Graybeard: A Poem
Oh gray whisker upon my face
Uninvited guest! Hirsute disgrace!
If you numbered but one, I could live with thee
But you promiscuous sluts, you now number infinity!
What man said that a gray beard was distinguished?!
Why, I think that man ought to be extinguished!
Gray hairs! Each one of you I offer a stern reproaching!
Is there anything I can do to stem their encroaching?
Don't I have a bottle of hair dye?
From Halloween long ago? No! Oh, fie!
But shh, from my desk is that the cry of the harpy?
Under papers and books - Yes! - a brown sharpie!
Unsheathed, I admire its glistening tip
And tenderly touch the nib to my upper lip
A gentle stroke and white has gone much darker!
Truly, dear friends, this is a magic marker!
Upon my visage I apply trusty implement
filling grey spots on chin, cheek, dimple, neck.
It works like a charm, but oh, what is this?
Oh the color, the color, why it's slightly amiss!
My beard is more auburn, more reddish than brown
And now these dark blemishes produce a sad frown.
There's but one thing to do, and I'm not afraid
The rest of my hair this color brown must be made.
So I must color my beard, eyebrows, each eyelash
Even the hair on my head, and retouch my mustache.
This takes some time, but I'm not done yet
The hairs on my arm must get this treatment.
And even my legs I color hair by hair
I'm a stickler for detail and it doesn't stop there!
Why my pale white chest, with only a wispy straggler
Is now a dense brown forest worthy of Marvin Haggler.
Done, I look at myself with new hair and beard
And can't help but think that I look very weird.
But there's no time, I must be at work in a half hour!
And oh no! I haven't yet taken my shower!
Does marker run? Is this indelible ink?
I've not time to test, no time to think!
I hop straight into the shower's warm rain
And glance down to see...brown water in the drain!
The color runs off me with great alacrity
All that work for nothing, frankly it bothers me.
But there's a lesson in this, I note with tone wry
You can't stop time - at least not without hair dye.
posted by Sheridan Dupre @ 10:22 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You crazy bastard, Sheridan.
I experimented with some facial topiary fairly recently. Of the "Viva Zapata!" variety. I have only just elected to remove it for awhile. When I first cultivated it after experimenting very briefly with the same thing over twenty years ago, I was alarmed to see a shocking amount of 'white'.
My hair has not yet gone grey, but my beard rather dismally resembles something Gandalf might sport. Quite unsettling. It was if the regular act of shaving itself had accelerated the aging process.
Anyway. I liked your somewhat bizarre poem.
Worry - by all means - when your pubes begin to exhibit signs of greying.
the prosody in this line is particularly nice:
Unsheathed, I admire its glistening tip
At first it appears to be a grammatical error on the speaker's part -- a dangling modifier. On closer look, though, the speaker is describing himself, and not the sharpie, as "unsheathed."
It's also very homo erotic.
Thanks, IB, for the comments. I'm a seasonal beard grower, and with each autumn the gray proliferates.
Ahhh, the Colonel Speaks. Two points, my desultory co-blogger - the modifier doth dangle indeed; dangling being somehow approriate, I think, for this stanza. But I must resent your homoerotic comment. Isn't that just a bridge too far? Haven't we over homo-eroticized? I mean so called queer readings have made the friendship of Patroklos and Achilles somehow sexual rather than what it was -- simply two soldiers sleeping naked together under the romantic Grecian night, awakening enrapt in each other's arms to see the rosy finger fingers of dawn; they have made AE Housman some sort of identity poet, as if the desire to know a man "more than it suits a man to say" is more than the desire we all have when we're out watching sporting events with our buddies; and more recently they have made the comic stylings of Will and Jack in the sitcom "Will and Grace" something more than merely the witty banter between two single men who love musical theater.
It just plain fails to convince, I think.
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