Charlie Brown

He who always tried kicking the football

That Lucy pulled away from his foot

The boy whose comet a tree devoured.

The work of a sad cartoonist

Who portrayed himself even at his worst,

Left by his wife with depression gripping at his neck.

The day Charlie Brown decided to make a living

Getting a job for which he lacked any skills

Exiting the suffocating world of infancy

And ending up in an alley a hundred times worse

A drunken, mediocre writer, forever bald

Spending his nights in front of a page,

Drawing the vivid sweater of he who was his father

A neurotic cartoonist beloved by children

With all alternate lives destroying him

Both deriving, towards the end of the day,

To a demolishing dialogue about psychiatrists,

Treatments, and a need for love

When the jazz ends in a darkened room,

It snows and Charlie Brown lies in bed,

Imagining a happy picture:

a football taking flight in the wind.

Translated by Claudia Rojas

“Charlie Brown” first appeared in the collection Paseantes (Ediciones del Temple, 2009).

 You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.