Veronica Revamped

Most of you (readers, curious minds, people wandering every corner of the Web) don’t know, but I had already owned a blog.

However and to be completely honest, I no longer care about it and it’s been months since I erased it (out of frustration, a little rage and maybe, desperation).

I want to rebuild. The same way I’ve been trying to start over in real life.

I’m not asking you to follow me, or even try and understand what the hell am I talking about… But if someone out there is willing to do so, I’ll secretly rejoice.

Anyways, I should just bring the real writing in to this…

I’ll see you around, I suppose.

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A maior parte de vós (leitores, mentes inquisitivas, pessoas deambulando pelos recantos da Internet) não sabem, mas eu já tinha gerido um blog.

No entanto e para ser completamente honesta, não quero saber mais dele e já passaram meses desde que o suprimi (por frustração, um pouco de raiva e talvez, desespero).

Eu quero reconstruir. Da mesma forma que tenho tentado fazer na vida real.

Não estou a pedir a ninguém para me seguir, ou tentar e compreender de que raio estou a falar… Mas se alguém por aí o quiser fazer, vai secretamente alegrar-me.

De qualquer forma, eu devia mesmo era deixar a autêntica escrita aqui…

Vemo-nos por aí, suponho.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Of all the characters in my life
I am the one I have yet to decipher.
I can’t tell if I’m the good guy or the villain.
I see evil, madness and no glory,
Any redeeming qualities just disappear
In the fog of a breath.
The fleeting nature of myself
Leaves me no room to get to know more,
And though I want more,
I have nothing left.
The bad guy remains
And he’s ugly too,
Guess there’s more after all.
One evil never comes on its own.
In the dust of confusing life,
I see nothing.
And yet I stand here,
Mean and scary,
Angry.
The good leaves the building in a flash,
Thunder strikes in the distance.
The storm of myself begins once more.

Dinheiro (ou Money) – É como quiserem

Dinheiro (já cheira a “money”).
Dinheiro é para uns,
Money é para outros.
Perdido na tradução,
O money nunca é para todos.

Dinheiro, dinheiro, dinheiro…
Money, money, money…
Conto moedas (são muitas e das pequenas),
Conto notas (umas aqui e ali, e curiosamente, também das pequenas)
Money nunca vi…
Só em tradução.
E em tradução,
Muito se perde.

Dinheiro, quando é meu, é pouco.
Money só na canção dos Pink Floyd.
Money real só nas mãos dos outros.
E os outros, nós sabemos quem são.
E por alguma razão, têm autoridade sobre o dinheiro e o money.
Mas só nos dão dinheiro.
Notas no início do mês.
(Notas que desaparecem numa manhã ventosa em Lisboa ou no Porto.)
Moedas ao fim do mês.
(Moedas pesam um pouco mais,
Logo não voam tão facilmente.)
Assim é.

Dinheiro.
Cheira a money no ar.
Mas não é meu.
E nunca será meu.
Não será dos meus avós,
Dos meus pais,
Ou dos meus irmãos.

Dinheiro sabe a pouco.
Money must take like honey,
Mas nunca vou saber.

Dinheiro não compra nem arrenda casa,
Não paga viagens de lazer,
Não paga vida.
Só sustenta sobrevivência
E afia os meus caninos,
Que já desejam sangue.

Money buys everything (and everyone).
Money não é para todos,
E não é suposto, não é?
Money alimenta porcos
E engorda. Como ele engorda, este money!

Dinheiro não dá vida,
Mas afia dentes e facas.

Do cansaço da sobrevivência,
Os animais sairão para atacar.
Os dentes e as facas estão afiados.
Os porcos são engordaram o suficiente, não?

Quem quer money, tem de abrir um porquinho ou dois… Não é?
A sobrevivência já cansou demasiado.
Os dentes e as facas estão prontos para cortar.

O cheiro do dinheiro já não sustenta.
Money smells sweeter.
Assim é.
Os porquinhos não precisam dele,
Quem lhes dera precisar!

Cansada de dinheiro.
Dinheiro não me dá futuro.
Dinheiro tira-me anos de vida.
Money dá tudo,
Ainda que os porcos digam que não.

