long lashed men

                —He said, 
                “Please send the electric shaver.
                After I finished my book,
                I promised myself
                To shave
                Every day.”

He was only sixteen
When he met Amiri and Amina
And found home in a movement.

But years after,
They said,
Man, what are you doing here.
At the factory,
Before he finally left
And wrote his working heart a way,
Smashing class and race
Until he found a black intellectual space.

      But shaved men need nothing
      But the bare hands of women
      Who clutch the peacock fans
      That the bare head men once had
      Before they stopped seeing those lines and those curves
      In their own backs,
      Before they got pushed out
      To the chest of a turtle shell 
      Not tickled by the long lashes of a peacock.

Shaved men need something.
Like a fan in their own hands,
When movements have stopped moving
And every story might open
Into another story that opens
Into the same story
That the young people find so boring
But shaved men need stories.

Like he needed those notes
Folded in the folders he folded.
Knowing he needed
As he leaned into that factory machine,
Knowing he needed
As he handled the cold handles
As the machine kept jerking him.

Lost in the movement’s machine,
He recorded what he was told to keep recording,
But found safe space in details
Like an alley full of the color coded minutes
Of each revolution of their long, loud meetings.

      He stopped shaving
      Cause his hair was like a halo
      Above and around the alley of black face.
      
      Then a factory hired the shadow of his halo
      And the movement moved on.

He kept not shaving his way through machines
And then a university on an icy hill
Until he finally sat down with his own story turned into his own book
And read what he had said about his own self,
And felt as full of his colors as any peacock could.

He then knew gray hair would never do,
Saw the halo of a halo of his own face,
And the long lashes of the movements that were still moving,
And learned how to shave
Lushly,
As if he had just discovered that his own hands could love his own face.