Madness.

It's subjective.

There's acting mad, and being mad, and who can tell which is worse.

If you act mad you're devoured by society, a messy, meaningless blur of faceless fanatics condemning you to consumption, their maws mouthing obscene shapes as they crunch bones and flesh between artificially whitened teeth, swallowing the sick soul and spitting saliva and skin and nothing else back into their artificial world.

If you're truly, madly mad, you're devoured by your own cannibalistic, nihilistic brain, a floundering shark in its mother's cold belly, aware of nothing other than eat, destroy, consume, survive. With no other brains to latch onto and drain of purpose and language, the mind meanders around in a painfully slow circle before plummeting off a cliff and pounding relentlessly into itself with destructive intent. And you dissect the pain and bitterness and ugliness and pin it carefully together into beauty, presenting the butterfly board to the world with, "look at the pretty patterns" and "the pins are for display, not for support" and you're lying, and sometimes they believe it, and sometimes they don't, but you never can because your thoughts crack your skull like a blacksmith's hammer and madness is born.

Madness.

It's subjective.

The only reason they condemn it is because they fear it's instantaneous infection, minds riddled with rattlesnakes, twisting and hissing and shaking every loose thought and cowering paranoia from the limbo of subconsciousness.

They peer over the wall of their paradise, and they don't like what they see, the relentless tide of ordered chaos pounding in a primordial dance. They don't recognise the racing rhythm of the swift steps, so they hail it as senseless and fear for their sanity as the force flies against their fragile fortress.

They cling to the turrets and they will themselves to melt into the battered brickwork, and they seek stability to the point where it's insanity, and while they curl cruel lips at the chaos, it's the need for normality that sends them nosediving into nihilism.

Existentialism is an epidemic.

They pull at passion with purgative, and seek to suck souls from the marrow of cracking bones in prevention of a pandemic, but they never realise that they're infected too.

It's subjective.

Some spiral unwillingly into splitting minds and shattered sanity, clawing at the rumbling rubble piling on top of them as they ricochet down the rabbit hole. Tick tock. They're late. Late to commit suicide, suicide committed and they're late. Time trickling swiftly south through the wicked witch's egregious egg-timer. There's no place like home, until insanity seeps into the comfortable cracks and familiar facets, and burns away the basic code of the building, leaving it the same but different. Like a shattered vase glued together again so the cracks are invisible, but that one splintering split that was already sneaking across the surface has also gone, so you can't shake the sombre sense that something's different.

Then there's the ones that embrace the deterioration of their minds, flinging themselves into free fall with outstretched arms and inane grins. Embracing the everlasting empty air, spinning sporadically in the storming skies. Once you reach a certain level of madness, society's sneers don't slip unwanted into sugar skulls. You can dive into your own isolated mind without care to the artificial actors with their artificial arched eyebrows and artificial anger and artificial augmentation of ordinary. Madness makes more sense when you maximise it's mania.

It's subjective.

The elderly sneak peeks over the crumbling walls of their castles, trying to ignore the dedicated deadline, a diamond glinting obnoxiously in the corner of their failing vision, snatching their valuable attention and leaving sentences unfinished as they fail to form fearful words. Madness stalks them, mirroring their every move, it's just a question of whether gentle death will rescue them first.

The middle aged, middle minded, middle muddled, they peer over the stone walls of their stable strongholds with derision, the housewife fixating on the marital problems of the neighbours without realising that their husband's fucking the babysitter and their thirteen year old secrets syringes in the old toy box, and it's not hypocrisy, just denial. It's "they should get divorced" and "their child's off the rails" and "there's rusted metal where there should be flowers in their garden" and not realising that there are no neighbours, just a mirror.

And boxed in a crystallised cube with their own mental state reflected back at them from all angles, who can blame them for shattering the shape into shards of silver webbing and letting their sanity be shredded by the shrapnel. Self-awareness is a terrifying thing. Fixating on the failing faith of others forces you to fly into the free fall of your foes, flickering flames of realisation evident, but insufficient to help regain control of your mind before it self destructs.

Children, they're intrigued. Creeping carefully over bright Lego brick walls, careless of culpability, caution crushed under the current of curiosity. Crumbling sanity seems cool. Madness is mayhem, and mayhem is anarchy, and if insanity gets them what they want, then why not? Nonsensical nothings are noted with enthusiasm and energy, every effort to be enigmatic or engaging enough to encourage interest.

Insanity, it's the new trend. Quirkiness is cool and babble is bubbly.

Madness.

It's subjective. Addictive. Cumulative. Deteriorative and illuminative.

Definitive.

It's the end and the beginning, and in the middle we might have a spell of sanity, but it's just a phase.

Insanity. It's the real normality.