If you cross Queens Boulevard a

hundred thousand times in a single day

you might get hit by a delivery truck

 

containing a veggie pizza and diet coke

headed to the Super Cut Salon on Austin

Street where Harold the hairdresser theorizes

 

about whether anything can be done in Syria and

Iraq where people lop off heads to get their

points across when they could chop off hair instead

 

and so not bloody the desert floor with human gore,

which makes Harold sore we’re involved in that

part of the world when it was the British and French

 

that caused the split ends by cutting up the Ottoman

Empire into fake countries after World War One,

shaving tribesmen from their local regions, coloring

 

opinion against the new rulers, adding layers of

problems, unneeded texture to an already difficult

do that if England and France had not restyled would

 

have been better for us because it’s all tangled up

over there.