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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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

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 ***.

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


Almada

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Madness  
has all the hours  
Whether it's insatiable hunger or the incision of ***
The unique path from silence to the abyss and back again
Life before life to tarnish the image of a house of a voice of an absent hand. Madness is a garden.

Those days have passed.

And no one remembers us anymore.
Slow steps through the mud,
Bare heads bowed beneath the snow,
Silence bitten into the crust of bread.

The death with which they poisoned us has been forgotten,
No one remembers anymore.
And even if I sang every name,
Even if I unearthed from the ashes
Or pulled from the darkness every frozen face,
Every shattered youth,
Every buried love,
Even if I did all that,
No one would remember us.

(I am a cry against the indifference of time, while I am here I am memory.)

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)

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

To soar above
The shadows of eucalyptus trees
And touch the sky with my toes

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

in my portraits how beautiful my father, my grandfather and my uncle were. how perfect the light was on my mother and grandmother's shoulders. how small our hands were when they intersected each other like wild bodies.

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.

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.