Madness dwells within each of us, for some

the normality of the sacrifice to the death of Kings

reveals itself in their actions, the jealous zeal

in which they covet everything but life itself

and the dishonesty of their envious desires.

 

For others though it unwraps and unfolds like a

forgotten parchment,

a map of places unseen, of continents lost and drowned

far below the surface of Earth’s majesty;

of a building with secret time decayed, narrowed

dusty and cobwebbed tunnels that bid warning

to the weary and the ill equipped, the forever yielding

and those that grip to tightly to the

realm of insidious sanity.

 

Piece by piece by disturbed piece

the map illuminates the way

and madness is glorified and revelled in.

 

Not the madness of the Fool

who believed he was seeing Lear in the flesh,

who whispered to the imagination of the damned

fabled king who bested his daughters to the point

of disgrace, not for them the madness of the Fool

in a paradise forged by fire struck heath and blasted hearth,

this is the madness of the poet, a far more deadly horizon!

‘Tis better to be the Fool

than the crafted poet

who sees his scribed children float away

into the ether of eternity

in the certain knowledge

that they will never be seen again

so the madness takes hold

and they write

more and more and more till the pencil is bled dry and sacrificed

in the hope that their sins of pride and vanity

will at least one day conquer a molehill

or the dramatic arch of a termite mound.

 

Who would take the madness of a poet

over the sanity that a Fool can lay claim to?

For the Fool is at least loved by his King

until his

head

is removed from his shoulders.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015