Late After Midnight
Astrikos Katoikos
1984 cassette player eating tape
Left speaker dead, had to lean for the snare
Kids nearby talked factories, marriages, pay
I learned drum fills before learning despair
Heavy metal arrived without asking my name
Before I knew boredom had rules of its own
Then Misfits records, cheap sleeves, skulls in black
Some dead singers felt less distant than home
Not heroic
Not cursed from the start
Only a strange kid
Dragging noise through the dark
Astrikos dust over the vinyl case
Years disappeared but the appetite stayed
Astrikos faces gone one by one
Still chasing thoughts that refuse to be done
Late after midnight
The scratching returned
Not everyone writing
Knows what was learned
Years filled shelves till the wood bowed low
Fernando Pessoa multiplied when one life wasn't enough
Guimarães Rosa bent language into fever and bone
Books stopped soothing and started being rough
Then Ramana appeared
Then Nisargadatta came
Not like teachers descending
More like acid on names
Some inherit maps
Some keep walking by guess
Returning for decades
To the same unrest
Astrikos dust over the vinyl case
Years disappeared but the appetite stayed
Astrikos faces gone one by one
Still chasing thoughts that refuse to be done
Late after midnight
The scratching returned
Not everyone writing
Knows what was learned
1999, Siderações
Four hundred fifty fragments out of sight
Poems beside unfinished songs in notebooks
Written while dogs barked somewhere at night
No movement to build
No disciples to keep
Just returning to subjects
That interrupted sleep
Astrikos dust over the vinyl case
Years disappeared but the appetite stayed
Astrikos faces gone one by one
Still chasing thoughts that refuse to be done
Late after midnight
The scratching returned
Not everyone writing
Knows what was learned
2020 changed the weight of a room
Silence sat longer beside every chair
People discovered routine can collapse
And fear has habits nobody prepares
Then songs came faster than years before
Three hundred knocking against old doors
Some died half-made
Some survived the page
Old fascinations returning with age
No audience waiting
No reviews to read
Only another afternoon
Spent following need
Again came the notebooks
Again came the sound
Like an unfinished argument
Still circling around
Astrikos after notebooks and years
After private obsessions and ordinary fears
Something persisted
Though memory thins
Songs sometimes outlive
The hands that penned them
Astrikos one question remains
Did you write those songs
Or spend your whole life
Becoming the person
Who could?
1984 cassette hiss in a dark room
The tape keeps turning
Long after the hands are gone