Proletarian afternoons

If I didn’t write these words at work

I wouldn’t write at all

My proletarian afternoons

have forced me to the wall

And the bricks of which are plastered 

with these sentences of shame

I am never working hard enough

My poetry to blame

But the shame of being working class

whilst studying in vain

Overtrumps the urge to keep myself

from oversharing pain

And the guilt of being privileged

the fear of dying broke

is eclipsed by all these feelings 

that I crystallize in quotes

I absolve myself of decadence

by preaching to the choir

As a marxist, and a martyr,

or a masochist messiah

All my lowest lows are sober

So I’m always getting higher

I’m my client and supplier

in my lack and my desire

And by the time I’ve spent it all

on figurines, not food

I’ll frustrate my goals of family

mere fantasies for fools

I’d propose to live at disney world

to crucify my child

thus enshrining inability

to ever let it die

And the worries we all carry

not to kill the child within

made us infants in adulthood

Far too lost to ever win