As one of the blue-jacketed workers
As a defiant student
As a child of poverty
Who never had a bicycle to ride to the Sorbonne

I repudiate your vivid red flags
And your graduate-school keyboard revolution
And your catalogue of cliches’ and cant
And your crawling housefly symbolism

As one of the blue-jacketet workers
As a defiant student
After an all-night shift in the plastics factory
I like my cuppa Earl Grey tea in my bleeding hands

Someday I’ll have a bourgeois balcony
And from it look down on your stereotypes