Blues for Samson

My stylist

calls me darling,

says Hi I’m Dee, and asks what I’d like today, smiling.

My hair back, I tell her, my precious locks,

thick and unruly and glossy as they were

before I was fleeced.

Her laughter

as she switches

the clippers on, brings back that sweet-throated witch’s

who comforted me as only your enemy can

in the days of my strength, when I smote

hip and thigh in a great slaughter.

Her nice eyes

by and by rest

on mine in the mirror. She leans in, letting her breast

brush against me. She knows her middle-aged man;

playing me like some trailer Delilah,

and I feel it rise;

the old blunt

want-instrument

that always and only wanted what it shouldn’t;

Gaza, Timna, my Valley girl

who spilled me in broad daylight. I must have reckoned

the sun shone out of her cunt.

Too long now

bereft of it,

a woman’s hands in my hair, or what’s left of it,

is all I seem to require of love,

and all I’ll spill is a tip, Dee; big as my straitened

circumstances allow,

for Dee, once

my head wasn’t bare

as that cornfield after the foxes I set on fire

rampaged through it, or the orchards and olive groves

I flattened with my slat-armored D9 ’dozer,

but maned like a lion’s.