Are You Happy?

lazymornings asked me this question ... here is my answer - what is yours? Are you happy, or sad, or angry, or afraid. Pick one. Here are the words to this great poem:

ARTE POETICA
By Pablo Neruda
(1904 -- 1973)

Between shadow and space, between trimmings and damsels, endowed with a singular heart and sorrowful dreams, precipitously pallid withered in the brow and with a furious widower's mourning for each day of life, ah, for each invisible water that I drink somnolently and from every sound that I welcome trembling, I have the same absent thirst and the same cold fever, a nascent ear, an indirect anguish, as if thieves or ghosts were coming, and in a shell of fixed and profound expanse, like a humiliated waiter, like a slightly raucous bell, like an old mirror, like the smell of a solitary house where the guests come in at night wildly drunk, and there is a smell of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers - possibly in another even less melancholy way - but the truth is that suddenly the wind that lashes my chest, the nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom, the noise of a day that burns with sacrifice, ask me, mournfully, for what prophecy there is in me, and there is a swarm of objects that call without being answered, and a ceaseless movement, and a bewildered man.


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