An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 2)

UPDATE: AN EDITOR HAS BEEN CONDITIONALLY SECURED

An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)

Early twenties—yes, “damaged” one might say—
beneath a Sponge-Bob ball cap and a beauty kept
by missed meals, a big tarot card—afroed ebony
Queen of Pentacles—inked in mere sailor green
on her left outer thigh, the self-proclaimed “bruja”
(IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Bruja”;
CashApp, posted all over, “$blaxicanbrujita”)
sits on her moon pod, an anti-anxiety beanbag
for adults, there in her Los Angeleno one-room
before a floor mirror, a full-length leaner, gazing 
into her own pupils—this, a meditation technique 
for learning herself and for purging self-loathing
(with the possible added benefit of warding off
resent toward what, more and more in tweets
on the stupidity of being born just to suffer,
she suggests is life itself, not just the capitalism
that alone suffices for her never having kids).

A stick of palo santo burns to cleanse her space
of residual (fart) energy from a Grubhub barrage
followed by a shame-making spell, two hours,
of shitposting, sativaed, on a manga subreddit
and hurting people she does not understand,
but feels are bad (mainly because their brainpower
makes her feel dumb), by reporting their tweets
or writing mean comments on their Substacks
from a troll account whose bio description,
although written out without much thought
(simply to fulfill the signup requirement), 
captures the nihilistic tonality of her heart
“Everything ends, everyone dies, nothing matters”—
exactly what, at least she herself would explain, 
a moody libra with a twelfth house ruled by libra 
would do, traumatized no doubt by past-life love
(unable to sit with her heartbeat, unsquirming;
unable to accept her heartbeat as her, unalien).

Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth iteration,
Spotify-loops silky from her pink iPhone Mini,
last night’s kohl smudged around her eyelids.
On the soundtrack to the film of her life—a film
in which she hopes to play herself like Eminem
and the screenplay for which she long ago began
stressing the wholesome bits (how in third grade,
in line with her idea of student-of-the-month code,
she wrote out the name of the only other classmate 
nominated for student of the month, feeling good
despite losing by one vote; or how in second grade,
and with no hint of poking fun, she mobilized 
friends to flood the dorky boy with valentines), 
yet cutting the sordid bits (how alone she sniffs
her pudendum-dipped fingers; or how one time,
several, she thought about diazepaming her cat 
and hanging herself; or how as a tween sitter
she would pinch the toddler’s nose and blow 
down its throat, watching the unease in its eyes
as it burped out its distention; or how in stores 
she would abandon her blind cousin a moment 
to watch his unease grow; or how she climaxes
best if she pictures herself a calico-gowned slave
being called “filthy nigger”)—this song is key:
it will be playing in the background (coming in
on her playlist right after the unplugged version
of Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the World”)
when on the toilet she passes what was in truth
a week-late clot, but what the film will suggest
was a pregnancy from a scuzzy modeling agent.
She has an entire Strathmore sketch pad filled
with charcoal spurts of psychography laying out
what on film will be mind-splintered flashbacks
to a red-wine dinner laced with more than just
claims of “You have potential in this industry”:
street curb, car horns, laughing, backseat, black;
zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;
ceiling twirl, air hunger, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;
shit taste, “All the way!,” chlorine smell, black;
vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;
dawn, car door, “Gotta watch them drinks,” black;
sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out out, come on”;
leg-heavy vomit, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;
head of thick soup, black, shower screaming.

The song’s last iteration had her mind wander 
from thoughts about how pretty her eyes look  
even without green contacts, to humbled awe 
at the Earth-sized red storm on Jupiter, to an idea
of something she was just about to diary down
had not a sudden shadow from a cloud, mistaken
for her dad, made both the idea and the plan itself
vanish: how with so little of the oceans explored
for all we know they harbor portals to deep space;
and how the Bermuda Triangle might be a portal,
which would explain why vessels seem to vanish;
and how perhaps aliens will invade from the sea
like the hand of God to smite us for our ways.

