Sonnet

The poet, thinking about how to write
some scene describing plain working class life,
invents Dave, arriving home - tea-time, tired
from a day’s heavy banter - as daylight
licks the backs of houses before pissing
off pubwise to talk about today’s Sun,
or something stupid done by somebody else.

It’s a picture that completely misses
the point, and is built from dishonest choices -
just something to amuse the voyeurs, ranged
along the bookshelves of the middle class,
trying to pick up pointers from the page.
Hard language used to draw safe caricatures.
I’ll leave that to Simon Armitage.