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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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?”

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

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.

What remains of you is flower-smoke,
A white dream of cold lava and sorrow.

Ashes of your days—
a sleep of birds
in the grey murmur of rain.

What remains is the weary strength of struggle,
Night’s sweat in the scent of the house,
The moan of lovers in love’s first bloom.

And what remains—
the dead script with which I devour you,
and the silence with which I adore you.

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

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.

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

Almada

Strange passion, this one,
of touching the equation of shoulders
and dreaming like a stone-wise man
– I already feel the spherical shapes of time
as if it were too late for us to sing.

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

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.

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

Do not give us the gift of consciousness,
do not save us with morality.

Offer us, instead, freedom —
pure and authentic.
A virtuous night to love,
to make of another body the island that cuts through the ocean,
the new dwelling place of our soul.

Do not offer us treatises,
nor more phrases for convention.

I will cast a kiss that will make the world fertile,
and like a rope, I will pull you —
you who are beside me,
and you who are far from me.

For I must love my neighbor with intensity,
and love even more the one beyond,
even if they are a stranger to me.

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.

When I was the age of a landscape
I used to write letters
And that changed all the noise of solitude

A breeze coming from the sea was still a piece of childhood

Later,
there were so many winters followed by so many silences
I had thousands of days with fever and heat

an impenetrable black light — full of varicose veins —
fell upon my solid shoulders like a raw and symbolic pain,
a call to the sacred, to the memory of a more carnal time, full of guilt,
more imperfect, where breathing was an authentic act,
a formula of instinct, of abandonment or return, perhaps.

I dreamed — a change of scene — I took off my best suit, folded it over my knees,
and entered the forest like an animal inventing itself.

A transparent cat stares at a distant desert with no one there.
A tree burns and screams.
Mad death devours a green fruit.
Stone *******. Stone with *******.
Wreckage of sea and sky—
and the moon did not come.
Cracked earth in the chest-hollow of a beast.
****** footprints everywhere.
Hands grinding the water.
Wine falls as rain,
a flower dissolves in the ash of the day.
Slow surface—
and a bird appears, barely distinguishable.
At last, a stroke that emerged by mistake.

And the water flowed,
folded on the wing,
like one who turns a page of the wind
– and our speech, what was it then?

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

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.)

Golden garden – portals of mist.
The trees upright in beautiful drowsiness.
Pale moon, boundless and restless, stirs the soul...
Naked horse.

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.

Kafka,
Prague is poorly lit.
A guest at a cheap boarding house smokes on the balcony of his room – he contemplates the movement of the Vltava – the river’s dark reverie chills the soul.
A newspaper lies across his lap, the front page reads: How to Be a Good Cockroach.
The man goes back inside; that night, he dreamed.