For The Poor Young British Male

We were brought up in a council scheme
We had no money we could put to hopes or dreams
Those with loftier ambitions would thumb their nose
Cast aspersions from their ivory towers
Up to their necks in debt and keeping up with the Jones’s
While we had no telephone
Few means to pay our bills
Dirt poor people with integrity and drowning in spirit
Trampled to the ground, spat upon and cast out
Before I knew it I was trapped
Young and male and without wealth
Marginalised beyond the understanding of the black and the gay
Clinging to the bottom of a social ladder
They race to pull from under your feet
“You don’t count boy, go straight to hell
You’ll get no support and no sympathy here”
Golfers and gangsters don’t care for your plight
Their BMWs are somehow more meaningful
Small town people with their tiny minds
Humanity is absent from their ruthlessness and new business interests
But Country Club memberships won’t save their souls
Wouldn’t know the milk of human kindness
If it pissed on their rice bowls
The struggles and the self-doubts they’ll never understand

Alex McGhie
April 2006