Have you ever noticed Trotsky’s hair? All you may think you know about a person, all you read and the pictures poured over, and the wife solitary in wool, a grandson caught in a brief snare—chin pointed and lips thin and flat like a duck's dipping down into chickweed waters, shy and smirked—none of it tells you as much. It arches over his head like a nation’s flag, thinned at the sides, black and swirled across the lid.

I imagine wearing that way—an angry agent, a child fighting with the bathtub. Perhaps if I kept my intellect in a similar fashion, I would have streaks of white whittled within the core. My life would be more, somehow. Less a hellbent following of orange, less an investment in music in sound in the rikatik pattern of letter in the crisp crumbling of soil in the misplaced faith in humanity (specific humans, actually) in the silent tales of skin or the doubts I have in one person, in my one person.

Courage is only understood next to fear. Trotsky’s hair is bravery blatant against a backdrop of oil, the crickcrack of cogs wrenching a chain through the thin eyelet off the backside of a trawler. The thick strands the shadowed bullweed in the forested shoals, fingers raking currents, sparks instant for a few seconds in the salt of it all.

I once daydreamt daily, each night before sleep, a few minutes new touched inside a self-believing story. Kidnapped by an alien spaceship, invested in the greenropery of jungle, twenty-seven children not all naturally born (their hair twined among my own at night, as we fought for the inches), a school my own, a batrillion dollars wisely invested, a presidency spent spurning the dollar for the righteous, a sea that swept up during tidal wave and took me forever, wrapping in shiny white of oysters and setting my eyes white and wild, my hair like Trotsky’s until I rose up out of the waters and claim.

I could have said clam, but I didn’t. Well.

I spent all day yesterday admiring his hair. It started with a picture from his youth, when one wouldn’t have ever thought him handsome, but I would have. I would have been entranced, I covet men or women who have hair like that, just like I covet sufficient punctuation, or blackberries when I’m walking along a trail in August or September. I wondered idly if I had hair like that whether I might have found love. I probably couldn’t have helped it. Maybe I would’ve had time for manifestos, declarations, and economic analyses too. I would half found belief in the uprising of the foolish, the addicted and indebted, the lulled. I would have found a way to not be quite so foolish, addicted and indebted, lulled and beguiled by the fortunate and hidden, the untold. Hair like that brooks no untold stories.

Hell, Trotsky, you make me think about things with that hair. Damn, Trotsky, young man with a beast of life (and hair), I wish I could have known you. And Tolstoy. He had crappy hair but he was kind of like a god. Or Dostoevsky, who likely had smelly greasy hair and cursed under his breath. He probably had excessive chest hair too, poor man, writer with my own twitching beards. Well, I suppose one can tell I like stories fictional, but honestly, I also like my hair like Trotsky’s, ravening crisp, kempt up above like a pressed mohawk, the punkish kind—wildy paranoid, a tad ridiculous, but still thick, luxurious.

Speaking of my hair, it is full of earth and white today, it is crashed by winter helmets and flat, unclear, not nearly long enough. It was once purple, blue, black, red, green, straight up, shaved, curly, curled, long, gone, greasy, dry. It was once like a sailboat without a mast, before that a slab without anyone lurking behind. I once cried for three days after a haircut (a mullet), and another time, just ripped it off like a beer lid. My hair once came close to yours, Trotsky, but it took three shavings and numerous unbathings, a bleaching, and a job at a library. A night job at a library. I would have kicked your ass at that point in time, Trotsky. Except I was a pacifist twenty-year old and you were very dead.

Trotsky, I have taken to talking to you, and you are dead. But I am willing to bet that somewhere down in the depths of the Mexican soil, your hair is still there, rising up earthquake from a clear white skull without that strange, naïve and excellent brain, but still just brilliant.