Fear

Everyone asks me to skip, to tone up and to play football, to run,
to swim and to fly. Fine.

Everyone counsels me to rest, every-
one sends me doctors, looking at me a certain way. What is
happening?

Everyone counsels me to travel, to enter and to
leave, not to travel, to drop dead and not to die.
It doesn't
matter.

Everyone sees the difficulties of my insides surprised
by terrible x-rays. I do not agree.

Everyone picks at my
poetry with inconquerable forks looking, undoubtedly, for a
fly. I am afraid.

I am afraid of everyone, of cold water, of
death. I am like all mortals, undelayable.

Therefore in
these short days I am not going to pay any attention to them,
I am going to open myself up and close myself in with my most
perfidious enemy, Pablo Neruda.



Pablo Neruda