Poetry as Fiction

You told him that the flashes of
light he sees in this white room are
all just in his imagination,
and he turned to you and said,
"Then how do I know you're not just in my mind 
as well?"
And you told him that was why he was 
crazy,
and that was why he was here,
but all he heard was the word
"crazy,"
and how it was so politically incorrect.
Here he sits in this room, playing picture
pages with a blank wall,
and knowing that his "mirror"
is actually a window,
so that he can be observed--
He has become a wild animal in a zoo.
So he figures this is his spotlight,
and he hobbles around mumbling to himself,
like a schizophrenic gorilla,
while the passerbys "ooh" and "ahh"
and the doctors, with their stern eyes
just purse their lips and scribble in their notebooks
"getting crazier by the day."
And he wonders why they have the authority to call him
crazy,
and he doesn't have the authority to 
merely call them underdeveloped.
In a matter of years, the best of us
will all end up
wearing white coats in white rooms of
one kind or another.