I read two verses by Al Berto and went to set the sea on fire.
Led by the drunkenness of nocturnal herbs,
I buried my heart in some dune,
crushed by the immense tenderness
that the other creatures poured upon the moon.
Ah, I also longed for your body...
to untangle the lava of sorrows,
signs of love.

Stereophonic love, pulsing.
You, a nameless sweetness —
your flattened warmth lies south
of my body’s sacred meridian.
I adore the grace of your breast.

I believe in your lacework love,
so tender, so absurd.

Give me a kiss,
a glass of water,
an act of faith.

Dress my aching chest in beauty,
feed the fire of my coughing fits,
unfasten my trousers
and let me walk barefoot
through the blaze of your tundra.

Unbutton your blouse —
you are my Diana, my Ophelia.
I want to fall asleep inside your oracle.

Let me steal the tangled pendant
dangling at your throat —
my hunger sobs
just to hold it.

I am alive
knowing, at the same time,
that I am dead.

we spend the afternoons
walking down the avenue,
hand in hand —
each step, a soft erosion toward silence,
toward profound solitude.

I ask you without using words:
what is it like
to walk hand in hand with a stranger?
and you look at me
as if you believe
that everything is the opposite
of what it seems.

and in that
there is a devastating peace —
knowing you believe in love,
in your own quiet way,
is the sign
that you were saved.

when I return, I write:
I am dead
knowing, at the same time,
that I am alive.

(I owe you
this unexpected metamorphosis)

suddenly we all died without hearing a word of it
we entered our deepest darkness and never came out again

With a sweep of the sword,
I cut through time, step in, and watch—
Your father sketching in the garden,
Your mother lifeless in the cellar.

To write, one must first think.
Thought cuts like a blade;
It, too, reshapes the world.

But it does not change mine.

All the poems
written have no end
They are stones and roses

Beauty in the shadows
Cold hands, Baudelaire
From your verses, they bloom

What do you think—are we temperance and music?
How do the stars move around our heads?
I seek to unravel this singular mystery of my life.
But, what I know is—I will never stop embracing the idea of ​​a consoling god, even if time devours my bones and my hopes, and you do not come to disturb my stillness and turn me into something else.

Nothing seals my unrest

The carp is hundreds of years old,
so is my story.
We speak the same dialect of time.

I know about the solitude of the night,
what does she knows about the river’s current

my smile,
as if dreaming
a sunflower into verse,
and my mouth, full,
singing.

in my head,
the terrible albatross—

it points to death,
knows the names of the dead by heart,
and swallows my life in a single gulp.

my smile
frees itself,
a child at play,

as if I loved
every heavy bee
but slept among the clouds.

When I wanted to go back home,
I just couldn’t take that final step.
Going back meant traveling the whole world,
diving into the chaos of every city,
wandering deep into the darkest forests,
sinking to the bottom of the ocean,
lost among strange people.

My feet were tired,
and all the junk I’d gathered in life felt so heavy.
And the loneliness—endless.

Going home was impossible.

Scant aegis, insular wasteland
in the infernal roar of the cliffs,
the sea breathes with its black manes.
Searching in the empty wombs of women
for the word of prayer,
the single and vital principle of all things.

It is still earlier than usual,
I hope that death comes with the bees.
The cold morning breeze softens our stone faces.
The uncles of my sweet queen and their troubled vices.
And I knew it all—the echoes of wine,
the sobs in the first skin.
I ask if it is true, if She has found herself.

In the now abandoned room—open sea.

She entered the small red room. He was by the window. She remained still, the geometric matrix of light softening her form as she swayed around her own axis. He ignored her.

Winter Mary – Do you hear that noise? It sounds like people sobbing. Listen now… do you hear it?

Blossom John – I don’t hear anything, Winter. Did you see Magic? She went out the window to the roof a while ago and hasn’t come back yet. Magic!!! Pchi Pchi Pchi…

Winter Mary – She must have gone after the cats – magical smile.

Blossom John – The only cat in her life is me, Winter – brusque and teasing.

They both laughed loudly. Blossom, in the meantime, had turned inward and tried to reach for Winter Mary, but she stepped back into a corner.

Blossom John – What’s wrong? Come on, don’t be like that, you’re my little cat too.

Winter Mary – *******, Blossom…

Blossom John – What!? Did the moon change or something… what’s going on? – he threw himself onto a large, dusty red armchair.

Winter Mary – Nothing. I just don’t like it when you say that.

Blossom John – What? That you’re a cat?

