POETRY: Trichotillomania

Foreword

Trichotillomania is the act of compulsively pulling out hair, and it's something that I do. I don't have it badly, mind. Sufferers that have it worse often pluck until they're bald. But I do have it. My left index-finger has a small nub of hardened skin from where I pinch at hair - facial hair in particular. I didn't realise for a long while that I was doing it, or that it was so unusual a thing to do. When I'm asked about it, I can never quite put to words the spine-numbing sense of desperation that comes with seeing or feeling a hair that needs to be plucked. It isn't just habbit, but a compulsion that can be really distracting. That's what I wanted to get across in this poem: how each plucking begins as something idle, done without any consciousness to it, then gradually becomes an uncomfortable obsession that will only be sedated when the hair is plucked. I thought it was suitably weird enough to write a poem about!


Trichotillomania

Pluck the ruddy brown facial hair
from my chin, dismantling biology:
these easily removed attributes, their
itchy linger, their idle restlessicity.
Apparently, the body does this when it’s bored,
But just how bored can a body be?

So without thinking I unroot my hair.
Thumbnail denting into my finger tip,
the only thing that wakes me from my reverie
is the dull pinch of the crossfire,
which draws my eye to the lonely strand
that falls into the palm of my sweaty hand.