58 My Homonyms

Reading:

My Homonyms

It downloads on my iPad
Uninvited every morning:
Academia.com. 
‘You have ten new mentions. 
To see your mentions
Click here.’ This takes you on
To their so-called Premium Package:
Only so many pounds each month. 
‘Pay now!’ The rent-seekers’ adage.
I’d rather call it, ‘Academia.con’
They suck-up all the facts of your existence
Then flog them back for a lump of the pension 
You need for your subsistence.

I often wonder about them though.
All those others using my name,
Obscuring my only chance of fame!
I see them in some bright laboratory
Tweaking stem cells, or in a dusty library
Beavering away to find some reference 
In the field of jurisprudence.
And there are plenty of engineers 
Out there among my unknown peers.
Somewhere too there’s a PLJ at work 
On the sociology of morals.
Today there’s another with a paper on corals.
And one from someone who may might well be
Me: a review of ‘A cognitive theory of metaphor.’
But if I did write that, I published it so long before 
I can’t recall what it was about any more.
And there’s that little footnote on ‘Post-modernism
In architectural history’. Was that too ‘yours truly’? 

Well, you could do worse
Than be one of the crowd 
In an electronic Cloud, 
A gnat in a swarm 
Of homonyms 
Who are at least
Doing something 
That endures
However
Slim.

But I’m damned if I’m going
To cough up in perpetuity
Just to satisfy an
Idle curiosity
About which
(If any)
Was
Me!