The Grey Hairs Are Having a Convention
A poem
A poem
The grey hairs are having a convention on my head,
a full-fledged insurrection against the natural order.
They start out as scouts, lone rangers testing the terrain.
But then the reinforcement troops arrive,
an entire platoon parachuting in under cover of night.
Before you know it,
they’ve formed their own separatist republic,
waving tiny white flags of surrender.
Every morning in the mirror is another skirmish lost,
they’re breaching new frontiers, fanning across the scalp.
The comb becomes a topographic map retracing the battle lines.
On bad days, I want to launch a full-scale offensive
hit them when they least expect it.
But the wily renegades have gone guerrilla,
melting into the landscape with their chameleon camouflage.
It’s happened so slowly, this coup,
that I barely noticed the old regimes being overthrown.
One by one, the brown-capped generals have been deposed,
replaced by hoary-headed juntas.
The once-lustrous full-field has thinned to patches of scrubland.
The grey hairs are staking their claim,
a craggy new territory to be mapped and coloured and laughed at,
because what else can you do, really,
but let them have their cantankerous way?
