Poem of the Month  ~  February 2010
What a month!  Ground Hog’s Day, Mardi Gras, Purim, Chinese New Year!  Wow!  A veritable explosion of carnival energy!  A while back some famous dudes, wrote:      
“Let your freak flag fly!”   
So go on…enjoy those marvelous eccentricities in yourself and those who people your world…find fresh new meaning in things your find mundane or taken for granted.   Make the world a place where adventurous play abounds!

Photo from Wikipedia: Carnival

SPACE ALIENS FOUND PERFORMING IN CARNIVAL FREAK SHOWS

In 1920, my great-aunt Jane

hopped a midnight freight

and ran away from home

to sing on a New York stage.

She was only sixteen.

The family took her photograph

off the grand piano

and never again spoke her name.

Later, they grew lonely for her voice.

At sixteen I shimmied down

the same drainpipe Jane had used

and took off to see the fair.

That’s where I met

the light-bulb boy from Neptune,

the lizard woman of the Moon,

the human razor blade from some galactic swirl

and other artists of the weird.

All of them had hopped

midnight rockets off their worlds.

All artists come from outer space.

Like my great-aunt Jane,

they’re just looking for some place

where gravity won’t hold them down.

So, parents—let your children

have their voices.  Let them

have their feathers and their flesh.

Let your daughters and your sons

have their pens, their paints,

their music and their hearts.

Let them tattoo jackals on their thighs

and dance with the lawn furniture.

Let them drum so loud that the sound

shatters watermelons in your garden.

Ask them to play on,

because these children come from Mars.

Tell them they’re welcome here on Earth.

Tell them it’s good to be strange.

Tell them they don’t need to hop that freight. 

Doug Gray  ~ Copyrighted material, for educational/therapeutic use only