“Come this way” — some say with sweet eyes,
Opening their arms, and sure
it could be good I would listen to them
When they say: “Come this way”!
I look at them with glazed expression
(the eyes filled with irony and fatique)
And I cross my arms,
And I never go that way…
It is my destiny:
To create inhumanity!
Never to accompany anybody.
—And to live with the same unwillingness
with which i tore my mother’s womb .
No, I won’t go that way! I only go where
My own steps take me…
And if what I seek none of you can answer,
Why do you repeat: “Come this way”?
I prefer to slip on muddy corners,
be carried on the wind,like rags,
to drag my bleeding feet,
Than to go that way…
If I came to your world, was
Only to deflower virgin rain-forests,
And to draw my own feet on the unexplored sand!
All the rest I do is worth nothing.
Why then you are the ones
that would give me axes, tools and the courage,
to cut down my obstacles?…
It runs, in your veins, the old blood of your ancestors
And you love the easy way !
I love the Distant and the Mirage,
I love the abysses, the torrents and the deserts…
so Go! you have roads,
You have gardens and flower-beds,
You have homelands, and your roofs,
And you have rules, and treatises, and philosophers, and wisemen.
I have my Madness!
I hold it high, like a torch, burning in the dark night,
And I feel foam, and blood, and chants on my lips…
God and the Devil are the ones who guide me, nobody else.
All of you have a father, all of you have a mother;
But I, without beginning or end
I was born from the love between God and the Devil.
José Régio
