Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
Navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.
El olor de las peluquerías me hace llorar a gritos.
Sólo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana,
sólo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines,
ni mercaderías, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.
Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis uñas
y mi pelo y mi sombra.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sin embargo sería delicioso
asustar a un notario con un lirio cortado
o dar muerte a una monja con un golpe de oreja.
Sería bello
ir por las calles con un cuchillo verde
y dando gritos hasta morir de frío
—
Neruda, Walking Around
A good friend of mine is having a tough time finding authenticity and meaning in her new job. She tells me she feels like this poem. The first three stanzas (above) resonate particularly with me. They seem to capture well the feeling of suffocating staleness that I have visited often this year.
“Meh”, we say, but the utterance fails at conveying the weariness of living in our own skins, muted as we are by an oppressive humidity of quotidian process and minutiae. We are starving to unsettle things:
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
