Self-Portrait As Author And Citizen
 
 
Any phone book or card catalog
shows me my half dozen or more other selves:
some disguised by different middle names,
some taking refuge entirely in initials,
but all betraying the reek of selfhood
that cannot deny its own.  I have written a book
on reincarnation, another on the religious lives
of country music stars, and several
on the enigmas of cellular development.
I can even call myself and ask
when I'll be getting home, and the woman who answers
is my wife without knowing it, a fact more comforting
than it ought to be.  Sometimes I'll chat
with my child or roommate, but it's a thin charade:
I know all my social security numbers when added
would total some prime number, one to its best power,
as I have noted in my treatise on algebraic philosophy.
 
Whenever I vote I stand in the world's shortest line
in a waiting room just off the municipal courtroom,
where a gray-haired woman I've seen somewhere before
asks my name and repeats it to another woman
in a voice loud enough to ruffle the curtains
of the voting booths.  Then she places
a fat black pencil line through each responsible letter
of the name and address I claim.
 
--first published in Second Wind.  Texas Tech University Press, 1990.