Metaphors Screaming My Name

Pedro Adams

1.

Elephant
An elephant in a room
so bleak and so cruel

Rhymes
The elephant doesn’t like rhymes
Maybe it just hasn’t found the right one yet
Maybe

“Fast!”, hushes the elephant
“Get out of the shower fast!”
Write that down, write that down
What?
“I don’t know who I am”

2.

We like to pretend, but there’s always an urgency to the situation an urgency to the situation an urgency to the situation an urgency to the situation an urgency to the situation nós gostamos de fingir mas é sempre uma situação urgente uma situação urgente uma situação urgente uma situação urgente é sempre uma situação urgente uma situação urgente sempre urgente sempre urgente sempre uma situação sempre

roupa no varal
os pássaros gorjeiam
ao pôr do sol

3.

Can it be called poetry if I don’t know what I’m doing?

Can it be called life?

4.

I felt it twitching today. The feeling of unease. Twitching deep into my core. The anxious sweat, the preoccupied stare. Um passo na escuridão.

It grows. The unease grows. Is death crawling closer to my bed? Somos apenas humanos, no fim das contas. Feitos para morrer. One thing is to know death is a reality, but being reminded of it is a completely different thing. Nada te faz se sentir tão frágil, tão fraco, indefeso.

Honestly, quite humbling.

Uma amiga se aproxima, e sussurra em seu ouvido: “There’s no meaning to death. It makes no sense. It answers to no one, to nothing. That’s the high of it. Death doesn’t give life a meaning, because both of them are pointless. Yet, still, we love.”

The friend doesn’t speak English, but they both know what they’re thinking.

Spheres are pointless. Is the whole Earth a vast, paradoxical cacophony, amalgamation, confusion, of nothingness?

5.

Falling rockets aren’t pointless. Rockets fall again and again and again and again.

Children die. Buildings fall. Lie on TV to no one. To all. To whoever doesn’t want to listen. The fall, the failure of the West.

My tears aren’t pointless. Or maybe they are.

6.

She looks in the mirror, what a pretty beard she’s got. Does she?
He looks in the mirror, what a feminine face he’s got. Does he?
They look in the mirror, and can’t see each other.
Cheeky verses, cringy allegories. What is the narrator even talking about?

Don’t look back, Orpheus, don’t look back. And just for a moment, everything will be fine. Don’t look at Eurydice, Orpheus, don’t look at Eurydice. Nothing is fine.

7.

Talvez ignorar o mundo ao redor seja o caminho para that wasn’t a typo back there a verdadeira felicidade. Já dizia Nietzsche (se não me engano), seriously, it wasn’t a typo algo nas linhas de “aqueles que dançavam foram julgados insanos pelos que não escutavam a música”, but it was kinda clever e essa é uma frase que carrego para a vida.

Não sei dançar.

8.

Thomas wakes up feeling sick again.

Tired, he massages the deep purple bags under his eyes and moans while getting up from the bed in his dark, sultry bedroom. On the other side of his former white, currently yellow-stained blinds, the sun slowly rises as always.

He looks at the bed and sees a dark circle of sweat on the old sheets that can barely be kept in place anymore, with now long-gone elastic bands.

Fucking. again.

Thomas goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water, and then a second one. Outside his flat, the birds start chirping.

Fun fact about Thomas: he loves birds. No matter how bad his day may be, only a brief encounter with a winged creature is enough to brighten it up quite a bit.

The chirping of the early birds, so far, is what keeps Thomas going every morning. He heads to the shower as the sky starts to light up more and more, and feels revitalised without all that overnight sweat.

Thomas may not know it yet, but in two weeks’ time, he will throw it all away. He will finally have enough, and just leave. He won’t kill himself, no, at least not literally. Maybe socially. But that’s more about the society around him than himself.

In three weeks’ time, Thomas will be sleeping under a bridge. And he will wake up feeling sick again.

His sickness is the world.

9.

Truly soul-crushing when a perceived salvation comes, and nothing really changes.
I guess I’m just as lost as an I-don’t-even-fucking-know-what.
(Sorry, I should have asked earlier, but can I curse here?)
How’s that for a metaphor?

10.

The flower blossoms, and with it comes the suffocating smell of thoughts of inadequacy. Almost all is on the line. But maybe stubbornness is a better quality than good judgement. Or writing. Or all of the above.
“That’s the high of it”.
Yet, still, I love.
But I’m not sure it can be called poetry.

