Various Dismemberment

A Poem on Haircuts in Poetry today.

Hair cuts are traumatizing experince. Someone so close to your thoughts that way...and with scissors, too.

Here's what bothers me about haircuts. It's the moment when I get off the haircut chair and I remove that awful vinyl robe and I look at the floor and there's this humilated pile of my own fur. Then these total strangers come along and they sweep up that straw-colored phantom limb and I never see that part of my body again. I picture them piling my hair into black plastic trash bags and throwing it out.

I want to ask the shear masters for my hair. Give me that plastic bag and I'll bury my hair in the dirt of a potted plant. Give me hair and I will give it to the birds and they can make golden nests. Give me my hair and I will learn to weave.

Upon the extraction of my wisdom teeth I really wished I had asked for those belated molars. I picture them lying, half submerged in blood and gum on the oral surgeon's steel table next to my unconcious head. I feel like I abandoned those teeth. I know they just gone thrown out. I wish I had gotten them for keepsies. I feel like I owe something that has been inside my body more then that. Or else they were more of bandge.

The drugs I took after the surgery gave me half-awake dreams where I couldn't find my way out of my own body.

And what of my gentleman caller? He is 1,300 miles away. A distance and his actual life, as well as my own, shapes us into different kinds of people. Who you were when you were with me you left here. What do I know of you?

You are in Portland in pieces.

Your hand with their generous reach and spread. You fingers, which are senstive, and taperoff like drops of water. Your fingernails. These perfectly tame ovals that you probably don't might, consuming brittle bones. You upper lip which curls down into this little point, you said was like a turtles mouth. That stange shelled creature of irony inhabiting the sand at the foot of my bed reminds me of you more now. You hair and your height and your enthuisim and my mistrusting a segmented orange. And finally, if I were counting, eighteen days until you come back.

Who will be then? What will we be made of?

Make for me a piano of bone. Make for me something vital and musical