He’s standing amongst the piled offcuts  
of unfashionable white-boy dreads
 and the remains of nerdy fuzz-ball heads.

Nick the barber is chewing haircut fat
while he clear-fells my sweaty neck.
‘So, a writer huh – what you write? Books?’

Chuckling, he starts gently nuzzling up
nice and close, under my left ear lobe
with long sweeping  carves of his cut-throat razor.

‘You write about yourself do you?’
He theatrically wave the blade
threateningly close to my exposed piggy’s throat.

‘You know’ He bares his big square teeth,
‘If I wrote, I’d write stuff about me.
Make myself famous and all that.’

I want to roll my eyes and ask him what he’s done
among the chit-chat of his barbershop life
to warrant an extensive autobiography.

But f*** it - I’m the sad, sneaky bastard
pinching a poem from his saccharine persona
having spent the last two weeks in foul drunken coma.