Tọlá Belva

The loony man looks at us, his eyes alight with an untamed wisdom,
To him, we are the deranged, trapped in a world of fragile illusions.
We, in turn, look upon him with quiet pity,
Unaware that his mind sees more than ours ever could.
When he approaches,
We flee as if his presence were a plague,
Our hearts pounding in the rhythm of panic,
Not realizing that in his gaze, we are the ones infected.
In his world, our haste only serves to confirm the insanity of the ‘sane.’

His tattered clothes flap in the wind like a flag of defiance,
A man stripped bare of the trappings of society’s order.
We pity him, his hair a wild mane, his skin worn like weathered stone,
Yet he looks at our polished selves with contempt,
Skeptical of the cost of our immaculate appearance.
To us, he is a tragic figure, lost in a labyrinth of his own mind,
A prisoner of his own delusion,
While we stand proud in our “reality,” shackled by the chains of normalcy.
To him, we are the puppets,
Tethered to an illusionary world that demands conformity,
Willing to sacrifice freedom for the cold comfort of fitting in.

He wonders aloud,
Why would we choose crisp fabric over the earth’s raw embrace?
Why, when the wild wind beckons,
Do we remain bound to the suffocating fabric of our society’s rules?
“Fools!” he cries, “Enslaved by convention!”
“Ancient fools who have forgotten the joy of untamed existence.”
And to him, we are the true madmen,
Chasing shadows, too blinded by our own reflections to see the world beyond.

He watches a man glide past in his Bugatti,
The car sleek, and polished — a symbol of everything we strive to be,
But to him, it is a mere tin can, a hollow vessel of vanity,
A bucket of dreams built on the illusion of success.
What he sees is not power but a desperate grasp for meaning,
A bucket carrying empty promises on wheels.

Then he calls to us from his cart,
A rickety, weather-beaten vehicle, a kingdom in disguise.
What we see as a broken-down relic,
He sees as a chariot of freedom,
A vessel to carry him through the wild seas of his imagination.
He invites us to join him, to take part in the ride of life,
But we, too enmeshed in our worlds,
Politely decline.
“How dull you all are,” he sighs,
“You miss the thrill of this journey,
The true exhilaration of the unknown.”

We look at his squalor,
The remnants of his world scattered like forgotten dreams,
And we shake our heads, dismissing him as a lost soul.
But in his eyes, it is we who are lost,
We live in the sterile boxes of our carefully constructed worlds.
Our idea of home is built on walls and fences,
On things that separate us from the chaos of life.
But his world, though ragged and torn,
is full of purpose — full of raw, untamed beauty,
Where everything is in its place, even if that place is a bit unkempt.
He is not mad;
He is simply the king of his domain,
A monarch crowned not with gold,
But with the courage to live fully in the mess of existence.

We stand in our pristine homes,
Clutching our sanitized realities,
And yet, it is he who lives in a kingdom of wonder,
Where chaos is not an enemy but a muse.
We cannot see his greatness,
For we are too blinded by the gleam of our own sterile lives.
His world is untamed, raw, and free —
A kingdom not of gold but of meaning.

In his eyes, he is a king,
A ruler of a kingdom where rules are not made by society,
But by the simple truth of the moment,
Where the wild beauty of the world is embraced in its entirety,
Where joy is found in freedom, in imagination,
In the very act of living without restraint.
And in our eyes, he is a madman,
Lost to the illusions of his own creation.

But what if we are the ones who have lost touch with that joy?
What if his madness is the key to his freedom,
To a life lived on his own terms,
Unshackled by the chains of conventional thought?
In his kingdom, the boundaries of reality are blurred,
And what he sees is not madness,
But in a world where imagination reigns,
Where life is not constrained by rules,
But guided by the pure joy of being.
We may call him mad,
But perhaps it is we who are missing the fullness of life,
Trapped in the cages of our own making,
Too afraid to step outside and live freely.

In his world, he reigns supreme,
Not because of the crowns of gold,
But because of the truth he holds —
The truth that sees beyond the veil of what we call reality,
To a deeper, wilder, more beautiful world.
And in his eyes, we are the ones who have strayed,
Who have forsaken the wild joy of being alive,
The thrill of stepping outside the box,
Of embracing chaos, of truly living.

We say he is mad,
But what if he is the only one who truly understands?
What if, in his madness, he is the sanest of us all?