My Qualifications

I wear my mother's dress and shake the earth with bare feet.

I spurn the -ists and -isms of dead men.

I have an obsessive attraction to elephants in rooms.

I think unauthorized thoughts and feel unauthorized feelings.
I write unauthorized words with an unauthorized pen
from a space inside myself that is doubleplus unauthorized.

They tell me that I am crazy
using words that are crazy
formed in minds that were made crazy
by a propaganda-addled civilization that,
from top to bottom,
has always been crazy.

"What are your qualifications to think those thoughts
and say those words?" they demand indignantly,
hands on hips,
voices dripping with spreadsheets and cubicles.

I tell them I was born here, pointing down at the earth.
I speak with no authority
but these cells made of stardust
and the grass between these toes
and the sacred syllable humming up along this spinal cord
from that point in spacetime
where the universe was birthed.

I am a board certified terrestrial.
I am a fully licensed ape mutant.
My papers are all in order.
My forms are all filled out.

"But you are flawed!" they protest.

"Exactly," I reply.

And then I stomp on,
shaking the earth with bare feet,
singing red ravens into the sky,
summoning fiddle music out from the shadows.

I am Caitlin.
I am like you.
We may speak
because we were born here.

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