The Haircut
Debbie cut my hair today. Mom paid for it, and it always makes me feel like a rotten failure that I have to rely on my mother for haircuts. For all I care it could grow and make children scream or whatever, but I suppose it makes my mom happy to be relied upon for haircuts and frozen dinners from her giant freezer in the shed.
As Debbie was snip-snip-snipping away at my hair I could see flakes of my dandruff snowing all over the strange silky apron she drapes across my front; Debbie is fairly good-looking and I sometimes can’t help having a sneaky peak at her ass, but today I didn’t want to have a sneaky peek because I was embarrassed about my dandruff and who wants to be ogled at by someone wearing a strange silky apron covered with dandruff? . . . And then something funny got stuck in my head. It’s always the same when you get something funny stuck in your head and you know it isn’t the time to be chuckling like a lunatic; Debbie would think I was a nut, just bouncing up and down with the funny thing in my head and her snip-snip-snipping those razor sharp scissors right near my ears. I might end up in the Van Gogh club! ‘‘Oh yes, my ear was severed due to mirth related spasms and a fairly good-looking hairdresser with a nice ass.’’ But the funny thing in my head wouldn’t go away, my body was trembling and I was biting into my lip with tears in my eyes until I became distracted by an aggressive itch on the back of my neck, you know the type, an itch that makes your arms go all jerky before you can tackle it. And then she ran her small electric shaver quite vigorously over exactly where the itch was and I could have moaned with relief. It was over and mom paid her for the haircut. I hung my head in shame. The nice ass slipped away into a world of rain and funny things, and my head felt light and the air from an open window whistled around my ears (thankfully still intact). – Right now, I have forgotten what the funny thing was. It could have been anything. It could have been the dandruff or the thought of having a sneaky peek at her ass. It could have been anything. It could have been my life.
* Bobby Parker is 25, lives in Kidderminster (England) has poems published/accepted in/by Agenda, Obsessed With Pipework, Fire, Iota, Rain Dog, Cauldron, The Coffee House, Curlew, Krax, Weyfarers, Purple Patch and Urban District Writers.
