What Your Shirt Says about You
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
Your shirt says that you stink inside its pits.
The cut may be as classy as a new
Prince undisturbed by later teenage zits,
Or whoring round in adult royal stew,
And may be like Jay Gatsby’s pressed, smoothed shirt
From Savile Row, and still may have a stench
Not quite as smelly as a skunk’s sprayed squirt
But bad enough to make bystanders blench.
Your shirt may be as wrinkled after sex
As Charley’s octogenarian’s face
But who will care? You’ve have shot slimy hex
Inside her. That will be the strange disgrace
And not the rumpled shirtfront. It will say
The truth about you like a donkey’s bray.
~ Phillip Whidden
