Persona Poem

I’ve never changed my name,
but there was a day
when a new me blew past the old
as fast as “Dylan” flew by “Zimmerman.”

I sat back from a page
and said to myself, “It took a year
but at last it’s right,”  and then that poem
reached up out of the paper and slapped
a difference on me I could not deny.

Mark of Cain, secret superhero status,
witness protection mask,
luchador camouflage — no.  
Nothing like that.
I looked the same to all but me,
but that poem raised a battle flag

behind my eyes,
that only I could see,
that prodded me then
and prods me still to be
something more than slapdash, 
someone who digs,
someone I was not born to be.

Someone once drafted
under his own name, and then
told he was another man entirely,

so as if in spite of whatever man I truly am,
I live and love and work and fight
as if I was indeed that man.