Before Cudi the loop was “Head Over Heels”
by Tears for Fears, a song imprinted upon her 
by the school-grounds sequence where it plays 
in Donnie Darko, a turn-of-the-millennium film 
set in the late eighties, which she had watched
around the time when self-harm hospitalization
among the first generation of non-free-range kids
already rewired by social media before puberty
began its still-climbing spike into today’s world
of chronic cortisol and chronic sleep disruption,
chronic exposure to unrealistic bodies and ideas,
chronic use of chronic to dampen the algorithms
that have college students scream in seizure fits
over campus speakers they never even have to see
and that have us so intolerant of my-truth dissent
that professors find themselves fired for tweeting
links to “wrong think”—a film she had watched  
in the spirit of the subreddit “im14andthisisdeep”
but which she never will know her uncle had on
as she cat-walked Barbies with her imaginary dad
(who visits her to this day, chokey in recent years
as she plays with herself) inside a blanket palace 
between the sofa and the loveseat, this song
drawing her head from the slit entrance to watch
that two-minute sequence of high-school kids
captivating for a little girl still in kindergarten.

Augmented by the barrage of flashback pop 
on radio stations in Grand Theft Auto, together 
with the TV series Stranger Things and especially
the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror, 
this song of friendzone infatuation stretches 
her nostalgia to a time (its trends, events, songs 
around which people dated and lost their jobs
and had children and died and watched TV) 
of when her mother was (incredibly) just a kid: 
the eighties, and its culture—which she grasps, 
like humans forming a picture of a hypercube, 
only by its shadow (when she even does at all)—
of card catalogues and neon-lit malls and arcades,
and of retro sunsets and Members-Only Jackets, 
and of trapper keepers and the Oregon Trail game,
and of staticky analog synth and grainy pixel art; 
and of Polaroid cameras and Atari and Nintendo,
and of “Be Kind Rewind” and “Just Say No,”
and of Care Bears and Walkmen and Aqua Net,
and of the futurist cityscape in Blade Runner,
and of shoulder pads and MTV and the Brat Pack.
Less Than Zero, in particular (one of the artifacts 
of which she has direct experience), stands out 
to her, capturing as it does her city as it once was:
Reagan coke and Spader and Robert Downey Jr.
Although too unconscious for her to verbalize,
it stands out to her, more importantly, because 
it speaks to something quite primitive in her—
as do as well Nirvana songs or Tarantino films
or even just the fleeting sight of anyone of those 
unleaded-gas latchkey kids now old, limping 
into the weed shop for arthritis, for insomnia.
Pro-“woke” and often railing against “geriatrics”
(tweeting “Can’t believe #geriatrics run the US/
Go to the damn light already you #victimizers/ 
Let the #youth make the US a #safespace for all/
fsfsfsfs lol bye”), she would never put it this way 
but it reminds her deep down—like wolves might
mollycoddled dogs, or like tribespeople might
first-world humans—that we were not always 
“wussies” hooked on comfort and reassurance, 
acting as if the world owes us, taking anything 
unnerving as trauma worthy of dire vengeance;
that we were not always reared in grade schools 
that ban the mere making of snowballs let alone 
joining in the toxic masculinity of tossing them;
that being traumatized was not always trending;
that we were not always so anxious to tattle
when our right not to be offended was violated; 
so medded out and helicoptered by guardians
giving out first-place trophies for showing up;
so hooked on screens and dependent on likes; 
so triggered, so personally offended, so ruined
by jokes and harsh facts of reality that we see to it
that comedians and teachers lose their livelihoods;
so gung ho to cancel anything that makes us—
or that we semi-pretend makes us—unsettled; 
so bitter about living in an unfriendly world,
one that does not always validate our feelings
or affirm our truth or accept how we self-identify,
that we are open to self-harm and even suicide 
to prove how accurate our victim narratives are
(perhaps in hope to be rescued by glitter families 
who will never hit us with nonpositive feedback).

