Sometimes I want to be an English guy

Sometimes I want to be an English guy.
I would wear a leather jacket in any weather.
I would drink warm beer in pubs with sticky floors.
And talk about the weather with sincere hopelessness.
I would listen to The Smiths at four in the morning.
And understand every word Morrissey sang.
Not as poetry, but as a statement of fact
Yes, life is really cruel
I would hate the government
With proper, measured hatred
Without this existential rage
That eats away at me from the inside
They long for pubs, I long for non-existent homelands.
Sometimes I watch documentaries about working-class neighborhoods
and try to imagine what it's like 
to hate Thatcherism, not the universe itself.
To have an enemy in a suit, not in the mirror.
But I'm not an English lad
My pain doesn't fit into pubs and football
My darkness is more complex than London fog
And even my despair is somehow pretentious
With quotes from Plath and hints of Woolf
Sometimes I want to be an English lad
Just so my pain
Finally fit the circumstances
And have a clear name
But we get the pain
We deserve
And mine has an accent
That will never be real

Like everything else.
But I can't.
Even in self-destruction, I won't be simple enough.
My end will be a pretentious performance
For an empty hall
And my last thought will not be pain,
but the realization
that even suicide failed 
it turned out too literary,
too loaded with meaning,
We don't get the pain we deserve.
We get the one
that matches our inner ugliness.