Census

Here's how we were counted: firstborn, nay-sayers, veterans, slow-payers, seditionists, convicts, half-breeds, has-beens, the nearly defined dead, all the disenfranchised live. Once everybody had a place among the nameless. Now we can't afford to be anonymous. Consider, they said, the poor, the misfit—consider the woman figuring herself per cent. Consider the P.A. system making a point so intimate I petition not to be anybody's good guess or estimate. I ask to be one: maybe widow-to-be watching the sun diminish brick by brick along the jail wall and also that green pear on its drunken roll out of the executioner's lunch basket. At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber of the digital clock the newsman said:There'll be less work in the new century.