Chaos Forms

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 said. “He’s taking advantage of the system. If he keeps refusing insulin we're going to have to take his leg.”

Chaos Forms uses some of the ideas and phrases he said during his scatterbrained attempt to secure a private room at at Carney Hospital around Christmas in 2012. He played the piano well enough to make money doing so downtown.

He calls his wife a prostitute. He's been tremendously used by many people, sometimes maliciously but he's no saint. He once helped steal a motorcycle, he said, and killed someone afterward. 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. Bits of his language form silhouettes that help to tell this man’s story. He lives a painfully poetic life selling his music for sympathy tips on the Common in the summer. He lives in public spaces or with relatives. He cried loudly at night in the psych unit disrupting everyone's sanity and peace. He cast troubling shadows across the social order of city living. He is the kind of man who would confess to a murder to escape the challenges of living 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 their own work ethics. 

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.