The girl’s dreadlocked hair looks like the shower spray it has never seen;

shooting out of the spicket of scalp.

Her left armpit hair spells out the letters, F and U;

I guess the other two letters are under her right.

She asks for spare change, plays three chords on her guitar, sings a song I have never heard before. I think she has wasted her life, let it go down the drain.

She could really make something of herself, if she just cleaned up a bit

And, every time I spread the foam and shave, I look closely to see what I might have cut off

that now moves in circles towards the grate that will separate us, where I picture it riding the shit like a ship.

All the hair I sheer, all the DNA of me that rides in the sewers, surfing that internet,

shouldn’t it by now have evolved to some newer, better me?

But I stand naked in the spray of chlorinated clarity staring into thousands of pores,

and follicles, hoping to see a daisy push through,

which can be a weed,

but seeing instead a Monet, or is it a Manet? When it doesn’t matter because the woman in the steamed mirror, waiting for me to get out of the shower so we can talk is someone I have never seen before. So I dress in the dark, already feeling the prickles of hair under my arms that wait for me to send them too, down the drain.

(2008)