Have you ever had a pair of pants?

Have you ever had a pair of pants?

Underpants that is

A pair that don’t wear out at all

But keep their youthful looks, endure

For ten or fifteen years or more

As if they drank the elixir of youth

From where we need not know the truth

But as other pants have come and gone

These veteran pair of drawers

Less often in the drawer

More often laundering or on

Hauled out over and again

For holidays and curry nights

They’re not the ones that cost the most

But stuck around through thick and thin

And never shrink or stretch or itch

Or lose their bow or drop a stitch

How they long for a week off

Like the purple pair who languish 

And that scratchy web of nylon thongs

For frequent outings how they long

You’re not who they want you to be

Probing where they don’t belong

Those big pairs who heckle you

THEY’RE NOT YOUR REAL FRIENDS.

On this pair you have relied

And perhaps taken for granted too

As they’ve stood by you at every stage

Delaying their own retirement age

To serve you like a second skin

Remaining smooth as you have wrinkled

Never interrupting while you tinkled

And keeping secret what they know

You wore them two times in a row

That day you had a problem

And trotted home early with ‘migraine’

How they come up clean as new

That pair of pants were made for you