The Madman

I am black and surrounded. It seeps into me like toxic gases. Stuffed full of cotton wool, barbed wire tears at my flesh. Slowly picking it away like chicken on a bone.


I must be and move and sit in this room. Drowning in self-conscious misery my confidence has snapped. It has been borrowed, taken away by a malevolent demiurge who is howling in some cage made of black space and motion.

Faces tear at me with eyes and beaks speaking of swords. They eat me up. Breathless and gasping, my face melts and my skull protrudes

I try desperately to focus on light, magic, beautiful, mystical moments of freedom but I come into this place and it flees from me. I am at a loss. Dying, scared faces realize that I am mad. I am insane. I do not belong in this story, in this place. 

How did I get here? 

There was an interview and a purple sky and a summer. I was here in this room but I couldn’t get out because the taxi was late. Now it has arrived and I have missed my stop.

The purple room with the skylight, and the gulls, and the cat sleeping in the sunlight has gone. There is just this room with its bare walls.

Faces which used to melt of warmth in my presence are now frozen in fear, like my jaw when my eyes go mad. I hold my breath until I can’t bare it any longer


Every morning I want to die. I want to drown myself, I want blood, I want hooks, I want anything other than this boredom. Ripping myself out of the warmth and coming here over and over again in a dream which keeps repeating.

I will enter into a hole under the floor where it is black but I am not afraid because I am not there. I am here, on a beach with pebbles and fish and horses.


Round and round he wanted to stay before but now he laughs. They were holding their breath. They were holding their breath, just like I do when the panic sets in and I just want to leave, but I am rooted.

I must continue. I keep saying it is a new moment. Every moment it is renewed, and they haven’t noticed and it’s ok. But they have, they have noticed. 

One day I will just snap and break the book case into splinters. I will dig them into my skin and push over tables and grow my hair long and wild, and run down to the river, and I will have escaped.


I will be somewhere new. A dance floor with drugs and music. The pounding beat is me and I am it and I do not have to care or be anything because all there is is the music, and the sky, and the pigeons circling round and round above the hills, while the airplanes land and the sky is blue.

The sky is blue, it is not black, it is blue and beautiful. The sun fills up the world. I wake up and it is there. I go to bed and it is there. I am alive, and life is fun, and it works. My intentions come to fruition.

That is the agony, of course. The fact that I feel it every night. And then the panic button comes on. I feel trapped and I don’t hear. I don’t want them to see, and they do see, and it goes on.

I sleep and decide that I am a shaman. The world is a magical dream, and there are kind beings on my sofa. It is 2012 and the world is becoming something new. Everything is God and everything is pure.

I am here where I need it to be, but it does not follow me. I am a psycho and they are afraid of me and I am afraid of them and the other people, and being so tired.

The good intentions wait and then they crowd round me again when I sit on that seat and I say it again. I will be magic, I will help, I will inspire. Then it comes on me. It comes on me, over and over again. 

I end up with eyes that are holes sitting in the darkness.

But then a world without people is worse. I am going to go there because I have not been grateful and I will not be given a second chance this time.

I will just be frozen in that room asking “but what do we do - where do we go?” What do we do, where do we go over and over again. Running into the bathroom with the mirror and the flickering faces, in the virtual reality experience.

I will go back there because I have not appreciated here. I have thrown here away because it feels not part of me. 

I want to be in a darkened room where I don’t have these people in my face. But they keep appearing and then they will investigate me for being a nutcase, and I will run away again.