If I Owned A Suit

By Elder Zamora
For Scott Creley

If I owned a suit,
I might have worn it to read this poem.

I might have stayed up late into the night pressing it,
going over every inch with a roller to make
sure that the lint from my aging carpet did no
discredit to the fine Men’s Warehouse Construction.

I might have laid it out on my bed, a flat version of myself on which I
I could overlay different colored shirts and neckties to put together
various two dimensional me’s who could attend functions and drink
cocktails and talk to other people in suits about suit things
like finances and elections and just what the US should do
with that one country with all the problems.

I might have at some point panicked because I would soon realize that
A. I don’t know how to make a necktie, and that
B. I’m nowhere near hip enough or sleazy enough to wear a suit without one.

I might have realized that my one friend who does know how
and who used to make the knots for the rest of us before job
interviews and weddings, my friend Sepehr, lives in North Carolina now,
and he’s married, and he’s got a real job, and he wouldn’t like it
if I called at 2 or 3 to ask for step by step instructions on how to make
a half-Windsor knot. He would instead yell,
and ask me why I even own a suit anyway?

I might have sat up the rest of the night reflecting on that,
why a suit? Why does it matter if a jacket and a pair of trousers match,
and are tailored in such a way that some rich Frenchman or Englishman
or Ralph Lauren or whoever designs the suits they sell at outlets would deem fashionable
and acceptable.

I might have not been able to let that go, so that today
I might have shown up with that suit, all balled up and torn
and doused in kerosene, for a grand statement on what I think of complacency
and fashion and the yoke of societal norms we all wear, and with a cloud
of black smoke this evening would have taken a very different turn.

But I don’t own a suit. Not one.
So instead last night I watched the last season of Battlestar Galactica, and got a good
night’s sleep, and that show is fantastic.

Previously published by Soundings Review