Words Making Love

I can very well get on this scooter to get away from you like someone who escapes from boredom and ends up in China but nights exist even in Mandarin. you never thought about making a name for yourself around the world but the world makes a name for itself inside of you and it’s not always round. we used to eat fire in the field spoil apples against the walls that kept us away from each other we had orchards growing in our throats and we wanted to lick the stars they looked as sweet as golden blackberries. when grandma died, I was quick to understand that childhood would be the only place of peace. now I talk with imaginary scooters I'm miles away from my grandfather's field I'm a digital fruit who tastes like blood. I'm going to buy a scooter, rush to my grandfather’s field and live there forever.

one day, we will take revenge on the ones who hurt us even if that means an inflection of freedom we'll breathe a slow, limpid scent that expands through bowls of obsession. this is the only time of the year that we know, the sights are flooded with spasms and withdrawal. we know that we have to leave November one day even if that means that we need to create something bigger than us even if we need to stop sleeping and forget the fresh meat only open our legs for the vertebra of the night. the long sleep will arrive lightly, resting on the wounds, sucking the essence and to be or not to be becomes always a matter of perspective.

I wanted to show you all the thesis I wrote about fear, with cold names and wild silences. It's time for a change and we have to leave. I keep the pages sweating just to warm you up. from here, I see your name of earth germinating into the dream’s womb hence the song arrives salty and eternity is exercised in an auditorium. if it is worth abandoning what we have created in fixed logic, in imperfect heat? perhaps. we crawl into the illusion of other bodies, sinking through the center of other people's conversations where we think we show ourselves but we only run away from us. What is it like not to be here, if when I'm not here I do not know myself? abandon the platinum rhetoric for a greater illusion. leave me with my thesis, after all, my extroversion can exist independently.

We met in Judaberg on a steep night. Snow tingled our voices. The melancholic appetite of the island immediately brought you closer to my body. Despite the friendly smiles, we shared the same fascination with war. European tales burned with vodka boiled the blood until dawn. The 4th of July is the day when Sigismund II annexed Lithuania to Poland. In the twentieth century your family was deported to Siberia. The North Sea scraped our words, while the snow crushed us in the oblivion of the island. I knew I could share with you my sovereign debt, my republican identity, the absence of sleep, fear and existentialism. We arrange to meet somewhere between the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, around August. I got on the plane. You came by bus. When we arrived there southern Europe no longer interested you because you were dazzled by the conflicts in Lebanon.

if trees melt into the tarmac and the fields fear the cars that never touch them it’s because the sky is a liquid mirage forgotten over the lives of other people that are piercing my voice. it’s when I let my gaze go violently off the road against my thoughts that i long for the life of electricity pylons. give me the shadow of movement and the nomadic yearning, the peace of knowing that all conflict is permanent.  give me all the portuguese landscapes you’ve got i’m in need of a self portrait of sea and mountains. i’m in need of the sun to light up my dizziness like an unashamed cloud growing over the reflection of my fingers. let the bus be driven deep into the atlantic winter we call home

The Fridays disappear on the table. then reappear in summer Meanwhile we ride a bicycle until the meaning of things but the tours are on Sundays. Fridays touch my skin Lightly And appear attached to self-love. sad Fridays Crawl by the end of the afternoon promising relief ensuring love and rest, hope as deep as the sewers. On Friday I write my name on the saddle of your bike This might be the weekend in which you call me. for years every day has been a Friday.

this is a village with more than ten million inhabitants cars and people and bicycles in perpetual chaos. it is certainly a village because people have dirty hands and expectations of survival by their own cultivation of inner peace. Neon lives constantly cross roads towards contemporary cathedrals: the buildings that try to reach God or are the owners of the buildings  gods without cause? a global ghost passes through me, full of nomadic violence. we exchange polluted breaths. the other side of the world  is the same as the other side of the world.

she was all porcelain, expensive flowers and a young fragrance made from illegal casino money. she was all juicy strawberries between the legs Korean heart-shaped cakes cappuccinos worthy of Instagram posts. almond eyes during Easter time the one in which you want to eat the body and drink the blood. had a noble height and a free hair. had tears of pearls wishes in the form of diamonds. he wanted someone real, She wanted a Portuguese prince. with a bearded intellect. he wanted to read Lu Xun, she wanted to have clams by the seaside. he returned to his village in northern Portugal, she committed the most elegant suicide, leaving the Chanel earrings on the hanging corpse at the dining room.

