I’m the son of those who fought on the 25th of April 1974
so that I might stay at home, bored, writing
about what I’ll never be.
I’m not heroic except perhaps in my own style.
I’m a tragi-comic, a tremendous sensationalist,
I can be bought on every badly lit street corner
in this city of fluorescent vortexes which didn’t see me born.
I’m ideologically marxist, although I've never read Das Kapital,
although all the trousers I take off in exchange for kindness
cost more than an average night of pleasure.
I’m not like Janus, but I do have a mask of many faces,
for the pure amusement of misleading whoever lies next to me
occasionally on a bed.
And sometimes all this makes me shed tears as easily
flaunted as glittering diamonds about the necks
of young women never as beautiful as me. But beauty is difficult.
I’m like Echo who was the first unhappy enough to suffer anorexia
for love.
Sappho was wrong. No one will think of me in the future.
I’m a ripe apple fallen far from the tree.
Still biteable though.
The only way in to my heart is in through the centre
of my mouth. And, naturally, I’m sexually ambiguous.
There are too many, men and women, sitting waiting,
I’d rather that one or other knew they held the reins of my soul.
I’m the dark side of myself and it shines incomparably
brighter than a summer's day.
The loneliness of my love is an erotic mechanics
reproducing in twenty nine spasms the celestial death.
My back is scarred and I’m proud of it.
I’ve invested myself in it with sharp black painted nails.
I’m my own Basilisk when I look in the mirror,
when I breathe in a line on the mirror as natural as
a tree. I’ve never felt special though.
I’m the half of the pomegranate eaten by Persephone,
i.e. a field where only black petal flowers grow.
I don’t look for anything different when I go out.
Nevertheless, I wish for someone capable of
alleviating the momentous tragedy of my dream.
Like Alexander the Great I made the mistake
of having contemplated my whole Empire too early.
It is said that he only smiled when Aristotle ceased
to correct his riding posture.
But my smile is wider than Churchill’s, than the Mona Lisa’s.
Almost three thousand years on
no one can ever again teach me the unanimous and democratic
way to rob adolescents of their virginity since, for lack
of anything better, they think themselves the creators of a
poetic word capable of meaning everything.
Am I the only one thinking Lautréamont and Sade wrote
nothing more interesting than Perez Hilton?
I’m nuclear, irregular, pornographic, luminously immoral.
I’m a dull princess, too schizophrenic
to feature on magazine covers. But I am on magazine
covers, appearing always with such mediocrity
that there has never been nor ever will be one like me.
I have no illustrious ancestors. I write the new bible
for goths, vegetarians, professed or unconfessing Kabala
followers, skinny models,
worshippers of fleshed gods, post-modern poets addicted to ecstasy,
stunning actresses in rehab,
red-hot nuns ready to imagine the apparition of Jesus between my legs.
I saw CSS* at the Lux on April 4 2007, my lips pale and still,
like someone wishing to pass as being
too irreverent to be absorbed by the music.
My blood has the colour of this poem and this poem is not a neutral angel.
No one would come with me to Père Lachaise to lay
barely forgotten leaves on the tomb of the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire about whom I’ve heard
many more marvels than the ones he wrote.
I’m the most illogical word processor of my generation,
probably the only one doing it, a pederast relation
of all those who did nothing but adapt
Portugal to the federalism of literary consumption.
Over in Lisbon, over there in Lisbon all I did was dying.
It never crossed my mind that this city, mermaid-like,
would be able to persuade so many to drown in its river's depths.
I’m actually scared to merge with people in the streets of Lisbon.
I don’t know whether I should stop in hell for a beer
or stay there for a while.
Only out of vanity did I name my cat Salomé; she
gave birth to an anonymous stillborn kitten.
I have no other illusion than the one of waking up. Failing that,
I have in me all the erotic dreams in the world.
I’m a bee devouring your honey in orgasmic quantities.
Like the Greeks, I write insignificant sentences such as:
I ran away from her like a cuckoo.
I know of a song that quietens the birds. But
I don’t know how to sing it. That’s fine, I’m too much of
a revolutionary and agitator to be bothered by it.
I’m modern and that's to say I was dead well before I was born.
Rilke must have been thinking of me when he wrote
that every Angel is terrible .