Walking Around (for and with Pablo Neruda)

A comby (van) ride to town past

Mexican buildings with bright 

colored murals. I get off at the main

bus stop where I saw a UFO two years 

ago. Straight to the coffee house, I sit

down outside. I’ve come here so often

a friend painted a portrait of me here;

it looks like he captured my soul.

Most people are calm in this un bourgeois 

town. “Still, it would be lovely, to wave a

cut lily and panic a Notary,

or finish a nun with a left to the ear.”

My craving for revenge at being born has

abated. The world does its thing and I do mine.

After coffee, I walk a couple of blocks to the

new Mercado. Grand Opening yesterday, I

didn’t go, mostly through with fiestas. I have 

a routine and a route that I travel, like all

paraplegics just waiting for revelation. It won’t 

come from a God, I know that now. I find the

meaning of life in strangers’ faces, or pick it up

from the street, lost by some unconscious slob.

Things in themselves are symbolic. There’s a 

secret code that runs through the world. Only

if you look can you see it, and most are too busy

for that. This town is fiesta, when it happens or

not. Everyone’s up for a joke, laugh easily at

not very much, my kind of people. Everyone 

knows life’s joke, the uncertainty. The icons

they carry through the streets in processions 

are imposing. I guess they have to believe in

something…no one tells them otherwise.

They go on this way for centuries. I’m still,

not walking, but very moved inside by their

sufferings and their joys.

Good times, but not the way you think.

Just being on the street delights me, like

an old man sitting on his front porch with 

his shotgun, waiting for nothing in Paradise.