Our brujita—yes, “dime-a-dozen” one might say— 
follows the palo santo with a bundle of sage twigs,
their sacred smoke—intermingling with her scent
of cocoa, copper coins, and beef—meant to purify 
the space while attracting more green into her life.
Part-time as a dispensary technician pays shit.
And no one really orders from her Depop page
of vintage, preloved, and reworked clothing
(y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,”
tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks,
cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams,
steampunk corsets, slips from the nineties—
all modeled by her: one hip often dipped low,
forcing the IT band of the jutted other to smoosh 
the bursa of her greater trochanter enough 
to make runway walking painful in ten years;
her forearm serpent fork-tonguing her left hegu,
that dime spot between thumb and forefinger
on the dorsal side of the hand, which she finds 
does kill pain anywhere when acupressured.
Few really order from her Redbubble shop
of iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Baby” 
and of Tamagotchi stickers, or stickers (often 
with associated images, like nail-polish bottles)
that say “Treat Yo Self,” “Blk Love,” “Cyber Bae,”  
“Witch in the Streets, Switch in the Sheets,”
and “Shy in the Streets, Freak in the Sheets”
or stickers—most commonly—of retrofuturism 
as captured in the cyan-and-magenta-dominant
neon pallet of Blade Runner: perfectly polished 
black-to-midnight-blue wireframe flatscapes 
of glowing gridlines (fuchsia, violet, steel blue)
reaching the horizon where, below a firmament
of dot stars, hovers a random triangle outline 
of radiant cyan, white smoke, and ghost white; 
a sixteen-bit supercar, like a Ferrari Testarossa,
with rear-window louvers reflecting the fuchsia
of a “Tokyo” skyline at Super-Nintendo dusk;
a midnight blue Malibu palm tree as foreground
to a huge retrowave sunset with a color gradient
from indian red on the bottom to golden yellow,
its bottom half cut by thicker-to-thinner lines
(the gradient here from dark magenta to tomato),
simulating its partial dipping below the horizon.
Only about two hundred subscribers she has
for her YouTube, where she vlogs on topics
like marijuana strains and cryptocurrency 
and using gaming worlds for manifestation—
having our Sims avatars live out, for example,
our dream romances or careers or experiences 
can séance such possibilities into existence
“more powerfully than our role models even,”
she says, “because our avatars are versions
of us, rather than strangers on social media.”
And the clients for her solo-and-nipples-only 
Only Fans, an account she has not logged into
“in like a year,” are cheap—hers at least, made up 
mainly of boys ready to fall for anyone, let alone 
a melanated Gen Z Bambi-eyed in cosplay wigs
whom, over years of Twitch-streaming herself
playing Grand Theft Auto, they watched change
from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair covering one eye
Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity black,
Cosmo-driven texting of flirt emojis to crushes;
Cosmo-driven whispering so boys will lean in)
and now to botanical-divination pre-med dropout 
(face echoing an aging uncertainty as to whether 
her recent dates have been culminating in rape). 

And for whatever it might be worth to mention,
in many of the countless alternative realities close 
to actual reality (that is, in many of the worlds
between the world where everything is the same,
meaning she still pinches her nose to go underwater
and daily checks the “raised by narcissists” subreddit
and nightly binges “lucky-scoop” TikTok livestreams 
of Chinese women shoveling out A-minus crystals 
(towers, [sa-FEARS]) from rice tumblers for US buyers 
and plans to take curanderismo classes on Coursera,
and dissociates in the face of intrusive thoughts
and thinks Mercury’s position shapes her mood
and sleeps with plushies that need to be washed
and hides crystals in her friends’ rooms and vapes
and bites her lip skin and cannot parallel park
and burdens those close to her with her hyper fears
and feels her body is too animal, too unanchored
to her, too menacing in its odors and cravings
and vulnerabilities and girlie-fantasy-breaking
pimples and cellulite, to count as under her control,
and the world where, although still obsessed
with corralling her life events into a screenplay, 
she has for her eating disorder an anonymous IG
whose description is a Simone-de-Beauvoir quote 
misattributed to Betty Friedan (“No one is more 
arrogant toward women, more . . . scornful, 
than the man who is anxious about his virility”)
and where her side gigs include clinical-trial subject,
dog-sitter, and haloperidoled Horror-zine editor
calling for gut-punching Lovecraftian submissions 
especially from nonwhite and nonhetero writers
who depict neither neurodivergent characters 
striving to become neurotypical nor any animals
getting injured across the body of their writings)—
in many of these possible worlds near her own
she had already burst forth from a fake cake
(topless like in that Seagal movie Under Siege, 
nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond
the little-girl diameters they share in actuality)
to dance for some bachelor party (a hand job 
for one persistent tipper turning into hand jobs 
for most of the others who, feeling left out on what
they convinced themselves came with the package, 
demanded entry into the hotel bathroom too),
her self-flesh dissociation keeping intact 
her self-identity despite the sadistic hair-tugging
by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.

