A Marginal Sort Outside of the Margins

I am that piece of creased paper
that drifts between your liberal guilt
and conservative reaction.
Drifting like a vagabond
with no purpose or aim,
other than to drift forward, sideways
and onward once again.
The man pushing the cart
full of smashed cans
has direction.
The woman standing at the corner,
waving a cardboard arrow
is giving directions.
Me, I walk around the long city blocks,
staring at the sun like a newly-freed convict
getting a whiff of smog-tinged freedom.
There are decisions to be made,
but all I see are rhetorical roundabouts,
and the end is the beginning.
There’s an end-times preacher
convulsing at the sight of two homosexuals
holding hands.
I smear a ketchup packet (that I somehow have)
in the center of my hands
and ran-a-shrieking across him…
screaming, “bloody miracle!”
Walking around the bend,
I see a flock of Pigeons,
and I start to think of how people
love to pigeon-hole one and all.
I start to think even further back,
at the times that both my Mexican-American--
and East Side credentials--
were called into question.
To be a full tribesman of one or the other,
there are certain catalogs one must subscribe to,
otherwise you are white-washed—
a marginal sort outside of the margins.
I might be white-washed,
but they are the ones living life
like the Man’s perception
of what it is to be a stock-footage minority.

©2009 José-Ariel Cuevas

Comments

[Penemue]

ah, the joys of stigmata...