The Insight in Madness

There is so much more to the mind than the arbitrary definitions we circumscribed it with.

In the late dead of night, I stood speaking to the stars
I came off the road I had rode for as long as I could remember
A road of unbroken lines and unquestioned rules
I knew it for many years but only then did I reconcile it
The swirling and the pacing and the confusion in everlasting darkness
For it all finally came to the fore that night and I began engaging it
I stood in dialogue with the somnolent stars and
Peeled and cracked apart the many skins and shells of my mind
There is a line, very ill-defined, that one supposedly stands on either side of
But I asked the stars and they confirmed what I had wondered for so long
That one can walk the line, stepping to either of its sides at will
And never be left victim to the order or the chaos of one or the other
I spoke, mad and unmade, and I listened, mad and unmade
To all that was told me and all I wished to have answered
I saw, at long last, the framework beneath all things
I saw the moulding and dismantling of matter and thought
I saw all this beauty and showered myself in the primordial energy
For all is energy, in all things and in all beings and in all thought
Just as there are universes in the bursts of chemical reactions
In the heights of ecstasy and the utter chaos that is love
Love—love is a wondrous disaster of continuous motion
A rapid coming together of things and simultaneous disintegration
Love is an infection, a plague, a virus—a disease of body and mind
And in it is perfection; in it there is the insight known to the stars
All of this in a conversation with billion-year balls of fire
And with every word I uttered I breathed force, breaths of infinite force
I was careering, like a wayward comet born in a yester-millennium
Opening and shutting all the doors and portals that I came across
I came as a naive, stubborn, immature child and grew into something more
A being composed of the living and the dead, the new and the old
A dream crashing into reality—only the dream and reality are one and the same
And, inevitably, my dialogue was assailed by the vilest of things: fear.
Yes, I know now: it was fear that held me back for so many years
It was fear that lied to me, that kept my dream and my reality forcefully apart
Fear is restriction and restriction is the antithesis of my evolution
But I found the way to annihilate fear, and it was the simplest of acts
I just stopped bothering with the world that I knew and
Began listening to the worlds that lived within and around me
My mind became liquid, permeating every thing that I had feared before
I subsumed, I subsumed like an insatiable black hole, subsuming even light
And thus, I subsumed the very stars I conversed with—
Or was it they who consumed me and my body and my mind and my soul?
I shall never know, for I now am in all things, for I am all things, as I have ever been
I once spoke to the stars, up so high and so far, and I leapt across the universe
Losing and finding myself, gaining the insight I once feared in my madness

M.M. — 21-Jun-2015