10 Years ago on Word of the Month Poetry Challenge

Hi everyone,

Last night I was pulling my notes together for a poetry workshop I’m doing today at The Library Center in Springfield. One of my prompts will be seeking inspiration from a single word and I was reading back through some of the poems I’ve written over these past fifteen years for the monthly challenge.

I ran across my poem from June, 2014. The word for June that year was GROW. And here is my poem. Believe me, what was true then is all the more so these days.

Things that Grow

My hair is growing more perverse,
Week to week from bad to worse
With tricks that seem, if not malicious,
At the very least capricious.
It stuffs my ears with tufts of hair
Like rabbits lost a fight in there.
Why do I need a third brow?
Never had one, got one now.
Elsewhere my hair aspires
To bristle from my nose like briars.
Whiskers that for years behaved
Defy my razor when they’re shaved.
My neck’s a lunar battle site
Where spiky aliens sprout at night. 
My head, you ask, perchance to grin?
My hair there -- of course -- grows thin. 
What once was brown and lushly pated
Perverse reverse has decimated.
Of those still charged to hide the dome,
None remembers cream and comb. 
These ghostly stragglers soldier on,
Doomed to wisp away anon.

(c) 2014 David L. Harrison, all rights reserved