The hairs on his fingers
do not curl anymore
like worms. They, too, are old
and arthritic as the fingers
themselves. Yet, together
they hum steel scissors
about many old heads spewing
stories of their war, their action.
And in his two chair shop-
only one of which is ever used-
he mumbles on in foreign tongues,
somehow coherent to his customers,
of his youth- his hazy past
lost amidst the others' vivid tales.
And as The Chairman croons smoothly
in the background a strobed siren streaks
by and off his front window barber pole
yet beaming the noonday glint of sun
so brightly that he closes his eyes,
momentarily, and is back in his village
during the raids. The sun burns
through his eyelids like an incendiary
fire which lighted his parents' cellar,
where he had hidden, from within
and he recalls the shadows of life
lost inside the brilliant glow
of mid-night bombings: the ash,
the noise, the heat, the used-to-be's,
the stench. In the distance of his brain
it is, now, almost comforting. So
when he goes to the window to draw
his shade it is not out of a fear
that he spurns the light, or the kid
shot and bleeding down the block,
but rather the growing apparitions
of evening crawling across the street,
like rodent remembrances canvassing
for fresh flesh, towards his shop
dwarfing ever-smaller to their scurrying
silent thunder:
and it is this simple act,
now, which unleashes the fires of life
from rock on a far away world
six hundred million years from now:
the complex genetic of beginnings
reborn from the simple psychology
of endings; as if invention,
or fear, or the cosmos,
really knows its own course.