…I’m so full of holes
I whistle when the wind blows…

John D. Graham

Whipping Boy

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
the whipping boy of society.
No one published by bloody books.

No one complained
when the best jobs
went to Junior.

White girls
couldn’t be offered
to the brown boy’s neck.

Oh, no, you’re brown as hell
you can’t live
amongst us.

So I wandered lonely as a cloud,
despised for shouting rain.
No one published my angry heart.





Being a Chicano poet nowadays
means having to dig down deeper
than ever to find that chicanidad
that once flourished right here on
the surface of Aztlan. It is not
American society that is destroying
the Chicano poet, it is the Chicano
himself who is erasing himself.
A dying breed indeed.