"Catch the morning rays, no matter what!"
7 am, early day.
I line up for a change of pace.
It was the Barber’s—a fine hand that eased a couple-hundred
beasts, every week.
I shut my eyes once inside, and the hour passed
in a fraction of its length.
The hair was gone, so was the half-beard I had—
I paid the usual cheque.
Chefly out, the door closed.
A bell rang, the same one from an-hour ago.
The queue had cleared to a few,
disheveled, descathed, an-hour away
from putting foreign crates into place.
“Is that how you look around, as you go by your day?”
It speaks in lengths, victim to a trap.
Using the same lens for anyone that’d passed—
conducting alien-administrations in human form, on human land.
“It shows in every interaction you’ve had.
No one’s fully human, yet there’s no mixed race.”
I lined up again, the clock rose to eight.
The Sun tended to desperation at last, with warm rays.
At lunch I noticed a cut too-deep, below my left cheek,
another cost to add for the local Barber’s shop.
Then an alien came by, seeking to swindle people
that hide away from their tribes.
This one had more underlying motives, I could tell.
I spent what credit I had to understand this being of some foreign land.