30 Poems in 30 Days: 7

Hair Do

"I agree with your hairdresser,"
Tamara says, pushing my
dyed brown locks around my face,
the hair faded and
aggressively grey at the roots,

primping me,
making me pout like a middle-aged
trout in the tawny mirror,
trying to get me to forget
that I'm cheating on Gregg,

my hairdresser for 12 years,
who just suffered through
rotator cuff surgery,
and who probably won't be back
in six weeks when

he thinks he will,
no sir,
because everyone says
that surgery is a bitch,
it takes months, not weeks,

to get to the point where
you can lift your arm over
your shoulder
without wanting
to die,

and what hairdresser can work
without lifting his arm
over his shoulder? 
Gregg, nerdy bowhunter
in plaid and khaki,

who said, seven long weeks ago,
"Don't let anyone else 
color your hair
while I'm gone,
because they'll just

mess it up,
I have a system."
So here I am in Tamara's chair,
about to mess it up,
feeling the guilt

like a load of buckshot
at the bottom
of my stomach,
but also the excitement
of an affair,

a fresh beginning,
and Tamara, a cute pixie-sized woman
with wispy golden brown hair
in a shiny layered bob
who reminds me a bit

of Tinkerbell,
agrees with Gregg that I can't
let myself go grey,
not with this skin, no way,
because "it'll just

wash you right out."
Funny, that's what they both say -- it'll
wash me out -- 
and now I can't help myself,
I'm imagining

a horrible tidal wave,
a massive watery wall of grey,
bulling its way in to shore
from the grey sea 
under a grey sky,

under the screams of grey gulls,
a smashing line of grey
with my name on it,
a curling grey horizon
full of tumbling grey bodies

come to wash me away
into the grey of old age, into
the evil grey of geriatric time, into
anonymity and
pre-death oblivion,

so I shudder in the chair,
shiver all over my pale, aging skin,
and say "Do me, Tamara,
do me" -- but not out loud, no,
just in my mind,

like a high whining song, just in
my grey matter, just in the back
of my greying head, "do me,"
I say, "do me do me do me," Tamara,
again and again.