Winter Mary – No, that I’m yours. I don’t belong to anyone or any ******* thing. You should know that by now. – She opened her robe and let it slip slightly off her shoulders.

She stood there, half-naked before Blossom John. Her slender body, ivory-like, was simply beautiful.

Blossom John – And what’s that for? To turn me on?

Winter Mary – No. I don’t believe you can be turned on anymore.

Blossom John – Even if I could, what difference would it make? You can shove all the **** you want inside you, you don’t need me for anything.

Winter Mary – Sometimes you really are a ******* animal. – She tightened the robe around her waist, leaving only one breast exposed, like a moon.

Blossom John suddenly stood up and leaned out the window again.

Blossom John – Come on… Pchi Pchi Pchi!!! Magic, come home.

Winter Mary – Close the **** window, I can’t stop hearing people sobbing, it’s getting on my nerves.

Blossom John – I still don’t hear anything. Maybe it’s coming from the floor. – He lay down and pressed his ear against the wooden boards. – Or maybe it’s just your imagination.

Winter Mary – You’re so ridiculous.

Blossom John got up, smiling.

Blossom John – Hey, let’s go out. It’s Lilac’s birthday today, she’s expecting us at 8 at the Paradise. – He moved closer to her without touching her. – I want you to look beautiful. It’s been a long time since you got beautiful for me.

Winter Mary – Beautiful like a woman or like a *****?

Blossom John – Like the best of ******.

They both smiled. She walked away, raising her ******* high, and locked herself in the bathroom. He turned back to the window.

Winter Mary shouted – Do you think it’ll be cold downtown later?

Blossom John – What!? No. How could it be cold!? Didn’t you hear the ******* news? Today’s the hottest day of the year… maybe of our lives.

Winter Mary – What an exaggeration.

Blossom John – Sometimes you worry me. You’re too distracted, too distant from all the simple things.

Winter Mary – If you loved me, you’d worry less. – She murmured, barely moving her lips, as she drew a thick black line around her eyes.

Blossom John – What did you say?

Winter Mary – I asked what you’re going to wear.

Blossom John – The shirt you gave me on your birthday. Of course.

Winter Mary – I threw it away.

Blossom John – What?

Winter Mary – I threw it away. Along with the lipstick marks it had from the last time you wore it. I think it was last week when you went out with Oom.

Blossom John – You did well. They say that **** is hard to get out of shirts.

Winter Mary – Whose was it, may I ask?

Blossom John – What?

Winter Mary – The lipstick.

Blossom John – Some random girl, nothing important. I don’t even remember her name.

Winter Mary – At least you took her home?

Blossom John – I paid for her cab. Why?

Winter Mary – No woman deserves to be abandoned by you, Blossom.

Blossom John – You’re so dramatic sometimes, love. – He said, smiling.

Winter Mary returned to the room, and Blossom John was already holding Magic gently in his arms.

Blossom John – Look who came home, Winter… look who came back to me.

Winter Mary – You really are a mountain where all women crash.

Blossom John – What? No way, right my little one? – He said to the cat, rubbing his face against hers.

Winter Mary – Are you ready? Weren’t you afraid of being late?

Blossom John – See, little one? They make me leave you here alone. You’ll miss me, won’t you?

Winter Mary – Oh God!!!!

He gently placed the cat on the sofa. The cat purred and curled her head between her paws, the bell on her collar jingling softly. Blossom John stood there for a few seconds, just watching. He felt at peace with it.

Blossom John – Did you give her water and food in her little dish?

Winter Mary – Yes. And poison, lots of poison. But don’t worry, it’s the good kind of poison.

They took a cab, and in less than ten minutes, they were going down the avenue. When they arrived at the party, Lilac was at the door waiting to greet them.

Lilac – Here comes the couple I envy the most. If love took a form, it would undoubtedly be the way you look at Blossom, and vice versa.

Winter Mary – What an exaggeration, darling. I’d say it’s more like the way you look at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

Lilac smiled, showing her teeth stained with red lipstick. Winter Mary kissed her coldly on the cheek.

Winter Mary – Thanks for inviting us.

Only the one
who tastes
the poison
of time
knows,
the death
of the rose.


Almada/99

We talked. We read newspapers. We read old magazines. The banished poets. There's nothing of that left, we said.
I stopped and looked at you. I stripped the darkness of a secret from my body. I am alone. Where are you? One more verse and our life ends. In this very second. I'm going to bed to play statue while sleep devours me.