Mostro os dentes, eu que nunca fui feroz,
Agarro na faca e solto um cansado:
Give me my money,
I don’t want to die!

Simple

Sometimes my brain
Seems to realize
The simple beauty of this Earth
Around me
And then I remember
Why I would never dare
To leave this beautiful world behind.

In the Mood For Love

Tease my body with your lonely hands,
Oh king of solitude,
Let not your pride reign you in.
Forsake your senseless obligations,
And the mindless chatter inhabiting your mind.

Tease my nerves with your electric fingers,
Oh king of illumination,
And allow the night to take you into its darkest hour.

All these years of shadowed longings
And deep pretensions,
Mean nothing to my history.
I could have always longed more,
You would have always pretended more.

We strolled through the midnight hours of the morning and the evening,
We smiled quietly when we would have laughed boisterously,
We abandoned the shade in our backs for the light in our imaginations.

Nothing was realer than what we could have had.
And thought we knew not of real,
We understood all that it meant,
Its implications would have been significant.

We chose subtle suffering.
Looking out the window in Winter nights,
Messages whispered into the wind and the trees in our home streets.
We kept all the secrets so well,
We even hid them from ourselves.
Every day was an Autumn morning.
Every night was Winter, chilling and killing our dreams of one another.
Flickers of lamp lights, gambling at our hearts.

The rain wouldn’t come until Spring
And until then we drowned ourselves
In liquor and in false expectations,
In kisses wronged and arms overtaken.
We stole what we didn’t have,
We lived what wasn’t our life.
And somehow that felt real enough.

The red lipstick I always wore faded
In another’s face.
I always waited.
I never let myself go.
I always thought the Winter would become Spring, and then Summer.
It did not.

And though the permanent sadness in me
Occasionally craves your lonely,
I realized you were no king.
Your solitude and illumination
Were a product of my unbearable imagination,
And what I really craved were my own hands on myself.

Love never left my body.
It exuded from me
And it intended to return to me.
But I expelled it away,
Like an ancient curse I feared would haunt me forever,
A curse that tormented me and threatened my descendants,
The fruits of all the love I still guard within me.

There’s still Winter days in my calendar,
And my red lipstick and heart palpitate
At their mere anticipation.
Nonetheless, most shadows have left my way.
And at last, I see what’s real.

Lights flicker outside,
It’s Autumn once more.
But the seasons shall pass as they always have,
And my illusions that negated then have long been erased.

I do crave a kiss.
(Though not your kiss, oh charmed king.)
I released my lips and my heart
To real love.
I long no more.
If I do, someone longs for me, as well.
And I pretend no more.
I suffer no more.

I wait for someone to appear outside my window,
And appear they shall.
Not hiding from anything.
Smiling up at me.
Kissing me through the wind and the trees wavering, and the lamps’ steady light.

(Guilty) Pleasure

Pleasure.
I wonder about this quite often.
I know what it is,
But it always felt like a forbidden secret,
Something I could perhaps afford to miss.

Teach me pleasure
Since I’ve only known it fleetingly.
Teach me pleasure,
As something I also deserve to seek
Ever so unwittingly.

Teach me pleasure,
Since all I know is guilt and shame.
Teach me pleasure,
Because I don’t care about fame
Or anything that’s too obviously a game.

Sometimes I wish I had been born a man
Because all we learn is guilt, shame
Oh, and pain!
And though men chase these feelings relentlessly,
They know nothing about them.
Guilt, shame and pain,
Are all games they desire to play unrelentingly,
While completely unaware of the consequences,
Their soul-obliterating consequences.

Pleasure should be enough.
And that’s why we wish we would know it.
I want to know it
And allow it to entirely wrap up my body,
My soul, all of my spirit.
It’s been hidden from me enough
And hell knows, I’ve hidden from it myself.

Pleasure should flow through all of our lives,
As we all deserve to feel it.
So teach me pleasure,
It tires me not to know it so fully.
It kills me to hide from it.

I’m not looking to play dangerous games,
I’m just looking to take what should be mine.
I don’t want to know only guilt and shame and pain.
I deserve pleasure,
And it will be mine.

