the madman

            There is a madman behind this stoic face. I am lucky enough to keep him down at most...at all times, keep him in a prison within me. He has urges to run into a graveyard in the middle of the night, to scream out at the stars and tear his clothes and scream and tear and scream and tear until he falls into a sobbing heap on the soil. He says he knows nothing of this world and wants to charge around in his ignorance, to while and tumble in his lack of knowledge, in his fear of man made things. His revulsion at paperwork and forms and phone call systems. He tells me he wants to find himself on a deep steppe, alone, away and away from civilization and it trappings, to find the silent gods that dwell there. He says he wants to find the lost rites of the earth and its knowing graces. I tell him there is nothing there, that the steppe is cold, the gods are dead, the rites are...imaginary. He won't listen. I go by, day by day with him in me, behind my face and within my ears and he is screaming at every stop sign and weeping at every sick woman and vomiting, vomiting at the sounds of the world. He says that every manmade thing is an illusion which we put up around ourselves, the bars of our cages built from papier mache and which we bang our heads against day in and day out and which we rail against and he says 'look! look! you made this, you made this' and I say 'quiet, you are being so loud, we are in a public place, terhe is no need for that here' and he quiets and it burns within him, his manic knowledge, his worthless wisdom.