"Shaving"

It has to happen once a week for now.

Watching the reminisce of what could be

the scruff of a sea captain braving the fist

of Poseidon to capture beasts of a bay,

desolated to white skin by razors passing by.

Perhaps, my ancestry fades away when I do.

A brooding Viking who invaded Ireland, bandages

Around wrist, gripped tightly to a make-shift axe,

and a round leather shield across his heavy built back,

wondering what lies past the glaciers and icy fog.

Or maybe a fierce pirate captain, who calls

crowds to taverns to tell tales of plunders

and being marooned on a Caribbean island,

surviving off what he captures with his bare hands,

and how he hunted monsters hidden within

ancient jungle ruins of bronze colored stones.

Young, misfit New World settler, friend of the Natives,

who writes stories and poems by the fire pit of a tribe

he visits often, to understand God in a sense not know

to his kind, smoking tobacco with so called savages

and engaging in legends of creatures that God hides away.

Letting all of it fall down a silver drain, into pipes that

lead to larger pipes that lead far away from my face

into some great, blue unknown and leaving me there

rubbing callused palms against a slightly less-callused face.

— Alex Hawkins