Suburbs by Pablo Neruda

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 for 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 titles, their names.