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)

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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