I celebrate the virtues and vices
of suburban middle-class people
who overwhelm the refrigerator
and position colorful umbrellas
near the garden that longs for a pool:
for my middle-class brother
this principle of supreme luxury:
what are you and what am I, and we go on deciding
the real truth in this world
The truth of that dream we buy on credit
of not going to the office on Saturday, at last,
and the merciless bosses whom the worker
manufacturers in indivisible granaries
where executioners were always born
and grow up and always multiply.
We, heroes and poor devils,
the feeble, the braggarts, the unfinished,
and capable of everything impossible
as long as it’s not seen or heard,
Don Juans, women and men, who come and go
with the fleeting passage of a runner
or of a shy hotel for travelers.
And we with our small vanities,
our controlled hunger from climbing
and getting as far as everybody else has gotten
because it seems that is the way of the world:
an endless track of champions
and in a corner we, forgotten
maybe because of everybody else,
since they seemed so much like us
until they were robbed of their laurels,
their medals, their tittles, their names.