Next to her snake plant, in bloat sweatpants,
our witch (she/her, but if born only five years 
later they/them)—yes, “gullible” one might say—
French inhales a sativa from a Raw-brand cone 
to snap a messy-sexy mirror selfie for her Tumblr.
Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed
to look like a pixel-art version of her own desk
but with plum shades like #dea4ee and #ce94df,
serves as a manifestation board mainly of images:
fanned-out hundreds, Schiaparelli haute couture,
black cats, tea leaves, druzy gems, seven-day candles,
old bridges of moss stone over rainy-day streams,
dried hinojo sticks for gas and bruised cervixes,
dried hamula for gallbladder pain and carpet burns,
dried diente de león for heartache and vulvodynia, 
dried barba de elote for urinary tract infections,
dried yellow dock root for Bartholin-gland cysts,
dried sangre de drago for sores and anal fissures,
cash emojis, plant emojis, crystal-ball emojis, 
Hello-Kitty jewelry, purses, tiaras, makeup gear, 
Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton,
a somewhat-braggy record of her rare modeling gigs,
fat stars “gorgeous” on red carpets, perfected pouts,
stills of anime girls in panties with heart eyes
pulsing, the occasional manacle, sexy scenes
of shirtless men chokey but not too rough—
and, yes, emoji spells of her own concoction.
Crystal ball, candle, cash, credit card, two houses 
(one without a tree and then one with a tree)
closed by candle and crystal ball—that is a spell,
for instance, for financial freedom and a home.
Crystal ball, candle, scissor, flame, bridge and then
flame, scissor, candle, crystal ball—that is a spell
for cutting ties with all negative things or people. 

Seated still, she twists around her SpongeBob hat
and leans in to exhale on Pothos, her black cat,
tail wavey in a sun slice among stuffed animals
tinged with testicle musk on her bed, twin-sized
under a pheasant-feathered dream catcher bought
from Taos Navajos, and a fringed dream satchel,
nubuck with a color print of noble buffalo, hung 
to recharge in the full moon slated for tonight—
garnet, amethyst, sodalite, and mugwort inside:
mugwort to help morning recall of her dreams,
sodalite to help avoid panic and nightmare,
amethyst to help stay in deep sleep longer,
garnet to help keep suicidal thoughts at bay. 

Her clear quartz pendant, wellspring of clarity,
dangles free of her chest as she leans in paused.
Its facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi,
one good sip left in the bottle standing beside
a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and Liber Null,
the defining book on chaos magic, open, spine up 
and highlighted pink and green as if homework—
margin stars too, especially on the last passage 
she read: “Put a brick through your television; 
explore sexualities which are unusual to you. 
Do something you normally feel to be” (and here
the words are circled in pen) “utterly revolting,”
“no matter how extreme.” A sudden insight,
one the shimmering of the quartz demands
she diary down, has her forget the selfie plan.
She pushes aside a book Babalawo, source 
of guilt since she keeps falling asleep on it, 
to take up her diary, ignoring another source
of guilt: the card sticking out of it. (That card
is a love spell to herself, Venus petitioned  
for solidarity. “I embrace who I am,” it says
in her cursive. “Love is my birthright. My words
are a spell. Remember, the more I love myself,
take care of myself, the less I depend on love 
from others.” Once she gets some rosewater
from Amazon, which she keeps putting off,
she can finish the ritual: voicing the words
before bed in the light of a rose-oil candle
echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card,
sprinkled with rosewater, under her pillow 
until morning, at which point she will hang it
(a pink ribbon threaded through the middle)
in ample sun, most likely next to the photo,
her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a trigger 
of depression but now one of empowerment.

The diary sits on her lap, as if poised for opening. 
The joint smothers itself out, propped against
her crystal pipe—aventurine, green for money— 
kicked from her spell of guilt-burger shitposting.
Below a desktop shelf with books that range
from the feminine-healing guide Sacred Woman
and the #metoo historical novel Blood Water Paint
to Junji Ito’s Remina and Uzumaki manga series,
her PC-gaming monitor, flanked by unlit candles
that say “Black Girl Magic,” displays a 3d avatar
of herself in a black plunge-top dress, one hand
resting on her iliac crest—hyperreal (but lacking
eyebags and acne). She designed it with Blender,
graphics software she hopes to use in the future
for what she calls “metaverse fashion modeling.” 

