Lattes and Fag Ash

In ways I’m fortunate of course.  
The course of a life can always be worse.  

Yet still the gorge rises to meet  
the carping of the print elite.  
 
As if some cunt in Pimlico  
has ever known quite what it is  
 
to have a Bad Mother.  
The thought is vulgar, This I Know,  
 
and if I was a better man I’d care.  
But slowly I’ve stopped apologising...  
 
And nothing makes me want to retch  
more than the whiff of lattes from  
 
the liberal salons. As if one of them  
was ever forced to eat a fried egg  
 
that had been dumped in the kitchen bin,  
and marinated in fag ash  
 
as Mother made you watch.  
My brother knew that pain.  
 
And I knew too just what it was,  
to love and beg and say sorry  
 
and still be scorned like thrift-shop shit.  
To watch dad watch his wife break down  
 
and explode like a clockwork prostitute.