journal of a writing man
Work in Progress
Saturday afternoon short back and sides
I wait my turn in the barber shop on Lind Road
where a battered and taped radio (who battered it?)
is tuned approximately to a station I do not know,
and where electric trimmers shower short bristled hair
to the floor, each flourish making the speaker buzz.
I sit on a bentwood chair in a patch of sunlight
as if I'm in a single spot, centre of a dim-lit stage,
shadow-filled with movement and with portent.
No-one speaks. If this is play, it is mime, and the stage-craft
does not require the use of vocal chords. Communication is
nodded and gestured. This barber knows only one style;
strangers in this town sometimes feel they've met before.
And I, too, have seen these strangers in many mirrors.
Their names, no, I don't know them, but the faces are familiar,
and the shapes of their heads, all sporting the same
short back and sides with a little off the top.
Outside, the plane trees along the street
have the same sameness about them,
pollarded in a way I used to think cruel.
Now they seem to share a commonality
as anonymous and comradely as the stream
of old men, similarly shorn, walking blink-eyed
from the Lind Road barber shop into the autumn sun.
John Bailey
Somerset, September 17, 2002
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