Bane of a Beard Cursed

My first real chance at acquiring gainful employment has ended in disaster. I had a telephone interview with two ex-bosses. Instead of plucking each perfect word, ripe from the vine, I murdered them with my tumbling tongue. A snake's slithery fork lashed out as if entranced by self-destructive spells. The beard will have to come off, now. I've been growing it ever since that day in January when everything around us changed—when we shook our lenses to the floor and saw the world through changed eyes. I said I wouldn't cut it until I had a decent interview for a 'real' job. A few weeks prior, I had an interview at a telefundraising firm. The exaggerated pubic hair glued to my face, surprisingly, was not an easy deterrent to them offering me the job. That's the day I sold my soul and kept my beard as a battle cry, and today, I will shave it off. With the tiny tendrils, locked, bunched, wrapped like condensation across my jaw, I have survived the last two months. Their follicles record the outward manifestation of inward anticipation—my recent fossil record. Waiting innards grumbling, and hungry for a paycheck, a valid trip the store, a viable motion in the mind. Today, they lose their brethren, the beard, to an intangible sense of hopelessness. The circumstantial evidence is really quite compelling. It is the bane of a beard cursed by rising spirits. And the spirits rise plentiful on winter's edge, back in January, when daylight sun melted snow gobs still strewn, willy-nilly, in people's yards—the city at large. If water must have three states, three forms, and three minds—then why not us, you and me, have skin that, when warmed, evaporates thick as humid tropics back to the sky above?

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