10 Mar João Cabral de Melo Neto-brazilian poet

The three bad-loveds(1943)

Love ate my name, my identity, my portrait. Love ate my age certificate, my genealogy, my address. Love ate my business cards. Love came and ate all the papers where I wrote my name.

Love ate my clothes, my handkerchiefs, my shirts. Love ate meters and meters of ties. 
Love ate the measure of my suits, the number of my shoes, the size of my hats. 
Love ate my height, my weight, the color of my eyes and my hair.

Love ate my medicines, my medical prescriptions, my diets. 
Ate my aspirins, my shortwaves, my X-rays. He ate my mental tests, my urine tests.

Love ate all my poetry books on the shelf.
 I ate the quotes in verse in my prose books. He ate the words in the dictionary 
that could be put together in verse.

Hungry, love devoured the tools for my use: comb, razor, brushes, nail scissors, pocket knife. Hungry yet, love devoured the use of my utensils: my cold baths, the opera sung in the bathroom, the dead water heater, but it looked like a power plant.

Love ate the fruit put on the table. He drank water from glasses and small rooms.
 He ate the bread on purpose hidden. He drank the tears from his eyes that, no one knew,
 were filled with water.

Love came back to eat the papers where I thoughtlessly wrote my name again.

Love gnawed at my childhood, with paint-stained fingers, hair falling into my eyes, 
boots never shined. Love gnawed at the elusive boy, always in the corners, 
and who scratched the books, bit the pencil, walked the street kicking stones.
 He gnawed at the conversations, by the gas station on the square, with the cousins
 ​​who knew everything about birds, about a woman, about car brands.

Love ate my state and my city. It drained the dead water from the mangroves, 
abolished the tide. He ate the curly and hard-leaved mangroves, ate the acid green 
of the cane plants covering the regular hills, cut by the red barriers, 
the little black train, the chimneys. He ate the smell of cut cane and the smell 
of sea air. He even ate those things that I despaired of not knowing how to talk 
about in verse.

Love ate until the days not yet announced in the leaflets. He ate the minutes
 ahead of time on my watch, the years that the lines on my hand ensured. 
He ate the future great athlete, the future great poet. He ate the future 
trips around the earth, the future bookshelves around the room.

Love ate my peace and my war. My day and my night. My winter and my summer.
 It ate my silence, my headache, my fear of death.