This is augmented’s journey,
Growing up, poetry was always an outlet for me- not just to express my emotions but also to explore ideas. It allowed me to see what others might be thinking and feeling without having to ask them directly. It gave me a new perspective on the world that I’ve never experienced before. As time went on, it allowed me access into conversations that I wouldn’t be able to have face-to-face with certain people. More specifically, poetry has been an exciting way to explore my relationship with emotion and spirituality.
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I’ve been waiting for this opportunity. I’ve been reading and writing and practicing for this moment all my life. Now it’s here, and I just can't believe that I’m about to take it all in.
Be part of it.
Please share your poem links in the comments below.
I’m not a poet, I’m a storyteller. Here are my words:
It would be elegant to begin this presentation – one of my craft – by praising the stories written by Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Babel, or even the unsuspected letters of van Gogh to his brother Theo. However, fate willed that I first embrace a piece of advice and a practice dictated by a departed soul: Brás Cubas.
It is his advice that introductions should be short or delivered in an obscure and truncated manner. It is also his practice to seek arguments from other authors; he cites Stendhal, I seek from his posthumous memoirs.
In truth, I also borrow from the deceased a fearless approach to confessions, that strange practice favored by distance, time, intimacy, or the hope of forgiveness: my stories, all of them without a defined style, daughters of a time when no one has time, almost all crafted and scattered to the winds, were written without method and without owner, only with the inks of astonishment. Forgive me.
In their content, prudent, I fled from known plots and people who pay taxes; imprudent, I forgot that life tries, with all its might, to resemble a well-told story. This post, for example, began to be written with one eye on the unlikely advice from beyond, while the other, foolishly dancing over the waters, went to seek shelter in islands of confessions, presumably real.
And so, fellow writer, hand in hand with the imponderable, hearing voices, pacing steps, and squinting towards those who come into my stories, I extend to you the best welcome I can: writing is good; being read is better.
Best regards,
Vitor Bertini
*Brás Cubas is the name of the main character in the book The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, a Brazilian writer.
PS: https://bybertini.substack.com
Morning Aug. I occasionally will take part in the haiku prompts from Honeygloom, which does a prompt every day.
My biggest collection, though, is the Words of a Physicist series, of which the first installment was published back in 2021. It's not in print now, but it is available on my substack if you want to take a look - https://theautisticmuse.substack.com/p/the-words-of-a-physicist-part-1-poem?r=1v3058