Chaos Forms

IN THE OFFING

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.

Sometimes ideas can slosh like wave stew, like five motorboats circling, blocking our view and we're swimming (maybe it seems to no end). In these moments, remember we can float. And those motorboats circling are driven by people just like us, sitting in the privileged comfort of their investment and faith in buoyancy, with their gauges and a comfortable perch.

No amount of new language can scrub the official record. When you're trying to snow people, eventually the snow will melt. At the disadvantage, stop fighting. Relax. Observe. Enjoy the splash of chaos. Float. We're all just specks of dust in the universe.

If you knew me when the Warrior Writers chapter in Boston started in 2014, you might remember when I shared this poem at Midnight Voices in Cambridge.

I WRITE FOR GOD.

At this point, so late in my development, post-death, I still have not refined my restraint. I write. I write. I overwrite. I don't particularly like the work of publishing or editing, but here I am anyway. Read me.

I read for fun. On a stage, I relish strong reactions. But publishing takes a lot of effort. I publish for attention, seeking an audience. Still I don't know why I write, just that I do it to do it. And not understanding my intention disturbs me. I would like to write to live, but that sounds insane (especially given our currency exchange systems).

I’m using an alternative poetic form specifically for smartphone views. I call these Wave Poems. The first effort of this series is a vague, semi-suicidal, undirected Fuck You. Chaos Forms combines my thoughts on the purpose of existence with myth and some of the semi-coherent ramblings said around me at hospitals. I would like to say that I went to these places simply to investigate. Truth is, I had a death wish but not the courage or training for the requisite seppuku. 

Now I've reached a point of abstraction motivated by a deadly combination of fear and desire. I am seeing ghosts. Some of them (I suppose inadvertently) stalked me to my home. I fear judgement. I desire adventure. Both are always in the offing. 

Someone who I've trusted said my name means dog in Arabic. Even if this is true in some Palestinian dialect, it’s irrelevant. I like dogs, but when I realized how I got declawed, I acted more like a cat. I whined loud enough to make a public record of my obstinance. My grief was excessive.

I need to cool off, exercise, figure out what matters. I fall in love too easily with both ideas and with people. My love is dangerous. When I fall in love, I try to fuck, fight, or fix things. And this desire to fix things consumes me even when I don’t know what I am fixing. Any effort to fix something without experience or knowledge is a dangerous use of time.

One person who caught my love got a little grief, especially over the past year and a half. I can be obnoxious and abusive in ignorance. I hope they will absolve me, despite my efforts to get into their head. I don't really know them, I've realized. So what is this love from? An idea?

Since I started this publishing effort, I have developed a foreboding for being watched. It is common for artists (and I see myself as a digital media artist) to see connections to their work in the creative efforts of others. All of this work, after all, attempts to communicate with someone. But who is my audience?

I write for a god who knows how to connect people productively. I have the arrogance to believe that I am a child of this god. I believe that serving a god can lead to social goods, since we all serve gods (metaphorical goods) unconsciously. What I know about the god who animates me is hardly relevant. In realms of fiction and fantasy it's easy to get overly ritualistic and reverent. When I say God, I'm talking about the limit of my imagination. Old words save time. Right now my god owns (the) Alphabet. Now, I’m off to the wilderness to become worthy.