Her diary, in the center a mini headshot of her
from one of those girlie instant-camera reboots
(green hair in two buns at the top like Chun Li,
warm-pink lip gloss named “Nymphette A40”
one rhinestone sticker below each lower eyelid),  
is zodiac-decaled and sharpied with positives—
what she calls “Princess Energy Affirmations”— 
such as “Money comes to me effortlessly”
and “I attract all forms of green into my life”
and “My skin color and hair texture are pretty”
and “Princess treatment is my NORMAL!”
and “I’m the very definition of an IT girl”
and “But I’m just too glam to give a damn”
and “I know I’m meant for so much more”
and “Abundance flows to me with ease.”

With rare neglect of her reflection, high-stuck
in the full-body mirror, in the diary—beneath 
two all-uppercase commitments to herself
(“I will practice on Blender and Python daily”
and “I will date myself, buy myself chocolate,
and take myself to the movies”), followed by
cramped scribbles of explanation to herself
(“My standards are high because I already have
everything I need” and “Napping is okay.
That’s what the great ancestors wished 
they got a chance to enjoy”), followed by
a romantic goal (dropping acid in the Rockies 
with her future husband) preceded never by
explicit discussion of her predawn suspicion 
that her dates rarely call back not because
of a lack of beauty or dreams, but because
of a pettiness and a pot-headed depressiveness
on top of a genital malodor that daily coconut oil
and raw garlic cloves inserted before bed
and fenugreek teas and vinegar shots
and boric-acid suppositories and yogurt baths
and goldenseal-slippery-elm-bark capsules,
she fears, might only make worse—she writes:
“Like literally, for real, I can be in my head
delusional asf, like this shit’s just a dream.
The delusional are happier. Call it irrational.
Fine. But isn’t it rational if it improves my life?
The personas we develop are delusions anyway.
They keep us sane to go to work each day
knowing the universe approaches heat death.
Let my delusions be scarecrows to frighten 
any ‘reality’ seeking to devour my crop: ME.
To cast out demons, especially if those demons
are ‘realities,’ requires a witch’s highest magic. 
I am a witch. I will shut my mind from realities
no good for me to hear. I will hypnotize myself.
‘They are just opinion. Just OPINION. 
I am my own mother. I am my own mother. 
I am the programmer. My decisions, my style,
come not from anything that transcends me.
I do not exist as an instrument of anyone but me.
I am self-sufficient. My destiny is my own. 
I am too vital to the universe ever to decay.
Nothing can stop my victory over reality.
I will live in my own girlie-fantasy world
of skincare and shopping and lip gloss.’
For real, it gets so easy, clear, once you accept
fantasy as the only real reality. GOD MODE.
Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads—
I’m the one who lets them be real or not!”


*Author’s note.—At first I was iffy about the Gen-Z(odiac) character in “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k).” I found it easy to write her off as one of those pathetic social-media bullies (the suburban cop callers of the digital age) who—even if it takes libel and slander—will report any account, especially if nonblack-owned, that “triggers her” or “does not reflect her values.” The type is now well known: one of those boilerplate my-truthers, faking fragility for power and attention, common on college campuses (especially since the political rise of Trump and the subsequent reaction on the left about the dangers of free expression). Her love of astrology and healing crystals and tarot, all of which seem a cover for a depressive nihilism, are particularly upsetting. She seems to believe they are congruent with black power when in truth, as too with the liquor and drugs she enjoys, they are poisonous to blacks—and to all people whose generational oppression has kept them in an educational darkness that makes them susceptible to such scams. But even if she is emblematic of US disintegration to pre-Enlightenment superstition (as China becomes the dominant world power), it is clear she is suffering and—shallow as all hell (uncritical, obsessed with makeup and designer handbags and shimmer mists and shoes, thriving on gossip and drama)—knows not what poison she spreads. Indeed, I find my respect for her grow as she lingers in my mind. Her innocence is a factor. Her hard work is a factor. That she has dreams is a factor. That she wants to improve herself is a factor. Perhaps the main thing, though, is my belief in her potential to do much good in the world if she can break free of her addiction to this ethos of victimhood and vengeance and magical thinking that makes her, despite what she thinks, so unoriginal and toxic.

*This poem, again, is waiting for help (which I will pay for)