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

Almada

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

To read you, to love you, to make you my art,
In engravings of representation and in poems.
And to pretend that all your kisses and embraces are figs—
Verses stretched out in rows like entwined fig trees, and the kisses within the poems.
Ah, they are summer afternoons.

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.

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


Almada

Rose. The most perfect rose
Stained the snow
Sinking into the grave
I never knew its name
And she never knew
Of my existence
God made her perfect
But that rose. So perfect. Stained the snow where we all walk.

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

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.

You are the sun in the sea wind
the bonze soul of spring
you are the law that moves my blood

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.

it is still too early to laugh
and to cast upon the ground the wing of the absurd forest.
it is still too early to be anything at all.
very ancient dogs cough in the distance
and the stairs creaks funereally,
i enter the library
the books withdraw their roots from the shadows
and prepare their expectant voices
for whatever may come

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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


Almada/99

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

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.

The house with the swing was gray. It had once been yellow, but no one remembers that anymore. The swing remains the same, and the tree that holds it has stretched its roots through the garden for at least five generations.
Today, the house was ripped from the earth. It screamed. The tree, mute from birth, shook its dry leaves in protest.

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.

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.

Our love
On the verge of sinking into the shadow of what I write.
Clear statues, moonlit words,
Bare ships on the bulkheads of kisses,
Howls from the lighthouse guiding us to the salt of ***.
Our tide was brief.

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.

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.

In the streets where whales and other great mammals once dwelled,
Only the towering signs of the summer shows remain.

They call us,
The dead.
Lamenting the sway of entire fields of grain.
They,
With a mantle of countless lives we owe,
Call us.
When we quench the rough throat,
When we lay down the axes,
When we bow and pray,
When we strive and live.

Immolated hands close sunflowers.
The restless sea echoes where pain is most dreadful.
Pain exists and resists the fight we put up against it.
The pain that never sleeps is terrible.
It dances with us all night like a wolf.
Like a pack of wolves.
We hold each other tight to avoid losing ourselves in it.

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.

Your hand reaches the depth of a fruit
You dream the interior of that fruit with the right geometry
And your head falls asleep in the burst of a bee’s examination
And at night, when the stars align by reason,
Your hand once again reaches the depth of that fruit
Of the poem and of ***.

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.

She, petal by petal,
On the ground, in the sky of her mouth, in the breath of the earth.
She was sublime, recited by Virgil or Solon,
In every stanza, a ship crosses me, ablaze, heading to her.
She sleeps, and I, at her feet.

My mistake was so simple
and death so dramatic
thus silence,
that beast,
annihilated through emptiness
everything that was within me.

THEN the morning was a long way to reach you, I wrote with ashes the wounds in music as if god MOVED in the grass.

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.

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

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?”

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.

Morning echoes
Through your body of earth
Carrying the scent of rain

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

We look far ahead, positioning ourselves as we will one day be: unreachable.

Your distant being climbs the great stone shoulders to dance a strange alphabet.

A dream of an arrow slicing through the air, wine dripping from trees into the space between your legs, and we write upon the water the latitude of a new idea and the way a friend’s memory recalls a resinous age.

we speak of love as we once loved: blue windows
of delicate lace, the sound of children playing at the foot of a
sinless bed.

I tell you, I taste a time that whispers it is near… and you kiss me.

He, who climbs the stairs around the stars.
I once heard him sob a song of the earth,
back when animals had not yet invented the final sacrifices,
nor had the night turned the day into its opposite.

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

Ulysses, I walk upon incandescent waters.
I change the course of the melancholic sun.
And the music has many heads, and the wine many *******.
And this is the terrible mathematics, material for dreams.