There are greater poets than I,
Who can cross a shimmering bed of leaves
Without a sound.*
Greater writers are there also,
Who stories teach us who we are,
Or who we might have been.
Even though I play defly upon strings
Lesser I am to prodigés and perfectionists.
My music is drawn from a million melodies
already composed.
Perhaps after death (when I decompose),
Will from me new music spring?
My philosophy-talk is good for French cafés
But is but bird talk on the shoulder of a great mind.
I add my dash of joie de vivre to daily cuisine,
But to the great chefs I take off my toque.
My strengths are infused with softness.
I am sensual beyond good sense,
romantic with no cure in sight.
I am a creator, an entrepreneur,
Systems-thinker, problem-solver,
Chief executive of little castles in the sand.
An urbanite, a nature boy,
A basketballer, a tree-climber,
A dreamer, a mystic.
A nomad, an aristocrat.
Both Jew and Gentile,
Wandering west, returning east.
An insatiably curious mind,
but a sorry excuse for a scientist.
A pretend-to-be sportsman,
A wish-I-could-have-been dancer.
Wanting to laugh, but forgetting my jokes.
An aesthete, an epicurean,
A solitary soul and a socialite,
a this and a that,
A mess of contradictions?
Or the equilibrium of all extremes?
Am I a potency for all possibilities
(like an undifferentiated cell?)
Am I the new man for a new age,
made whole by woman?
I am all this, but what does it matter?
In the end, there is only one thing
at which I am beyond compare,
only one hour for my magnificence,
but this is yours, not mine, to divine.