Poem: Altered-Ego

My swimming coach called me by a different name for something close to two years. It was hard to correct him from the pool – so I never did. I just demonstrated the strokes as best I could when he asked ‘me’ to.

“Everybody watch John”, he’d say. And the kids in the pool would all look around. There was no one called John in the group.

I’d wait a second or…