Exempt
Exceptional
Sitting at home
Around a camp fire
Gay as the men on the wire
Things aren’t straight
Adjustments
Alignments
What the horror meant (?)
The play book from the shops
Meaning a lot
Delusional and grand
Things the dealer’s planned
Smiling at the door
Leaning in some more
For your friend and his good times
All about the wealth the rest of the time.
How can it be?
This is not for me
Streets of sympathy
For the dope dealer
Runaway kids
Hey new News Anchor! That’s my Raga Id!
Refinements
Definitions
Remonstrations before the brain
It’s always the (medical) same
___ these things are not for the ethnic in me
Striptease city life
Man without a wife
Judgement all around
*Look what he’s gone and found*

AI Summary

Your poem sketches a life lived at the margins of straightness, class respectability, and cultural belonging, moving through images of campfires, wire-walking men, dealers, runaway kids, and the judgement of a city that never quite knows what to do with someone like you. It captures the tension between being “exceptional” and being excluded, between refinement and remonstration, between the ethnic self and the expectations of a world that polices desire, masculinity, and success. The voice is weary but sharp, watching the theatre of city life — dealers, anchors, striptease nights, medical sameness — and recognising how easily society turns a person into a spectacle. Beneath the clipped lines is a quiet protest: this life, this judgement, this script was never written for me.