11.

My falling rockets are pointless. Or maybe they aren’t. Interlude.

12.

“Preciso escrever em português”, me lembro. Não posso perder minha voz. Minha voz.

Voz. Qual a minha voz? Seria apenas um sussurro? Um susurto?

“O que Machado de Assis diria?”

Nada, seu bobo. Machado de Assis está morto. Ao verme que primeiro roeu as quentes carnes de meu corpo dedico como saudosa lembrança estas memórias de hoje. Memórias de quem há pouco nasceu e acha que muito tem a contar.

Todos os meus “eus” se encaram na escuridão completa, sem conseguir ver um palmo à frente do rosto. Eles não existem. Será que por isso parecem mais reais que eu?

13.

A cheeky, cheeky rhyme
that will only get worse with time
There’s always time to go back
don’t lose focus, keep on track
don’t lose focus, keep on track
There’s always time to go back
That will only get worse with time
Some cheeky, cheeky rhymes
May God strike you dead, elephant!

14.

A pior parte de escrever não é escrever. É não chegar a lugar nenhum. Seemingly.
Perspectives, or the lack thereof.
Muitas comparações. Depois de um tempo, fica chato.
Ainda vão dizer que sou sem inspiração. Expiração.
Um grito no papel.

15.

Today a friendship was put down like it was a rabid dog. Before it claimed a victim. And still, there’s always a victim. Was it you? Or was it me?

16.

dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig.

dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig.

deeper. deeper. deeper. deeper. deeper. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig. deeper. dig. deeper. dig. deeper. dig. deeper. dig. deeper. deeper. deeper. deeper. dig. dig.

keep digging. keep digging. keep digging. keep digging. don’t look back. don’t think twice. dig. dig. dig. dig. dig it deep.

dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and hide it. hide it from all. hide it from yourself in the darkest of places. this must not come out. what was it again? I can’t remember.

17.

Is there a greater tragedy than having nothing to talk about? Is there a greater lack of meaning?

Maybe one day they’ll be famous. Maybe one day people will use AI to forge fake evidences against them and ruin their lives forever. Maybe they won’t be able to bear it, and will have a self-induced overdose on a lonely Christmas eve. Why do they want to be famous, again?

Why would anyone want to be famous?

18.

Rocky streams.

I have a pretty smile. That’s what some people say, at least. Others say I laugh funny, which in a way is a compliment.

They all make me insecure. They all used to make me insecure. Which one is it?

River flows.

19.

Dreamers, they never learn.

20.

One man’s trash is another man’s trash. One man’s treasure is another man’s treasure.
Or something like that.
One man’s worries are another man’s worries
One man’s priorities are another man’s priorities
One man’s limitations are another man’s limitations
One man’s shit is another man’s shit
By default.

Bonding.

21.

Decorate time with a profound softness, the sounds of nature, the choro. Carve into soapstone the sacred figures. Build brute modernist structures. Always remember where you came from.

It may be hot as hell, but the food… tem gosto de paraíso. Modéstia à parte, sem igual.

And you may mock my lingo. You may mock the sound of my “nh” when I talk. You may all make me ashamed of who I am, make me slowly lose myself. But eventually, we always find ourselves.

Choro paraense. Meu choro paraense. Nostálgico, Yuri Guedelha.

Sempre tanto a chorar.

Sempre tanto a rir, sorrir, com meu açaí, meu tacacá, minha maniçoba, minha farinha d’água. Meu peixe frito, meu jambu, meu cupuaçu.

o sorriso se abre
em praia de água doce
corre o caranguejo

Latino-americano, graças a Deus.

Interview by L. Valena
January 17, 2024

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was an image of a projection on the wall. It was at an angle, so the image was all stretched out and blurred. The room was dark. I quite liked looking at it.

What were your first thoughts and feelings about what you saw?

The first thing that came up was the name, which was something I came up with in January 2022, and I've been waiting for the right opportunity to use it. I went through a lot of turmoil in my life a few months ago, and the prompt complimented what I felt like I needed to say. I was hoping that would happen! It gave me a lot of things to work with.

What happened next?