You’ll feel better. in fact, if you come to work every day wearing a tie, you do your job better. if every night you choose a shirt It's because you know that the day after exists and if you wear a blazer, it's because anguish is something you can absolutely distract with schedules and alarm clocks meeting reports, client management, marketing strategies if every day all the days are days of work You do not scream anymore, it doesn’t hurt anymore. you don’t feel, you don’t lie if every day the traffic, everyday the tiredness, everyday the kindergarten and the bills to pay if every day, all the days in one day and then it ends.

of herself to herself with words replacing the veins, the city gravitates in the sensitive fragments of verbs. a night movement lives on the highest floors of solitude. the great city rushes in the convocation of men that are lost and found in the same space. the hot age of the earth dies in my hands as I pass this sad bridge which will connect you with Setúbal. you could not pay the houses I sell not even if you double your existence. the shingles linger in my eyes remembers the crackling sound of your presence. I love to laugh today. English Version first appeared at Spittoon Collective Spittoon Collective

I need seven nights, eight days to find me, write several outputs, shred time admire the open music of the trees, the mythological work of the poem. awaken the inner violins that take care of the streets I bring your name burned in my arms, a poisoned mirror in my throat. deviating snakes from borders that separate us I retreat like a convalescent animal the cliffs you bring to your shoulders, oh, the precipices that bend over your name. a lightning factory explodes at sea speed nobody knows anything about the moon that lives on your nerves. every night, every day that I find your body will be the space itself in the sleeping body near the neck the primitive mornings where everything disappears without a trace. English Version first appeared at Spittoon Collective Spittoon Collective

They call it The Center of the Universe but I do not see stars, in fact, little is seen in the days of June. in addition to the intermittent gray earthquake over these foreign heads, wudaokou is a daily earthquake. when the hours wake me up I do not recognize the prosperous economy. or the millenary culture, I just catch my breath. I burn in the shadows scattered along the street. I search the shallow dialogues inside me where Chinese sayings are written Where Water Flows, a Channel Will Form  This is how the banks replaced the hutongs and the street vendors came to our phones. The five mouths drink so many dreams That it becomes a perpetual drunkenness with dreamy bikes towards the neck, cars over the arms, carbonized brains in the thorax, gold dragons that spit Taoist foam. in the distance, they shine in the emperor’s pupils, observe the muscle of the breath and play mahjong with our lives. English Version first appeared at  Spittoon Collective

the image of blind clay the more refined movements, and God slips by the birth of the flesh. a female house burns the mouth with the smell of the fingers maintaining the hallucination on legal animal shirt where dementia bursts and the fiber of fear disintegrates. these are the sweet archipelagos who live in our fingers, white pages like chrysanthemums, windy blood in the caudal of the stars, concentric gestures around the word.

