Walking Around




It happens that I tire of being a man.
It happens that I enter the tailor’s and the cinema
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of beginnings and ash.

The smell of hair salons makes me cry shouting.
I only want a respite of rocks or wool,
I only want to see neither establishments nor gardens,
nor merchants, nor eyeglasses, nor elevators.

It happens that I tire of my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
It happens that I tire of being a man.

Nevertheless it would be delicious
to frighten a notary with a cut lily
or to kill a monk with a blow to the ear.
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with a green knife
and crying out until dying of cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the darkness,
vacillating, extended, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the wet stone walls of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want to for my many misfortunes.
I don’t want to continue in root and tomb,
alone underground, in a bodega of the dead,
stiff with cold, dying of shame.

Because of this, Monday, this day, burns like oil
when it sees me arrive with my prison face,
and it howls in its passing like a wounded wheel,
leaving steps of hot blood for the night.

And it pushes me in certain corners, in certain humid houses,
in hospitals where bones fly out the window,
in certain shoemakers smelling of vinegar,
in horrifying streets like fissures.

There are sulfur colored birds and grotesque intestines
hanging from doors of houses I hate,
there are false teeth left in a coffee pot,
there are mirrors
that should have cried from shame and shock,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venom, and navels.

I walk by calmly, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetting,
I walk by, I cross offices and orthopedists,
and patios where clothes hang from a wire:
underwear, towels and shirts that cry
slow dirty tears.


Pablo Neruda