What is it to be a man?
Is it to be romantic?
Fueling its own nostalgia
With dreams of death in battle
Submitting its body to hard privations
Gaining the curse of martyrdom
Leaving this world in a blind and passionate fashion
In the arms of a consuming mistress
Stupidly jumping off the schlafen berg
Dying on a piano, of an unexpected but inevitable sickness
With a still dripping quill in the left hand
Depicting unbalanced emotions in sheet music
A deforming lens
Aimed at a small fraction of the human catalogue
Or, in the case of our contemporaries
Depicting a long over exploited duality between good and evil
As if the choice was a puzzling dilemma
Attacking a God, killed over three centuries ago
Counter facing the camera you borrowed money to pay for
Implying references to esoteric Delphies
Creating a non existing mystery around oneself
What is it to be a woman?
Being sad on a beach,
A long monologue glorifying impossible loves
Smoking cigarettes with boredom
Enacting its own death in a car accident
Maybe quit it all at 27
Impressing some naive teenagers
Who can’t but think that suffering is deep
Clearly, there must be some other themes
Who please both to mind and body
While petitioning for genius and greatness
Maybe give a listen to Fauré and Bach
To the Greeks, Mill, and ironically, the great Goethe
They are all brilliant men who worked hard
… Still, they can’t be placed above manly affairs
Because, concerning those, no one ever saw nor heard
They remain interesting as photographs
Which depict some of many human features