Night Walk

Night creeps up to me,
As dogs howl in the distance.
The earth is scalding,
The heart is losing warmth,
And I walk slowly, but unsurely.

There’s only the sound of barking,
And the fleeting buzzing,
And my blood rushing to my brain,
And my thoughts trying to make me insane.

I’m not sure how I came to be here,
But here I am.
The earth is still emanating heat
And my heart is growing colder.
I keep walking though I’m still unsure.

The trees wave peacefully,
White leaves gently saying hello.
The tall grass dances
And I become hypnotized.

My thoughts rage and go,
Though not as violently as they had been.
I know if they ever become fully silent,
I will not be telling their story anymore,
Or I’ll be sleeping as soundly as ever.

The only refuge on lonely Summer nights
Is the imagination.
And she runs wild –
Oh, what a child!
But if dreams make people children,
Let me fall into a deep slumber
And turn back the time.

Sometimes my ideas ease the loneliness,
Sometimes they become obsessions,
Sometimes they fade into black
And I become alone once more.

My heart is as chilled as it can be,
And I long for warmer temperatures.
Scorching times come back to mind,
And they brand my conscience one more time.
I’m alone, but I pretend I won’t be any longer.

The future seems more powerful
But it never appears to arrive.
The present is bland
And I remove myself from it.
The past comes back,
And it always leaves a painful mark.

My imagination sets in
To try and save my wounded heart and brain,
And I wonder if I should allow it to escape me.
But I always do.
Loneliness simply hurts too much.

Night has fully overcome the sky.
And though stars now cover the horizon,
Dogs still howl as solemnly as earlier.
The earth cools and takes a breath,
My heart receives a shot of warm blood,
And I walk back home.

Letter to My Young Poet Self

Dear me,
The tiny poet
Who admired Fernando Pessoa’s
Thousand personas.
Dripping from his feathered brain,
He build a million worlds
In which all of our futures could unfold.

Later me,
And a tiny poet still
Intrigued by Césario Verde’s dualities
Of green and grey,
City walls and country rolled in hay.
Urban life could do little to engulf
The flowers, the trees and the lovely bluff.

Youngling adult,
A poet that grows.
Walt Whitman wandering
A lone supermarket.
Outside, nature blooms
And rugged coasts erode.
Everything changes in the wild,
Even poets occasionally blend in, though ever so mild.

Rough young adult,
Poet in edges crashing.
A Charles Bukowski lost in a liquor store,
Drunk as never before.
All world is women he knows not how to respect,
All world is body he destroys with a shot in a glass.
What changes seem unbearable,
Are the result of not changing at all.

So much poetry, so little life yet,
Oh tiny poet!
Arise from the schadenfreude with Rainer Maria Rilke,
Travel across your loved continent and bring T. S. Eliot in your pocket,
Or venture further into the dark with Edgar Allan Poe.
And don’t dare forget the dear music that spills forth from your beating heart,
And love and despair as Leonard Cohen did,
Or as all poets do indeed.

Taste the journey,
And let its flavor and scent color your writings.
Try not to get to lost from what you love,
But if you do, try to find poetry.
So many things appear true
And so little actually are…
For a poet’s heart, little’s enough.
Just don’t give up searching.
And don’t give up writing.

Il Poema dei Lunatici

Lunatici, tutti voi
But so am I
In everything we must avoid,
We become lunatics.

Out of thirst,
Out of sadness,
Out of madness.
Society so decided
We must be lunatics.

Fever reaches unbearable temperature,
Misery only so will mature
And raving mad we become.
But we were not born in such a way,
We became lunatics, or so they say.

Lunatici, tutti voi!
But don’t mark my words just yet,
We’ve only just met.
And all are details,
The stories tend to be much bigger
Or perhaps that’s how I figure.

We die of irresistible thirst,
Of indescribable sadness,
Of prescribed madness.
We are given the medicine,
They must cure us lunatics.

But lunatics as we are,
We didn’t meet this fate alone.
We didn’t design our lives as such,
We didn’t desire so little or so much,
But now we are lunatics.
Or so they say.

Lunatici, tutti voi.
Silence in an inescapable void.
Everything we tiredly avoid,
And yet we become lunatics.

