Middle-Class Lad with a Working-Class Dad

You don’t speak like the rest of us,
he said. None of us are posh.
I could have said that for a class warrior
he was awfully keen to not be blue collar,
even though the colour of his boiler suit
was hardly white as office walls.
But dad was always caught between
a sneering self-regard and loathing of
the rich, or anyone he deemed as such.
The kids that played outside were “skin rats”,
worth only the exterminator’s vats
of killing gas and ziplock bags.
But me? I’m posh, apparently,
which in his narrow, self-deceiving way
was just a little code for gay.
Something to say that justified
a turning from the ugly truth.
A middle-class lad with a white-collar dad,
who works but isn’t working class.
A little better than a fairy and a snob.