What I Have Not Been To The Few I Loved

What I have not been to the few I loved,
the cost of what I am. Whoever that is.
And the poor boy happy ending
that was supposed to conclude in money
to redeem the aristocratic poverty
of a doomed childhood, scrapped
from the start as slavishly predictable.

I shone for a while, angry and bright
and university was an easy ordeal of guilt
while my mother washed floors in the Uplands,
and I went through culture shock
in my own country to learn that
not everybody lived the way we did
never further than twenty concrete blocks
away from the despair and poverty of home.

Three meals a day and shopping tours
to Europe, with a jaunt to Auschwitz
along the way. My mother would dress up
for three hours to go to the corner-store.
And it was everything I could do
to keep from laughing out loud
at the pygmies of pain in English Honours
who cried their eyes out in the library
because their mothers were social butterflies
and it was the sixties on the West Coast
when no one was suppose to live in vain.

And I remember the little wet doctor’s sons
who used to remind me of who
they thought I was, asking me, at the end
of an advanced Shakespeare seminar,
at the end of a creative writing class,
after a three hour oral exam on Marlowe,
to sell them heroin I didn’t use or deal
to make them feel, like the postcards of Auschwitz
that showed the skulls in the furnaces
and read Arbeit macht frei,
they were slumming with reality, lest
I forget despite how well I did in class,
where I came from. And the difference
was obvious and lasting. So many things
I had to master just to wear a plausible lifemask
into the golden future of the middle class.
How to sit down at a table and eat
with cutlery as if I were doing surgery.
How to relate to the trivializing of the poor,
listening squeamishly to the screening myths
of how the rich suffer at their hands.
How my mother with hands and knees,
cracked like lobsters boiled in bleach
was leeching them dry on welfare.

I broke up with their daughters.
I punished their sons atavistically
and losing my taste for trying to prove
you could find diamonds in the coalbin
of everyone’s ancestry, and I could stand
eye to eye with the stars as well as anyone,
I ran with a wolfpack of ex-cons
who accepted me as a well-educated
one of their own. And through it all
I returned to poetry after every brawl
and threw everybody off my back
to climb a private mountain of my own
while my mother said do
what makes you happy
and went on scrubbing floors.