Bones Beneath the Banquet

     INSANITY!

     Such slippery, slimy, slithering four syllables! It slinks from your dainty, dignified lips like venom disguised as virtue, like poison perfumed to pass as perfume. A curious word. A cruel word. A CAGE of a word.

     You speak and suddenly your conclusions crystallize into my delusions, your definitions dictate my dimensions, my depth, my direction, my very design!

     Your rules rattle, your labels lash, your precious little properness presses me into PULP!

     And so, so, so, so so so,

     I bend.

     I BEND AND BREAK,

     I TWIST,

     I TANGLE,

     I TEAR MYSELF TO THREADS.

     So you can sip your tea and sleep soundly, smug and secure in your sacred little shrine of sanity! But you don’t see the seams, do you?

     The seams splitting, the stitches snapping, the scaffolding screaming as it splinters!

     You don’t see me writhing, wailing, warping behind the curtain.

     No.

     No no no no NO!

     You just clap for the performance, applaud the illusion, pat yourself on the back for taming the mad dog, petting the beast while it gnaws on its own bones beneath the table!

     Your world is built on my breakage. Brick by brick, bone by bone, blood baked into the mortar! I am your foundation, your fiction, your fragile fabrication!

     And you will NEVER ADMIT IT, because if you did, you’d have to face the fact that you are the lunatic, and I am the lunatic’s lovely, loyal little scapegoat!

    But here’s the secret, the screaming truth you swallow down with your tea: Insanity is NEEDED.

     My madness is the mortar holding your whole house together!

     Don’t mind me. Don’t mind me at all.

     I’m just here, keeping the stage set, keeping the walls straight, keeping the roof nailed down, while my mind melts like wax in the crawlspace!

     Your definition of my insanity is the definition of your stability. The madman props up the mask. The monster maintains the myth.

     I make you sane.

     I make you stable.

     You can thank me later.

     Or, better yet, THANK ME NOW.