Josh Kleinberg

Implications of an Unkempt Coiffure

Here’s something you never thought about
hair dressers:
they know as little
about your scalp
as you do.

Bulges and motives that
you have not fathomed
—because who shaves their head?
—and who has the time?
Are as foreign to foreigners,
trained though they be
as to you, who are
screwed on

by something you imagine
as fettucini in red sauce
—screwed to, for instance,
your balled socks in red sauce,
foggy you, or chain ladders, you imagine.

“That isn’t entirely true,”
you are interjecting. You awake
into these scenarios sometimes
—like you’d blacked out
at a party in high school
and come to, a family man.
The boy is in another corner
of a large room, talking
to the wife and you
have already said
“that isn’t entirely true:”
that his hair will keep going
long after his breath.
“What, honey?” the wife
will ask. “What?”
And if you have a scrap
of God still left, you
will look up from the paper
and play at surprise,
not say a word.

“Cats do not talk,”
the boy had once said,
you remember in vague shades
of TV-lit blue
“That’s stupid,” he’d said.
And you agreed,
you evil son of a bitch.
Give him this at least,
let his hair keep on.

Three people, roommates,
are throwing a party—
two girls and a guy—
and the girls are talking
about how much they hate
their lives, and the guy
is thinking about how much
he hates his.

Nobody dances self-consciously,
those people have left,
and the roommates have given up
on getting laid tonight.

So the girls are talking about
how much they hate their lives,
and talking also about
cutting their hair.
All of it. Off.
And the guy stops thinking
about how much he hates his life,
and wonders what his roommates
look like naked.

Try this: grow a beard.
Women, try too.
Try to grow a beard that will
seep into floorboards,
and prove to your father
what you’ve needed to prove.

Try to grow a beard
and keep Cuba in mind.
And the length of the beard
can mean anything really:
“how long since you cried,”
“how long since you mattered,”
“how long since your sister
threw away all the razors.”

Try to grow a beard that will
sting your lover’s neck
and if she asks you to shave
(he, if you’re a woman),
you won’t have to love him
(her, if you’re a man)
anymore.

There is a poster on the wall,
Jim Morrison being sexy,
kissing nothing, shirt removed.

There are six candles, four lit.
The television is on,
stuck on black, its silence
like the hum of baking frogs,
and on the bed a girl, her
fingers down her frontside.

There are pictures in a box
underneath the bed,
pictures of the girl and
other girls, long ago.
In the pictures they are happy,
they are kissing nothing, mostly,
they were so much younger then.

But the girl does not remember,
she is grabbing numbly now
at any hairs the razor
may have missed.

Feel yourself pull at the scalp,
follicles popping
free like juicy mosquitoes,
like crooked orange blossoms
in Tamarac autumn.

Feel your fists become fists,
hairs cascading in between,
pushing up against,
avoiding altogether—
and the heft of every one,
the weight like curtains lifting.

Feel yourself
and take inventory:
She loves me not,
and so on, though
it doesn’t matter one way
or the other.