Lisboa/98

It was winter
and in your mouth sank a body that I adored
It was hell
It was bone
It was smoke
The opaque poison of your old solution
Badly anchored
It was verse
trembling on the ground
your cracked and spiteful days
that deny art
that deny the kiss
a little bird
That ended the poet's life

Almada

It Was from a Morphological Time

I have the idea of a first home,
a worn womb with no number on the door.

There was also a tree, first and singular,
from which Eve plucked the fruit.

A heavy rain poured down on us,
separating our light from our darkness.

Then came the Men, very old,
as if wearing heavy masks
to hide their true age and their true sins.
Precarious in almost everything,
they returned from where they came,
stoking fire for the very pregnant women,
defying the swift advance of the seasons.

And I, facing the sun,
write of good and evil—
and from that moment, I awaken.

(Almada)

Nothing disturbs the surface of the waters
until a dead and unfathomable time
shows us the way home.

You tell me that words build the world,
that cities are made to stimulate encounters,
and that in love, silences have a magical and phenomenological intention.

And I tell you that the days float above death,
that men are born from the barren wombs of solitude
to the solitude of rooms, and to the solitude of coffee shops and streets.

Tell me if I also float above death,
if there is solitude in us,
tell me, if the love that remains in us is only the movement of verses in extinct poems.

10/Almada

The ultimate mutilation of a kiss
my lips did what they knew
they softened the cold temperature of yours
so, kissing you was like dying

94/Almada

I
memorize
your steps
in the rain
and sing
whenever you come near
you
touch my hair
calm my day
and I fall asleep
believing that you love me

Almada

you
as if I spoke with a soft knife
water
or a
kiss
a pure kiss

Almada

In the brightness of death,
the day opens your shoulders,
Wings grow
The roots of the trees pierce deep into your veins
The time of love runs dry
Darkened mouths touch petrified sexes
Pleasures becomes barren and rough
The soul is no longer inside the body
It fills the emptiness of something else

(I speak to you of my experience of writing for what is fleeting)

11/Almada

The wind sings in the cherry trees
So sweet that voice, so pure and human
It whispers your name to wake me up

Almada

The sound of water falls asleep…
and within me, there is a sweet silence…
I dreamed you were a dream…

Almada

My dog died old and one-eyed
Maybe he listened to too much French music
Or smoked too many yellow cigarettes

He didn’t drink, so it wasn’t because of that...

My mother boils eggs in a brass ***
My father writes political manifestos

I’m going to bury the dog in the garden

17/Almada

I fill the darkness with the roar of being,
but from one being to another, it's all so irrelevant.
I am Kafka, and I die as Kafka.

21/Almada

If I could,
I would sleep with Juliet
with Romeo watching


Almada

I spent part of my childhood on a summer vacation.
A handful of old men conspired, unable to remember a year so hot, simmering in the shade of the whitewashed walls of the low houses, smoking, chuckling softly, smoking again.
They waited for the hour to leave the women widowed.

Everything I knew about life at that time remained between me and a lizard.
I spent the whole day with him tied around his neck with a string.
Back and forth, I tugged him when I ran, hoisted him when I climbed trees...
He was such a loyal companion.
By the end of the day, he barely moved, his tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth, and when I realized it, he was dead.
I hated him for that.
How could he be so stupid as to die on me there, in the midst of so much joy?

I buried him near my grandfather’s well, in a small hole, with a heavy stone on top.
An old man who had watched the scene from afar asked me as I walked by—
“So, you killed the poor lizard?”

I have too much blood in my arteries
There are no castles where I come from
Only dark forests with their heavy legacies
The sea leans against the cliff and whistles from the depths, shaking white-haired waves
The sirens go down with the wreck
The pilot’s long pipe goes down too
And they drift by, naked, exposing their marine tattoos
Hmmm!! They pass to the sound of the bell towers
Beasts upon beasts
And that turns me on so much

21/Almada

They killed my dog because he couldn’t read.

He didn’t know how to drive a car or fly a plane.
But he spoke a strange language—his own—not from here.
He didn’t go to beauty salons, restaurants, or church.
In fact, he prayed to a dog god, different from the dog of God of those who killed him.

he was a happy dog. that's why he's dead.
We no longer see happiness as something natural.
We can’t stand anyone less miserable than we are.

And so, on a warm morning,
with nothing worth reading in the newspaper,
without a trial, they killed him.

BAMMM!!!
Three shots to the neck and seven stab wounds to the heart.

He didn't breathe again.

