I Want to Say Sorry

I want to say sorry

I want to say sorry

That I grew up somewhere nice

That I had it all there for me

Bedecked in bright clothing

Draped in netting, and plastic rhinestones

Adored by handsome well dressed parents

In public London gardens and art galleries.

And my father privately trying to escape

Memories of Glasgow – chibs, slums and hun bastarts

Trying to paint away that Catholic Papist guilt

In pictures of working men in thick Cubist paint

Sat in his studio drunk off the fumes of turps

And not only that.

I used to sit in his studio

Pretending to paint properly

I must have got drunk off those fumes too

Expelled from ballet aged three

Abolished from the school play

Refusing to continue with the violin

The middle class case of shame

And now continue in the same vein

Back to the slums that my family escaped.

And I live in hope

And I live to fight

And I return to the battlefields

Of my Great great uncle

As he stood in the rubble of Dublin

And smoked his last cigarette and put

His cigarette case into the hands of the boys

About to murder him for fighting the wrong war.

And in resistance to Imperialism

I stand with him as well --

And I want to hand the case over too

And I want the quaking youth

Who carry the guns planted in their hands

Without them ever asking for it

To have the opportunities

I have thrown flagrantly back

Into the face of myself.

And I want to apologise for the articulated vowels

Procured by constant loving corrections

From my steamrolling mother

And the piles of books she brought back and forth

From the library, the tanks of knowledge

On shelves around the home – literary canon-fodder

And I am sorry I mistook these acts of love for oppression

As they were fed brusquely through pursed parent lips

An army Corporal decanting cod liver oil

As you angrily demand your rights

A young, pampered Private.

Running shouting free

Through battlefields of hydrangeas and

Aghast picnicking families on Hampstead Heath

As your Glaswegian father

Shouts out, lobs a bottle at your head

To stop you from running too far

In an act of loving violence

And you tumble

And are scooped up safe in the unique embrace

of your beleaguered Scottish dad.

And I am sorry I cannot give you the same love I had

As I see you there

Sad young man

Flinging down the books I have given you

Whilst I attempt to Enlighten you on your Civil rights

With my white face and rounded vowels

And university education

And I am sorry that I could not save so many

Countless misunderstood

And I am sorry that I am always angry

It’s not at you.

It’s at the world.

And I am sorry that I spat out all of your spoons

But they are suffocating the others.

I want to make them into spades.

I will spend my life making spoons into spades

And saying sorry.