I hate getting dressed in the morning—
the monotony of stretching the tighty-whities,
socks, and then the shirt I’ve been growing
over my body for a week, the black jeans
I secretly worry are the only pants that fit;
finally, the shoes, the black New Balance
for my wide feet that my darling son calls
my Unabomber shoes.
He had so many delightful names
for our vulnerabilities: he called the boney
protuberances of his mother’s comely feet
her “man toes.” He called the thinning clump
of hair near my forehead my “Elvis Presley Patch,”
and once, when he was three and his mother was
wracked with pain from Crohn’s Disease, he said,
“Let’s throw the I-don’t-feel-good in the garbage can”—
so poetic, but now the name Unabomber makes tying
the goddamned things at least a little interesting. Maybe
he sensed what my whacked-out Jungian friends call
“the shadow,” the side of me that would love
to send a few special people a bomb in a shoebox.
Fortunately, I’m a techninny and would
most certainly blow myself up in the process
of cramming the dynamite, or C-4, or whatever
into the New Balance shoebox.
Just to be clear: while I find getting dressed
morning in, morning out, a mind-numbing
exercise in meaninglessness, the kind
of absurdity that could drive Sartre
to poison his own hommelette,
I vastly prefer being clothed to running
around naked. I’m sure the rest
of the world appreciates that.
