My Qualifications

@caitlinjohnstone · 2020-03-02 04:17 · poetry

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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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