I bring the giant questions with me, the ones burning in the weight of speech. From you I wait only the corrupted night, the continuous solitude that goes to the buildings and returns But I believe in your company. How do I believe in the vanity of the sun? life roars on my shoulders while shame is breathing between secrets. Where are you and where have you been? they are miserable caves standing only for logic your presence doesn't make sense because we are actors on an invisible stage do not get lost while returning because the truth is that you have never been here before.

restless fever, desire of artist, wild sea in the fragrance of the ice. a stare on the peripheral victims in the Asian part of my desire. justifiable shadow segments in the convocation of the eyelids, the boredom in the pockets next to the permissive smartphone.

life is ordered as the lean light of the poem, it breaks up into equal pieces: green, blue and white all gray underneath. the buildings that contrast with the soccer stadium the Chinese shops, the signs indicating that Figueira da Foz is more or less in the same direction of my arteries. a bridge suddenly rises between the window and the poem. the cars line up in progress   with on-time inspection and the lights on at night and he life linked to death and death off to rot in a fruit bowl.

there’s a savage light scanning my name slowly going insane within the humid gut of memory. the voice’s space expands until it reaches the unbreathable age of objects. i sit watching the beach how the water dreads coming too close almost touching on questions. my eyelids drain down to the nerves. there is an unbearable coldness in the slide of time  over the moulded plaster of each name, and a feverish place, where intelligence manages to crumble away at all the decipherable traces of life. each name, in the inner stillness of its womb, in the simmered blood of nights, carries an unpronounceable heavy light. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

rough mornings burn away sleep and fever fizzes up the most vertical of words. your finger on my name exerts agonising pressure and a spasm runs through this text while hell is slowly hatching inside my chest like a snake creeping into the unsteady hollows of the hours. sparks fly out of books and the flames urgently heal each less intended breath but there are assignments less sweet than others and there are syllables set to vibrate in the core of the deepest innocence. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

the power of the landscape corrupts the text, it penetrates its frailty. the game of the tactile, of the glowing, of the scenic tension of your name – so tense is it, that it isn’t displayable – but i can always display this photograph, not on walls as in times past, but i can still ingrain it into your subconscious through the feed of your wall on one of those social networks where there’s no place for debate since each person is the dictator of his own reality, which might even be convenient were we able to be solely confronted by that which doesn’t shock us. let me rejoice with the power to see you and the power to know you see me, thus i am an image, i am fleshy matter, i am back and shoulders and eyelids, i exist because light exists. allow me to upload this existence directly into the deepest memory of your libido. it’s probably simpler. words are the business of poets. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

i’ll search for you all over my body, i know you inhabit me, buried somewhere inside my ego. if you aren’t there, you’re in the stars’ entrails and that’s the same, it’s the language of a film you found mediocre because it was abstract, it’s the chromatic spectrum of the grammar you inflict on me, it’s the agitated nerves yelling at the poem and it’s the poem shouting back and the words jerking down through the tendons. i press each letter into the deepest loneliness and the pages suffer the weight of the syllables. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

a few months have gone by since I learned your face by heart a few days have passed since I knew your name, a few hours have gone by since i left your room. from my room to yours time is a sombre passageway floating on the edges of images. i find myself lying on the soft robes of expectation, i find the meanderings of a fetid academicism a soft roaring robe that devours my waiting, that burns through my waiting, though i wait for nothing, in particular, except perhaps more waiting. arteries weakened by the years run through me. the skin of fear slides with me across the room or is it my ideas being flooded by the sampness of thesed cracked walls? in my voice i sense the burden of the furniture and the burden of all  the fingerprints of all the other students who, like me, have used it. in my mouth, i taste the salty memory of you, or the salty memory of what i think you are, of what i’d like you to be, of wthat i’d like me to be together with what i’d like you to ...

Sara F. Costa is a Portuguese poet who has won several literary prizes in Portugal. She has published five books and has a degree in Oriental Languages and Cultures and an MA in Intercultural Studies: Portuguese/Chinese from Minho University, Portugal, and Tianjin Foreign Studies University, China. In 2017, she was an invited author of the International Istanbul Poetry Festival in 2017 and in 2018 she worked with The Script Road-Macau Literary Festivaland the China-European Union Literary Festival in Shanghai and Suzhou. Her works have been translated and featured in Literary Journals and Magazines all across the world from Brazil do China. She is currently living in Beijing and coordinates writing and reading events with a Beijing-based arts collective called Spittoon.