For me, the dead dog didn’t even look like a dog.
(I hesitate to say what it looked like.)

And now I play chess alone, because he couldn’t read...

20/Almada

I want to inhabit you
like a swallow in spring,
I want to dive into your flesh
and sin until there's no salvation left


15/Almada

My Philosophy (If I Have One)
Seek to reveal all the mysteries
that made your existence possible.

You defy all the foundations of reason,
you escape every universal law
that governs the motion of celestial bodies,
the power of alchemy, and the possibility of love.

There is nothing more beautiful in the world than your essence,
the eternal dawn that you are, where I always awaken.

20/Almada

You are a tremor— a micro-arc roaring, fine sand in flight,
while I am your tide— an affection the fire torments, then soothes.
So fierce is your art it grows intimate with man,
drifting in bed as once the blind Thracian Phineus
loved the cold presence of your harpy form.

#Lisboa/18

January’s hours passed me by. Over and over again.
The cold waters won’t be missed.
Miserable souls, dragging their heavy fates, peer through the windows from the depths of the centuries,
weighed down by heaven’s vanity.
A musty and insignificant existence that only answers to the devil.

Almada/99

I live with a cat because I don’t like cats.
This is the only way for me to live invisible.
The only way to have someone look me in the eye
and tell me, to my face, everything I don’t want to hear.

Everything feels like a cold, melancholic afternoon.
Words weigh heavy on my fingers, dragging along,
as if my thoughts were pulling iron horses.

Listen—
I exist only within myself now.
The motion of life does not tempt me;
nothing stirs the wish to be anything else.

I speak from a new territory,
shaped only so that I may fit within it.
To exist is to be here,
between what is written and what is dreamed.

a fire carp
on a shoulder it burns
just skin and scales

An impression of rain lost in the senses,
like something spoken from so far away,
so desperately,
before being itself,
the inner healing we seek in a new language,
the light we want to believe exists to guide us.

Breton’s BLUE tongue
Breton’s blue TONGUE

Like a fantastic harp

- nommer les nuages -

Ships beneath rain-drenched seagulls.
The sea surrenders idleness to the land.

Were you the sweet music of wine
the perfect shape of embrace
and the peace that doesn’t exist           in my mind.

She was a rare bird.
In her hips, she carried music and strange fevers.
She was special, drinking us in with her water-like eyes.
One day, she stripped the polish from her nails,
cut locks of her hair,
opened a book of poetry and said a prayer
(I know that, in that moment, her roots were still bound to the world)
and then, feeling kissed, she fired a shot of pollen at her temple.

The sky lives intensely blue, but life is lukewarm. You can barely feel life in the air we breathe. The hours have a tenderness that is neither good nor bad and new words replace old ones but say the same. The same things are always said throughout life. Imagine that a scream is no different from an echo. The line always goes straight; where it began is where it ends. Mornings are always mornings. Nights are always dark. Silence is always death.

It's Saturday
let's do something really foolish
something that, for a moment—even if just for a second—
makes the world spin the other way.

let's set all the birds free from their cages
teach children to love poetry
or
make the almond trees burst into a storm of blossoms.

When Mahler played the funeral rite,
Oh, the light, like a liturgical hand pulling me from the depths of darkness,
That light, resting upon me, so intense it blinded all my senses.
I rise, yes, an external force lifts me,
And I have never seen so clearly the path that leads me to life.
I have never felt such happiness, knowing that a condemned soul always sleeps alone.

And a light will open your forehead and spread its shroud over your body, from feet to chest, and before the world awakens to love, you already know how sweet love is.

Lonely men are lonely.
So modern are the faces of loneliness today.
We can live the big lie, wish for death, drink wine, and still love someone.
And deep down, the hole never closes, the wound never heals,
and all we are is sand slipping through our fingers.

Lonely men are just lonely.
They have their salty hands in what they have left,
then they return and sleep noisily, as if slaughtering horses.
An axe cutting the nerve of water,
the terrible hours landing like ancient birds,
chronic hunger fracturing the bones of distant objects,
as if trees embraced the mist in tremendous pain.

In ancient times, when the sea was where the land is, and the land was where the sea is.
Love was a kind of dawn that spoke all languages.

Let us reclaim the primordial places of land and sea.
Let us reclaim love in the music of all the cradles of man.

From the tongue of mirrors,
toward the geometry of vines.
The fierce ferment of distant years,
our perpetual paths.

We wither in the whirlwind of days,
virtuous man – ogre man,
no one knows.