The Last Madman

 

I was born from the same dark, tender womb

That carried every child into the light,

Yet at the third sharp turn into the gloom,

My mind abandoned their accepted sight.

They drew a narrow map and called it sane,

Demanding every spirit trace its lines;

Because I wandered through a wilder plain,

They crowned my heavy head with tragic signs.

The children met my steps with heavy stone,

And tore the frayed and thin cloth from my skin;

They mocked the fractured world I called my own,

And in their cruel joy, I joined within.

For laughter is the final, desperate shield

A wounded soul will wear before the night,

Before it surrenders to the battlefield

And remembers how to weep away the light.

My wild sobs traveled far beyond my feet;

The listening hills gave back my lonely cry.

The wind responded down the empty street,

Yet human hearts looked on and passed me by.

They crossed the road to flee my passing shade,

As though a shattered mind could touch their own;

It was not madness making them afraid,

But fear and cruelty written into bone.

When darkness fell, I found a ruined space

To voice my deep arguments to the stars.

Night never judged the terror on my face,

Nor weighed my worth according to my scars.

It was the daylight wearing truth’s disguise

That brought its pockets filled with heavy stone.

The difference lay entirely in the eyes

That chose to see a devil or their own.

Those who knew love saw purity inside;

Those bound by fear saw something dark and blind.

Yet goodness does not vanish or divide

Because a blind observer cannot find.

I shared my handful of remaining rice

With beggars who possessed no other bread;

For hunger pays no tribute or device

To caste, or creed, or where a man was bred.

Only the rich invent a border line

To fence the empty stomach from its food;

The thieves now guard the fallen coins of mine,

Yet miss the greater theft of human good.

For true theft is the quiet, stolen grace

Stripped from the human heart by cold decree.

When my own kin look past my weathered face,

They turn away from what they yet could be.

It takes a single nerve to break inside,

One twisted memory, one sudden fall,

To strip away your certainty and pride

And make my reality belong to all.

The stray dog and the black crow on the fence-

These wild companions never turned away.

In biting rain and winter freeze intense,

Their silent presence warmed my freezing day.

You call me mad, yet when a stranger dies,

Reaching a trembling hand into the air,

It is my fingers answering his cries,

While "sane" men turn away without a care.

Tell me who bears the deeper, darker stain:

The one who broke his irons to be free,

Or millions polishing a heavy chain

And worshiping their shiny slavery?

They build new walls to keep our thoughts confined,

Not out of fear that we might cause them harm,

But because a soul that will not walk pretend

Fills every comfortable lie with dark alarm.

They thought I fled the borders of the mind,

That sanity was something I had lost;

Yet I left only what your rules defined,

Escaping your illusion at all cost.

The cage was never built within my brain,

Nor forged from any madness in my sight;

It wraps around your world in quiet pain,

To keep your guarded minds from seeing light.

The sky remains my roof, the earth my home;

Freedom is all I inherit from the floor.

Through endless ages I will rise and roam,

Wearing new wounds behind another door.

Each epoch manufactures its own foe,

Crucifying those who will not sing the lie.

And when my final laugh begins to grow,

Shaking the quiet boundary of the sky,

The world may learn, beneath the morning sun,

When all our heavy masks are cast away,

That madness was the freedom I had won,

And sanity the prison of your day.