I will always be sinful, immoral, wrong, in everything I say, in everything I do, the way I look and act, to my core.
Because I was not raised in your world, your understanding of me will always be vague and elusive.
It is my blood. Native Meso blood, red, how primitive of me. How primal to care.
European Pagans, those peasants, those convicts and criminals, just trying to feed their children, just trying...and then came Christianity to tell them they too, were wrong.
From the east, my Hebrew disposition fights because it has never known anything but battles. Fights to live, fights to love, fights the tribe but will die beside them or die alone, a love beyond reason. It questions others, it questions itself, it questions until the questions turn on themselves. In a world that despises questions and loves answers, promises, and messiahs. False, true, it doesn�t matter. Just give us our drug, our heroes, our lies.
We industrious Prussians and bitter Slavs and the meaningless stereotypes that created me. A history of misunderstanding and fleeing from one place to another to another to another makes me dizzy and they ask who are you, who are you, what color is your skin, what is your religion, are you white, you talk strange, I don�t believe you, your insides don�t match your outside, you�re a liar, why do you care, you�re American now and that is all, you are nothing. Your past didn�t exist, your veins are here by accident, their struggles are dust in the wind.
i�
who am i?
I am them. All of them. Check every box. Skin lies, skin lies, but my blood reveals the folly of their institutions and that is why they despise my honesty. I didn�t ask to make war. I was born here. These are my parents. I love them as you love yours. I loved my grandparents as you loved yours. My grandparents loved their grandparents, so why shouldn�t I care? You want to know who I am? I�m your fear of change. You want to know where I�m from? I�m from the border lands in their brain that they don�t know how to classify, only how to oppress. I'm of the tattooed heathens who wouldn�t do as they were told. The depressed eastern Scandinavians, but what an eye they�ve got. The mumbling Anglo gypsies. The Mexicans, in the soil so dirty, oh they�ve infiltrated our borders, my blood, oh the dark gardeners with their vascular hands in the soil, surviving work with their minds in the sky, sweating for their children, oh that�s my father, MY FATHER, picking fruit in the valley. Does it upset you?
I live in the clean white neighborhood now and can�t find crema Mexicana at the grocery store. There is only brie, and you think I am French, but I am not. Maybe you see my Spanish roots, the failed nun who decided sex was quite alright. Her children danced in Chapultepec but had sex with Indians. The aristocratic Mexico you never heard of, which says more about you than it does about me. You can�t see the prince in a pauper. And now he�s a prince and now you pay attention and now all you see are his jewels, not his wife who chose him first, who saw his beauty when all you saw was poverty. Now I am the Indian. Now I am my great grandfather, the accidental child, blood as red as secrets.
2:09 p.m. - 2008-02-07