By Pablo Nerudo Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This is how you made me feel—in this poem by
Pablo Neruda—
And it is not the right way to go down laughing all by myself
Upon the hind end of all of those canals
Without any stilts or fanfares: this is
All I have done—blemished into the promises
Of the caves,
As the stage crafts of the airplanes crashes and all of
It becomes some kind of another bad news:
This is all you have deserved into the hinterlands—spelling out,
That you have left some kind of husband upon the
Playgrounds while the mountains are still glowing—
And I am left playing some kind of ketchup even though
I am not good enough to stay alive- and
The child that I have effected will have to determine itself
Into Shanghai—growing itself into another religion
As if into another five thousand years of
A text adventure of all of those disaffected dreams
As your brown skin awakens upon the palates above
Disney World—kissing its brown tomorrow-
And swearing that it already knows all that it needs
To know—for tomorrow and until all of the yesterdays
Until it is finally young and falling out of its nest—
And safely besides the highway before it can be curated into
A nothing that has to take care of itself.