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