Mope

She spends time alone and it’s Sunday
afternoon and I want to jab two
fingers to my throat, BSL for gutted
or disappointed or argh…

I’m not supposed to still be this in love.
It should have reduced down to just
love by now. Yesterday we had the best
sex we have had since the diagnosis.

It was the day her hair was razored
away, which sounds passive, like
the cancer fairy visited, claimed her hair
and left a beanie under her pillow.

In fact, our fairy was a deaf man covered
in tattoos, he specialises in updos
for brides but this was not his first
shearing.

I stayed back, he told me later,
to let her feel what she feels,
but also, so it hurts me less.
His typical habit is forwards,
camp and as gay as it gets.

I struggled to get out of my chair
in the pub once, and he told me to use
the lips of my labia, demonstrating
their tripod nature through gesture.

My jaw dislocated from my gob
and smacked down into my hand,
i.e. imagine the BSL sign for gobsmacked.
Then picture, seeing as we’re here, disembodied
labial lips, pulling themselves along the pub
carpet, carrying my gob away in their grip,
surprised the Alien franchise hasn’t
tried it.

We did it in the kitchen, not being
in a salon, not having a mirror
meant the two of them could only
communicate through vibration
over scalp, no need to translate
the sensation of hair falling.

With shaved head she seems familiar,
reminds me of the buzzcut queers I’ve known
over the years… her scar more intentional,
eyes huge and stupidly beautiful.

No, I know why I recognise her,
she is giving Imperator Furiosa,
ready to drive a war rig across
a desert for vengeance,
or radiotherapy.

And the sex that nochy, the grasping
sensation of shaved head beneath luppertips,
a release she didn’t know she needed,
now the hair is gone, she can come.

This morning we spotted missed
patches, she charged the clippers
and I ghosted the final strands
away then took a large pair of silver
scissors and trimmed at the top
of her scar, where there is still a tiny scab.
I resisted my primate urge to pick it off.

She comes back downstairs,
she has just had a nap, she rubs the nape
of her neck and smiles. There was no
need to mope, an anagram of poem.