This article proposes a reading of the poem "Canto de la locura" (1962), written by Puerto Rican Francisco Matos Paoli (1915-2000), as defending madness as an epistemic possibility as well as an emancipatory poetics in the face of penitentiary and colonial biopolitics. In the 1950s, Puerto Rican nationalism, in addition to being prohibited by Law 53, known as la Mordaza (Gag Law), was stigmatized as a delirious threat to the stability of the island's government. With a hyperlucid poetic voice that exceeds the limits of language, Matos Paoli insists on the question of freedom for Puerto Rico while denouncing the colonial violence of the United States.