Silvano J. Gonzalez is a bioresource and agricultural engineering freshman and Mustang Daily poetry contributor.
There was once a man with a secret he couldn’t tell.
It was not that he didn’t want to, he simply couldn’t.
He didn’t know what the secret was.
Sometimes he wanted to run.
Sometimes he wanted to sit frozen.
Mostly, he wanted to speak.
He wanted to tell the secret.
He couldn’t.
One day he met a woman.
She told him a secret.
He thought it was his own.
It wasn’t.
He left.
He met another woman.
She didn’t know her secret either.
And one day he heard her secret.
She said it.
So he thought:
“Ergh, if she said it, not knowing that it was her own secret, then have I … ”
And so he talked, and he listened to himself talk.
And he kept talking and listening.
Then one day they noticed.
They noticed, but he didn’t stop.
He was “different” to them.
He had something broken in his mind.
And he kept on, as they looked with condemnation.
And he knew they would never figure out that there is nothing,
Nothing but what we tell ourselves is real.