I wanted to do something I probably couldn't do anywhere else. I wanted to do something bilingual, and also I wanted to explore something between prose and poetry. I wanted to go crazy. There were some topics that I wanted to talk about based on my turmoil from back then (which is not happening in the same way right now). So I went back to those topics, and wrote out some bullet points of what the image made me think or feel, and then I compared the lists.

Then I didn't work on it for four days. As a writer, there is that idea that you should write whether you're inspired to or not. I agree with that, but since I had no idea what I was going to write, I couldn't really force myself. Then I was in the middle of a shower, and just... [snaps fingers]. And I was like, 'Oh god!' and went out of the shower, running, drying myself off and got to the computer still dripping and started to write. Then I wrote a third of it instantly. Then a few more days went by. I ended up writing the vast majority of this piece in three blocks.

Isn't it crazy when something just strikes like that? And you can't lose it! You just have to run to try and grab it before it flies away!

At first it was just a sentence, but then it just started to grow and grow, and I knew I would never remember it. Hold on!

I know the feeling. It's really weird, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's also amazing. I can't complain.

It is an amazing thing. I think that feeling is one of the most sacred parts of being a creative practitioner. There's just nothing like that.

I read that Aaron Sorkin takes seven or eight showers a day, so I think there's something there. I do have an advantage. Since I live in Brazil, I take at least two every day. We take lots of showers. It’s a cultural thing.

So tell me more about this piece, and what you're thinking about.

This was one of the hardest text projects to write, because I had no idea how to judge it. There's always a lot of rewriting, but how can I judge this? How can I know it's good? This piece is composed of 21 parts, because that's how old I am. I went with it, because there were a lot of things I wanted to talk about. I didn't talk about all of them, but most. The first part is just about getting out of the shower fast. Then it just kept coming. I did some haikus in the second part and in the last part. Although I don't really like poetry yet, and I haven't found my style of poetry, I do love haikus. It's so simple, but it has so many rules.

I don't know how to talk about this text as a whole, it was just a bunch of things that I had inside me that needed to come out. Which is exactly what every artist says about their work.

Do you want to talk about the title? Metaphor seems like an important concept in this piece, do you want to talk about that?

I think this is one of my best titles. It fits because there are a lot of things that I'm not talking about directly, I'm talking about them in metaphor. And they're screaming my name because this is about me in the end. A lot of this is very specifically related to things that have happened, and I don't expect the reader to 'get it.' I do talk about Palestine – that's probably the most obvious one. I used metaphor because I didn't want to feel that exposed, or just go on a rant. Hopefully that will also mean that it can connect with more people.

Do you feel like this line of inquiry opened up anything you'll continue to explore?

Since this is completely different from anything else I've done, I do think it has opened something for me. I can actually do this. This works somehow. It did make me lose some fear about experimenting. But again, I don't know anywhere other than Bait/Switch where I could do something like this. This was really fun, and maybe I'll do some similar things in the future that are reminiscent of this work.

I felt the need to write in Portuguese, because in the past few years I've had a lot more identification with my country. We went through some very rough times. Fortunately we changed our president – hooray. So things have gotten better, but also it seems that the rest of the world has gotten worse. I wanted to move to Europe, but now they're all becoming far right and just as effed as we are, if not more. A very strong thing in my culture is what we call “stray dog syndrome.” It's the idea that everything from the outside is better, whether you're talking technology, singers, or culture. It was very strong almost since forever, and then it began to get better, only to get worse again. Now I think we’re on the right path again. That's why I ended the piece with "Latino-americano, graças a Deus,” – Latin-American, thanks to God. I'm not religious, but I had to write it like that.

Even within Brazil, the Southeast and the South in general are extremely xenophobic about the North and Northeast, where I live. We are thought to be dumb, starving, incompetent. The Northeast is thought to be a wasteland, just desert. And the North is thought to be just rainforest, savage, with wild animals in the streets. But the Left only won the last election because of us, so fuck them. You’re welcome. This is a major struggle for me, this sense of belonging or lack thereof.

Now that you've done this twice, is there any advice you'd give to someone participating in this for the second time?

Try not to remember how the first time went. Try to forget it, so you don't take the same path. Be open, and that might be harder to do if you've already participated in this. Go crazy.

Call Number: M88VA | M90PP.adaMe

Pedro Adams is a Brazilian student, author, screenwriter and director. He lives in Natal, a seaside city, where he is always trying to find the balance between writing/creating and studying Psychology at the state's university. And he may just have found that balance.