Some Beards I Know

I have seen the pictures of your face
thundered and thick with storms
while whorls of satellite cloud banks
Churned across your jaw.

Another, older, wears a throne
sat upon his upper lip, gloriously trimmed
with cappuccino foam and bejewelled
by bits of rich tea biscuit.

This face meanwhile purrs for friction
and, like balloons towards static
hot hands are called to it
as it hums and is sung to by wordless lips.

A final childish chin has grown
a rough-plucked, naked chicken’s skin,
which crackles and splutters under thinking fingers,
now the strange rough grass of foreign parts
and no longer the smooth earth of home.