Parallel Lives

You should know I’m not who I am The one who you see living an everyday life Being paid for the job he’s doing Sometimes with pains in his back Or in his knees The triumph of stupidity giving him migraine headaches He who reads the papers and hears the news And drinks with his friends or alone And smokes an old pipe secretly so his wife doesn’t know He who worries about the lives of kids And struggles to write the unwritten I am a man who makes his life far from here Who explores unknown places in the earth Who nips in the bud monstrous hurricanes Who holds a tight leash on flooding rivers and spins energy To light up the night Who reveals through the cosmos the history of creation Who helps find the names for new stars Who takes protons apart like shelling walnuts Entering through quarks To get at matter’s secrets Who can make the dumb speak and deaf hear Tuning in to the world’s cacophony Who appears in the path of barbarian hordes And crushes them Who destroys wild dictators The minute they step away from their thrones And people wake up smiling Who finds the roots of medicines for each disease Who undoes the greenhouse effect Saving the world from global warming And in the evening After conducting a giant orchestra And a chorus of a million children in the Sahara desert That he has caused to blossom with olive trees and oranges Returns to his home To lie only a little bit tired Near the quiet breathing of his beloved wife.