No water can quench this thirst,
No goodness can salvage this sadness,
No amount of calm can ever soothe this madness.
We will always be lunatics.
Siamo lunatici, tutti noi.

Siamo lunatici,
E saremo sempre così.

Grandfather’s Gun

A gun is hidden behind the bedroom door
And I wonder what’s it for.
I am but a child,
And though imaginations do run wild,
I’m not even sure what in the hell is a gun for.

Is it an air rifle, is it a shotgun?
Curiosities run amock,
Atrocities agonize the mind,
But the brain to that door will always flock.
I’m not even sure what in the hell is that gun for.

I want to hold this gun,
Perhaps because of the danger it unknowingly unlocks,
Perhaps because I am a girl and I won’t get to hold it otherwise.
Oh, it does stand there and it mocks,
I’m not even sure what it is for!

Was it meant for war
Or just for shows of masculinity?
Was it to scare wild creatures
Or to shoot a man dead?
These thoughts wouldn’t occur to a child,
They only arrived now in adulthood
And they haunt me just as well.
Would it be different if I had instead met boyhood?
Would I actually know what it was for?

There is war in my mind
And I’ve never crossed that reality myself.
I’m thankful for the peace I know,
I’m grateful for those willing to face cold violence for me.
I grieve the war that met my grandfather
And the conflicts he fought for all of us.
We know peace even if it feels shattered,
We owe him peace even brokenhearted.
I don’t think I want to know what that gun was for, now.

There’s a war in my mind
And I’m still gathering the burning pieces of memories,
And holding on to the life that still subsists.
The Lord knows how I fight to do this family justice
In time and memory,
In poems and in glory.
No gun can ever shoot these efforts down.
War may not be eternal, but I know neither is peace.
I wonder if I should pick up that gun, regardless.

I now buried my grandfather’s hat
And the gun no longer hides behind the bedroom door.
Does it?
I haven’t gone to look for it in a while.
I’m an no longer a child,
But Lord knows my imaginations still fly wild…
I believe I should let that gun go
And not look for it anymore,
As I won’t have the guts to ever shoot it.

I wish I was stronger, but I am just a poet…
I write prayers now instead,
I write in hopes I will maintain the peace,
But my mind is always at war.
I suppose it’s a war that has been in this family’s blood.
But I’m meant to keep the peace,
It’s the job that’s been assigned to me
And I’ve only known how to do this my entire life.
I can’t just pick up a gun and go about searching war.

We now know peace and owe peace
To my grandfather’s daring.
We must honor that peace,
In time and memory,
In poems and in glory.
I shall leave the gun alone,
Where it always stood,
And wherever it should stand now.

I bid farewell to the curious child,
So I can make peace with my mind.
And for however long it lasts,
I shall write poems.
And I shall pray for our souls.
For war is too unthinkable,
Too unsettling, too indescribable…
And God knows what people have done to keep it off our doorstep,
Let alone our bedroom door.

The Name is Trouble

I am trouble
Because I trouble you
Your mind races with thoughts of me
Your body flashes in hot pangs
In dreams of me
I am trouble
For the trouble I arise in you.

Call me complicated,
Call me crazy,
Call me absolutely fucking insane.
Color me infuriated,
Color me mad,
Color me in shadows profane.

In all the passions I had
I used no guile
I chose to love brave
And in your heart defile
The sadness of your boredom

I am trouble, for you,
Not for myself.
And in all these years,
I began believing such troubles indeed,
I lost myself to the complications,
I gave in to the narratives
And I sank into trouble
That didn’t belong to me.

I have my tricks,
I have my fashions,
I am not that simple either.
But I refuse to believe I’m insincere.
I balance myself
As I can’t rely on anybody else
And I turn to look for my due revere.

Call me complicated,
Or crazy
Or absolutely fucking insane.
I surely wish it was that simple.
Color me in dismay
As I refuse to do as you say.

Color me then, infuriated,
Mad,
And in shadows profane…
In Hell,
I shall be least unbearable.
Color me unbelievable,
I’d sure prefer it that way.

I am trouble, says you,
Entirely disregarding your troubles.
Lest my conjured troubles befall you
Kindly choose to speak to me true.