Colonized Mentality

Foreign is such an incomplete word
though it seems apt to describe
our mutual otherness.

My manners and ways
no doubt confound you,
My difference makes me stand out
like a sore thumb.

You don't realize that to me
you are hardly a mystery,
unfamiliar nor new.

You and yours are the others
inside us, beneath our skins,
at the back of our minds,
tangled up with our ideas
of ourselves.

You got there by your sheer
often vulgar presence,
a persistence you both expect
and take for granted.

We know too much about your ways
we hardly know about ours anymore.
And while we are "foreigners" to each other,
we sit on different sides of meaning-

Your ignorance of me and my kind
stems not from any absence
(Arguably, we too proliferate)
but simply a lack of interest,
while I on the other hand
find it impossible to ignore you.

And the only reason you are foreign to me
is because I am to you.