BEGGING BOWL

Ich schreie um eine Kleinigkeit,
Die Dichter schreien um mehr.
(Rilke)


I learned to walk awry, squeezed between shades,
just to avoid being trampled by their pace,
and do all of my talking without a voice,
begging only among the narrow choice
of what you deny or doesn’t really matter.
Therefore, I beg for the love from the dogs,
and encore from those birds that chatter.
I beg scorn from my flocks of mockers,
and huge silences from a range of mountains.
The space I ask for pace,
and beg breath of the air.
I plead with sleep to set me in rest and then release,
and with rain to quench my thirst (first things first, please).
The heat I expect to come unbearably near,
and death as possibly unfamiliar, quivering with fear.
Of those who don’t hold it, I only ask for faith,
and of will, well, what it may.
With the shadows I may have shed, I beg pardon,
and from light that extra bit to read between the lines.
In the beginning, I hope for itchy feet,
and, in the end, wings would be fit for a king.
Of answers, I beg to differ and riot,
and beg questions to beg so they never go quiet.
When time passes by, I shout, hey guy, slow down!,
but of life all I wish is that we both keep on swirling around.
By the moon, I long for its loony moods,
and, by sun, noon as soon as it's always produced.
Who might so prefer can toss some dough,
for there is always empty room in my begging bowl.
But in the event I fall by accident short of failures,
then I will beg my tongue not to falter and insist
on longing even for things that won't exist:
like coins on my squalid saucer
or discretion from a protesting militant rainbow.
I'll order all Caesars to deliver what belongs to earth's creatures,
and fend myself all fences from off the firmament.
I will have decided by decree that stepmother impossibility
ought no longer to intrude on the likings of me and you.
Fits or overbrims the top of my hat, I shall beg for the very blue
in the sky, and have my bath with it next Saturday,
till I go so light, you won't believe your own eyes
when you see me flying. But never mind.
Thus, as the stock markets thud
together with the shades on the dying day,
it is me again you will see
escaping with the angels from the church frieze,
shitting on the tourists.
Then I will only beg you to mind
you don’t slide.