How Blindness Breeds Perversity

This is clipping from the local newspaper 

in the town I grew up from 1962,

the year after I was born.

It says that the council are celebrating

the opening of a public toilet.

I wonder, was there a ribbon
over each entrance
and did the mayor cut it?

And was he the first to use the facilities?

I knew that toilet well, for reasons common to me

and many others-the sense of my sexuality 

being fit only for keeping well out of the family house. 

I find it perverse to imagine the pomp and circumstance

that the council and the local press cooked up between them

being invested in something that was going to embody shame 

and become the stain of self mistrust for many generations of men 

who were going to wave their willies there, 

in the hope of attracting similarly stained/shamed men.

All because nobody wanted them 

as the people they actually were.

But then again this cutting is evidence 

of how much perversity can be blind to itself,

as if blindness itself breeds perversity....