Donegal beard contest?
I can scarcely resist,
coming so soon after
Spielberg’s Lincoln.
And then I discover
a Donegal beard
is also known as
a “chin curtain”,
a name, a notion too
inexplicably tempting.

I Google “beard plugs” and
discover that it’s possible
to surgically transplant hair
from the head or the chest.
There are even beard tattoos,
compensatory trompe l’oeil
for the stubble challenged…

Many of the fragments I share online are excerpted from finished poems, vignettes, sketches. These fragments are far from finished. I’ve doubled back and changed course and reworked and abandoned and resuscitated this “embryonic” poem more times than it’s worth. And still, it’s an orphan. Wrong metaphor?