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Consider the man who finds his way into warm hospital beds and/or jail cells every winter by being a danger to himself and others. His psychiatrist called his incoherent outbursts, misdemeanors and refusal to take his insulin an elaborate con.
"He knows what he's doing," She told me. "He's taking advantage of the system. If he keeps refusing insulin we're going to have to take his leg."
This man moved from the South and lived and grew up near me. Chaos Forms uses some of the ideas and phrases he told me during his scatterbrained attempt to secure a private room at Killer Carney through the winter 2012-13. His hustle was to refuse his insulin and annoy the hell out of his roommates. He seemed to be hoping to lose a leg, and to get on disability.
He is a piano man, and his wife (he says) is a prostitute. He's been tremendously used by many people, sometimes maliciously but he's no saint. He once helped a guy jack someone's motorcycle, he said. He felt aggrieved by that whole situation, which he initiated.
Chaos Forms is about communication, the images we use for signaling, and how language is manipulated to odd purposes. It loses some meaning read aloud.
Bits of his language form silhouettes that help to tell his story. He lives a painfully poetic life as a pianist who sells music for sympathy tips on the Boston Common in the summer, who lives in public spaces or with his relatives, who cried loudly at night in the psych unit disrupting everyone's sanity and peace, who just sort of casts troubling shadows across the social order of city living. He is the kind of man who would confess to a murder to escape into a system he knows well.
In form this poem demands to be read in a certain order, across, line by line, as it organizes a man's disjointed thoughts and half truths to suggest a story. His words are a monument to the schizophrenic nature of society, celebrating myths and egos, rewarding guile and greed.
The saddest class war is fought between the poor who transparently rely on social subsidies and day wage workers who idealize excess and moralize about work ethics to make just a smidge more.
In general, it's worth remembering how signals come at us from all directions, often initiated without any conscious effort. How we play against those ideas, how we propel, target and anchor our beliefs, how we react when our visions get blurred and disturbed by stories and emotions that have literally nothing to do with our actual lived experiences, ultimately defines us.