A man glances at his forearm, and by the end of the poem he is thinking about his own funeral. Balachandran V's "Homo sapiens hirsutus", dated Trivandrum, 2016, begins as a comic inventory of the ageing body and ends in one quiet, startling image. The title sets the tone. It mimics the Latin naming of species, and "hirsutus" means hairy, so the speaker files himself in a mock-scientific catalogue as the "wise man" who is mostly noticeable for his hair. He is both observer and specimen, and the humour lets him look at something he might otherwise avoid.
The central idea is that hair works as a clock. It records the speaker's whole life: the first dark growth of adolescence, the white hairs of the present, and the bareness and burning still to come. The poem does not announce this. It moves from one body part to the next, forearm, chest, head, moustache, and lets the pattern build.
Colour is the poem's main structure. "Dark" and "darkness" return again and again: the "dark brown skinned" arm, the "darkness of my brown skin", the hair that was once "dark" and "black", the "dark and exciting places" of youth, the "darkening shadows" of adulthood. Against this stands white, which gradually takes over. The speaker even quibbles over the word ("again white (why grey?)"), as if the exact shade of ageing mattered. The early darkness has a pointed twist: his skin is dark "but not of my mind, hidden, hopefully". The wordplay is ambiguous, but it suggests that whatever shadows lie in the mind, he hopes they stay private even as the body shows its age.
The voice is conversational, and parentheses carry much of the humour. "(ah, not on my head!)" is a rueful aside, and the line about not needing a mirror, "having not much / On the head to comb and pat them down", has a grammatical echo of lost hair: "them" still refers to something that is no longer there. The poem also treats hair as a crowd of individuals ("more hair have turned white", "how black it once were"), as though he had counted them one by one, which suits someone watching each loss.
The moustache stanza is the funniest. He clings to it as "the vestige of my manhood", and the image of "bristling, drooping bicycle handlebars" holds two opposite verbs in one picture, stiff pride and sagging reality. The beard he "dare not grow / For fear of incurring my partner's wrath" turns vanity into a small domestic comedy. Masculine dignity is reduced to a negotiation at home.
Then the tone shifts. "I remember -" is cut off by a dash, and the lines that follow are short and fragmentary: "Hair, growing, dark, / In dark and exciting places". The broken rhythm reads like a memory surfacing, half-embarrassed and half-tender. The poem is in free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre, and line lengths shrink and stretch with the speaker's thoughts. That looseness is deliberate, because the early stanzas read almost like chatty prose and the later ones tighten into something closer to song.
The last two stanzas turn the shadow image around. In youth, hair gathered in "darkening shadows"; now "Shadows lean" and grow "oblong, as the Sun approaches dusk." The lengthening shadow of late afternoon becomes a picture of life's final stretch, and the day stands in for a lifetime without any heavy explanation. The closing lines are the most chilling in the poem: "One day, my precious hair, / Would be the first to catch fire…" The word "precious" is lightly comic, since he has just spent a stanza mourning its loss, but "catch fire" suggests the funeral pyre, and the trailing ellipsis leaves the thought unfinished. Judging by the imagery, the thing he has been fussing over is simply the first part of him to go.
What makes the poem worth reading is this control of tone. Hair, an almost trivial subject, carries a whole life from adolescence to death. The jokes do not hide the fear, and the fear is not allowed to spoil the jokes. The poem shows how people often face mortality: through small, vain, funny details, until one of them suddenly stops being funny.