Contributor's contribution: Bad threads

Check yourself before you check yourself.

M.E. Grey is a British-origin poet based in Brussels.

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To wear a tweed sports jacket
and be understood as affiliating
with a caste of rumpled
ivory tower lecturers
should have been my aesthetic inheritance.
It has been stolen. Stolen by men
in jackets with a check too large
                          a colour too mustard
                          a pocket too many.
Not by their brown shirts
or their black shirts
shall ye know them, but by
their over-bold country attire.

This last decade or two,
to wear a tweed sports jacket
is to be expected not as a
useless, harmless personality about to recite
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
but to be on the verge of declaring
Stop all the boats. Cut down the fucking scum.
Prevent the hordes from landing with a navy gun.

To wear a tweed sports jacket
is to wear large ambition with
a small and ungenerous mind.
These are the bad threads that have over-
run men. I swear,
men ruin menswear.