The Mental Walk-In Closet

Some days you want to dress
Not so much in clothes as in costume
Maybe a pirate costume
Maybe a monkey suit
Maybe you want to change your whole life on the twirl of a thread

This makes you look like Sophie Tucker
This makes you look like James Dean
This makes you look like Daffy Duck
This makes you look like Heidegger as a young man
I know it makes you look old
Heidegger never looked like a young man

This makes you look like Marie Curie
It's that soft radium glow
This makes you look like Janis Joplin on speed
I know, it's a frightening thought

This makes you look like Claude Rains as the Invisible Man
Not only doesn't it show your best profile
It doesn't show any profile at all
Have you got the voice though?
Think Captain Renault in Casablanca

This makes you look like Rahab
This makes you look like Joshua
This makes you look like their illegitimate twins
Are we having an Old Testament day?

This makes you look like Kali
Wait, let's arrange the nest
Good! now it's more Medusa

This makes you look like Abraham Lincoln's running mate
I know, I can't remember the name either
But from History Channel I recollect the face

This makes you look like a troubled amnesiac
This you look like a paraplegic whose smiling countenance inspires us all
This makes you look like a psycho nobody suspects
"He was always the quiet type"
Either that or the third banana on a cop team
This makes you look like Joan Crawford's last thirty years
Let's get away from the stereotype hangers ok?

This makes you look like a Renaissance artisan
This makes you look like a hewer of wood and chopper of water
Chopper? I meant drawer, sorry
What's in this drawer?

This makes you look like death warmed over
Might get you sympathy scaring up change on a streetcorner
Might yield a nomination as best supporting actor
Won't get you sex though

This makes you look like Marlon Brando
Unfortunately late in his career
We're talking the role he played like a fat Truman Capote
What's the diff? You'd have enough money to buy sex
Or an island

This makes you look like St Sebastian
I'd get those arrow wounds looked at

This makes you look like the Coney Island Ferry
How the hell did you get that effect?
This makes you look like the Hubble Telescope
Snap a distant galaxy for me
This makes you look like an animated feature
Why you picked the receding chin I'll never know

This makes you look like a Flying Dutchman
It's a little known fact that one in 50,000 Dutchmen are born with wings
And one in ten of those
Grows into a workable pair
The ones that don't have to be
Surgically removed, otherwise they fester

This makes you look like you haven't a clue
Adding the deerstalker hat doesn't change the impression

This makes you look like a mirror
My guess? It'll make you irresistible
This makes you look like nobody's business
I doubt that'll have the same effect
This makes you look twice before crossing
A safe look but far from bold

This makes you look like the North Star
This makes you look like a master's thesis
This makes you look like a stoplight
This makes you look like a deep dark secret

A pentangle
A cashbox
A flying wingtip
An apple complete with twig
A representative minority
A woodwind section
An artful dodger
A horn of plenty
A Matterhorn
A tea cozy
A girl in a Freudian slip
A bank tower
A decree nisi
A mounted head
An avalanche
A bottomless fund for topless dancers
A four car collision at a five corner intersection
A race to the top
A game with chains and whips
A game with words and cluster bombs
I don't know how you look like all that
But isn't wardrobe and CGI amazing?

That makes you look like a perfect twat
You're right, I am exaggerating
Nothing's perfect in this life
That makes you look like an apple tree
Complete with worms
We may be reaching a point of diminishing returns here
At least insofar as dressing
How's if you slip into your birthday suit?

That makes you look like dynamite
Let's blow this place.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides