The Right Sort
No no-chin future men, wide eyes sunken, set apart,
always growing with their hee-hawed back room self-assurance
ever went to my old school.
Inherited wealth set them apart, made up for facial features,
sent them to the same boarding schools that made their fathers,
to compound them in their interest.
At my old school a few young boys, well-scrubbed, warned to be well-spoken,
always watching how they’d be exposed and shamed
were offered guaranteed paid-for attendance.
Money set them apart, lacking hidden behind a hope,
sent for an education more real than what you’ll learn with friends.
My old school placed itself against extremes, between excess, a centre reaching to the top.
The promise was to make a man of me, of us, of them, as brothers.
Learning shared looks of knowing better, with old school ties,
a teenage knot in the middle to bind us all together.
You are the future, lads, they told us — the open secret of our due respect —
Heed us, work hard and nothing can ever deny you that.
No difference was ever personal.
The presumption we’re all the same.
We’re all different the teachers said.
The difference to be the same right sort,
We guarantee you that or we’ll fuck you out.
I fucked off.
I didn’t know it at the time.
It was more than pool halls, booze and fags.
It was more than endless coffees waiting for the day to finish, then start again but never start for me.
How does your life begin when the one way to be is the one way you’re not.
You’re all good men, they say. Nothing can ever take that from you.
Yet that school’s one truth could not hold fast.
And so the question you refused to ask but felt so deep, how much of this is lies,
Is asked by every difference in that school.
Every pushed down, unacknowledged look
The unknown fear that this small world is off, repressed,
Learning difference has no merit in a future ever-the-same,
with manufactured men
taught the always-ways
it always was,
and will always be.
The past of pupils given a future moulded to their shape.
