Myra

Lately, I resumed furtive and exquisitely painful visits to an electrolysist who happens to share a name with a sadistic child murderer, to permanently lose encroaching embarrassing facial hairs. My reasoning is that I won't have tweezers or mirrors when I retire to the Cook Islands, so I should acheive a permanent solution to menopausal androgenic cosmetics now, before it's too late.

Myra doubted my ability to tolerate the pain of a half-hour session on the upper lip (see the relative sensory size of this area on a homunculus), but I breathed through 30 mins with silence and elan.

Myra

Myra lays me down on her green couch,
She of the smooth legs, white snapped dress,
Botox expression and rootless blonde French twist.

An inspection with an enormous lens
Her perfect blue eye haloed by a punishing light ring,
Her gaze, inescapable,

Alights on the hirsute source of shame.
Speaks in soft elliptics about ‘the problem’,
Her exquisite plan of action

Starting from the outside working in;
Her needle, probes, electrocutes, extracts in an escalating pattern
Of trigeminal sensibility.

“Myra, you’re beautiful”, I’m thinking,
Each stab a blessing and a step closer to perfection.
I breathe in and out, in and out.

Focus on the fluorescent tubes,
Everything washed out, stared through
Each professional second of pain.

With Myra, time stands still,
Music smears, the overhead tube strobes,
Hearttbeat and breath, never so alive

As when I labour through these invisible pinprick tattoos.
Discreet, chilli-hot and sweet, eyes watering,
But no tears.