13 Ways of Saying—

I have white hairs in my beard.

There are white hairs in my beard,

There are, in my beard, hairs that are the color white.

There are, in the beard on my face, hairs that have lost their color.

There are hairs that have traded gold for ivory in the thicket of blonde sprouting from the pores in the skin stretched across the muscle clinging to the bone tendon-strapped into the skeleton housing the organs sustaining the fullness of the empty abstraction called “me.”

Beard hairs near my jaw have succumbed to permafrost. 

Lengths of dying and dead cells rooted in my cheeks have already dressed themselves for my funeral. 

White hairs in my beard have I. 

According to some of the hairs on my face, I am no longer as young as I think—if I ever was.

After running her fingers through my beard, my girlfriend says she will not like me when I am Santa Claus. 

The chemical processes granting bronze hues to all the silk strands spinning from my face have begun to fail or at least have become inspired by snow. 

I look in the mirror, rub my beard, discover that it will not be much longer until I can again behold my late father. 

In the hairs of my beard I see the unwinding of everything.