[verse] John The Baptist Speaking to a friend today I learned that John The Baptist was crazy and hated. He was not allowed to do something or another. I remember not. Regardless, he was denied on account of some or another defect of the mind. A defect that was truly a defect. And not something adorable. Such as musical prodigy. “John the Baptist”—the name is already wind in the throat, a rough syllable that tastes of river water and sand. Speaking to a friend, you heard he was crazy and hated, barred from this or that, refused because his mind carried a defect that was truly a defect, not the charming flaw we forgive when it sings in tune. We like our differences lacquered and marketable, the oddness that can be applauded from a safe chair. But John’s strangeness was the kind that breaks furniture in the soul, the kind that does not ask permission. There is a certain madness that is simply the refusal to be lulled. Some people are born with a skin too thin for the world’s soft lies; they feel every compromise like grit between teeth. They speak, and the room grows colder because truth has the habit of stripping warmth from pretense. We call them unwell because their vision hurts us, because their urgency exposes our leisure. Better to say “defect” than to admit “message.” Better to dismiss a prophet as a cracked vessel than to taste what he carries. Hatred is often the tax levied on those who will not flatter the tribe. The wilderness does not teach diplomacy; it teaches clarity. The river does not negotiate; it baptizes—plunges, lifts, leaves you gasping with the clean terror of being changed. And so the world, devoted to its familiar dirt, labels the washer as deranged. It shuts doors, cites rules, invents prohibitions it can barely remember, anything to keep the strange light outside. Yet history keeps a secret ledger: the ones we shun for being too sharp, too raw, too unprofitable, sometimes become the measuring rod by which our comfort is judged. Not every broken mind is holy, and not every holy mind is safe. But when someone’s so-called defect is the inability to make peace with injustice, the refusal to decorate decay, then their exclusion becomes an indictment of the gatekeepers. In the end, the world always tries to bury the voice that names it, and then wonders why the silence feels like thirst.
