Dare to be Mad

I have been going into the bowels of my past writing.  Years of poetry, short stories, essays and books started but languishing for attention.  I read snippets and can regain my conviction. Oh the flavor of my misguided flares into the passionately flamboyant fire.  Being in love with love, I took no prisoners.  I read, and on occasion cringe to think of me being so exposed, so naked on purpose.  Who should reads these rantings and not run away?  Who would not fall in love with the freedom to be totally mad while howling at the moon?  Dance in the foaming surf like a possessed Prophet.  "Would that being an artist protect one from institutionalization"

He can't be mad because he is shrewd?  Isn't that the maddest of statements yet? Genius to be different. 

Or just ....

An individual.

Where did Da Vinci really go?  To the limits of our understanding?  Or just the brink of our fear to recollect?  We say he was great, but no one adds buggery to his list of accomplishment.

We are cowards in love.  We don't dare open up to the full flavor of it.  We get tipsy on the thimble we dare sample, then get jealous with fear of loosing our portion.  The sun dries it from our reconnoitering...we age and don't even realize what season we're in.  I marvel at the freedom of a century ago. To suddenly realize you can't recall your age.  What a surprise to be 'right now'

    I look at the mess I've created. I pale at the aspect of the labor involved with labeling and placing them in a drawer so I can test my memory of where I put things.  As if a cruel necromancer was generating fireflies with little blinking numbers on their tiny bottoms.  I being assigned the responsibility for adding their sums.  "I can't make that out, is that a five or six?" Oh and my anguish when I would be told that my math didn't match someone else's matriculation....never really knowing whose at fault; it didn't really matter.  Once more tasked to chase down those high-jacked into the insect bars along the boulevard.  "Out with you out out out, stop necking in the corner and sound off with your number" the drunken hoard would bellow in raucous unison their numbers too fast and muddled for my scribbling fingers to capture on notepad page.  The dirty yellow light of the cantina's marquee provides me intermittent blinking light as it announces its namesake, "Raidaway" a spoof on mans design to control their numbers.  Toxin to the ill advised...don't make any reference to leaving as bugging out.

They don't take kindly to that kind of talk....and you'll not get the numbers right Then no lemon meringue pie for you tonight bucko.