Dead End Street

It's in big letters And I can't see beyond the sign They talk about messages Well that one is emblazoned on my eyelids Walk forward, stop The end of the line is right where you started Poverty is funny because you don't know you've got it at first Not where I was from Or maybe I just didn't notice I'm not knocking playing in abandoned houses and eating well for the first couple of days of the week then having pasta and ketchup for the rest, it feels fine when you believe you're just not a 'keeping up with the Jones' type Then it creeps in, being judged That bit isn't so easy Plus those judging haven't got a clue There's plenty of weaknesses and failings in their supposed cushy number But why did they all feel sorry for me? I felt sick hearing it - I felt I was never out of earshot "it's a shame for her" Most of them thought they were the bee's knees because they were two parent households But despite the signage and the mantra of "that girl doesn't stand a chance" it didn't really stick and I left the lot of them in the dirt I just kept on going to school, almost out of laziness to be fair and I got enough low paid jobs to know I didn't ever want to be managed by the type of people who believed they were better than someone else by having pennies more in their pay packet There's no dead end streets round here, they are cul de sacs or private roads or access to the village green But I still feel judged and poverty feels tattooed onto your skin, I wonder how many paces away people can tell from Hey, I have dead end street encoded into my DNA. I checked - it's generation after generation. What will I do about it? Wait for society to catch up - it just coincided with my lifetime. I've introduced privilege into the genepool, intelligence was there for hundreds of years to no avail There's more to shed, confidence issues, the right to exist etc. the shame is this coinciding with the end of the world. Dead end street, you can't shake it