookkeeping
— from Poetica by Manuel Bandeira; translated into English by Yolanda Leite and John Nist