Addressing just the writing part, what if you were to approach the portrait as both internal and external. How you know yourself on one side and how you present yourself to others on the other side. You could make it a shaped poem on a full sheet of paper in the outline of a head and shoulders portrait. It sounds complicated but doing it this way would limit the amount of text you'd have to produce. To give it a bit more life you could also incorporate colours for different parts of the text.