An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 3)

Let's workshop this poem about a young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, social expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasy

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An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time . . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Might one call her “damaged”—un-early twenties; 
eyes bloodshot beneath a Sponge-Bob cap; beauty
fed by missed meals; a bold tarot card (afroed ebony 
Queen of Pentacles) hipster-inked in mere sailor green
on a caramel thigh? Our self-anointed “metaverse bruja”
(IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Brujita”;
CashApp, fluttering cyberspace, “$blaxicanbrujita”)
sits erect on her moon pod, an anti-anxiety beanbag
for adults, there in her Los Angeleno sunlit studio
before a floor mirror (a full-length leaner), gazing
far into her glassy pupils—this, a mindfulness ritual
for seeking the little girl and for purging self-loathing
(yes, with the possible added benefit of warding off
the bitter bile toward what, more and more in tweets
on the absurd jest of having been “born just to suffer,”
she suggests is reality itself, not just the capitalism
whose cruelty itself suffices for her never having kids).

A stick of palo santo smolders sacred whisps to cleanse
residual guilt (and fart) energy from a Grubhub barrage
that fed into a shame-making rabbit hole, two hours lost 
in a sativa frenzy: first shitposting on a manga subreddit;
then, after lip-bite clitoral smacks, trying to hurt people
she does not care to understand and yet feels are evil
(mainly because their brainpower makes her feel dumb)
by reporting tweets and tremble-typing mean comments
(same lip bite) from a troll account whose amygdala bio,
although (because?) written with little thought, captures
the nihilistic tonality of her knotted heart (“People lie 
and leave. Everything ends. Everyone dies, nothing matters”)—
sad actions but exactly what, she herself would explain, 
any moody Aries with a twelfth house ruled by Aries 
would do her situation, traumatized by past-life love
(unable to sit at peace with her heartbeat, unsquirming;
unable to embrace her heartbeat as her own, unalien).

Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth reverberation,
Spotify-loops hauntingly from her pink iPhone Mini,
last night’s kohl smudged around her leaden eyelids.
On the soundtrack to the film of her life—a film
in which she hopes to play herself (think: Eminem)
and the screenplay for which she long ago began
stressing the wholesome bits (like how in third grade,
in line with her notion 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 like how in second grade,
and with not even a hint of poking fun, she mobilized 
her friends to shower the “dorky” boy with valentines),
yet cutting out the sordid bits (like how alone she sniffs
pudendum-dipped digits, slick; or like how one time,
several really, she thought about diazepaming her cat 
and then hanging herself; or like how as a tween sitter
she would pinch the toddler’s nose with pussy fingers
and blow down its throat, watching unease in its eyes
as it burped out its distention; or like how in stores 
she would abandon her blind cousin for a moment
to watch his unease grow; or like how she climaxes best 
if she pictures herself a calico-gowned slave torn apart
while being called “filthy nigger”)—this song is key.
In the film it will play in the background (coming in
on her playlist after “The Man Who Sold the World”
(Nirvana’s Unplugged version) as she doubles over,
knock-kneed on the toilet, passing what is in truth
a late menstrual clot, but what the film will suggest
was the blastula of a scuzzy modeling agent who called
her skin “caramel.” She has a Strathmore sketch pad,
awash with charcoal spurts of psychography, laying out
what on film will appear as mind-splintered flashbacks
to a Beaujolais-wine dinner laced with more than just
musky claims of “You have potential in this industry”:
street curb, car horns, muted laughing, backseat, black;
slow zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;
ceiling twirl, more ripping, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;
shit taste, air hunger, “All the way!,” pool smell, black;
sour vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;
then dawn, car door, “Gotta watch them drinks,” black;
cruel sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out, come on”;
fawn-buckling legs, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;
head of thick soup, black, curled up shower screams.

The last iteration of the song had her mind meander 
from thoughts about how striking her eyes look even
without her usual green contacts, to humbled awe
at the red tempest (Earth-sized) on Jupiter, to an idea—
a half-baked epiphany—she was about to diary down
had not an unexpected shadow from a cloud, mistaken
for her dad, made the idea (and the plan to jot it out)
vanish: how with so little of Earth’s oceans explored
for all we know they harbor galactic portals, swirling;
and how the Bermuda Triangle might be such a portal,
which would explain why vessels whirlpool from light;
and how perhaps aliens will invade from the depths
like some zombie hand of God to smite us for our ways.

Before “By Design” the loop was “Head Over Heels”
by Tears for Fears, a love song imprinted deep in her
by the famous school-grounds sequence where it plays 
in Donnie Darko, a turn-of-the-millennium film (set
after the Regan eighties) that our brujita had watched
right around the time when self-harm hospitalizations
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 rub-smacks her clit) inside a blanket palace 
between the sofa and the loveseat, this anthem
drawing her head from the slit entrance to watch
that two-minute sequence of high-school kids
captivating for a little girl just beyond kindergarten.

Augmented by the flashback pop music of GTA radio,
along with Netflix’s Stranger Things and Black Mirror
(the “San Junipero” episode, in particular), this song
about friendzone infatuation stretches her nostalgia
before her time to a time (its trends, events, songs 
around which people dated and lost car keys and jobs
and had children and died and watched TV like now) 
when her mother was (incredibly for her) just a kid:
that big-hair time, and its culture—which she grasps, 
like humans trying to form a picture of a hypercube, 
only by its shadow (when she even does at all)—
of card catalogues and neon malls and token 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 flapping and Atari joysticks clicking,
and of beeps and boops in wood-panel basements, 
and of acid-wash jeans and Garbage Pail stickers,
and of “Be Kind Rewind” and “Just Say No,”
and of Arnold’s “Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?" 
and of “It's 10 PM, do you know where your children are?"
and of Care Bears and Walkmen and Aqua-Net coughing,
and of the futurist cityscape glowing 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 in her mind:
Reagan coke, Spader and Robert Downey Jr. hickeys.
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 and Tarantino films
and even just the fleeting sight of anyone of those 
unleaded-gas knee-scraped latchkey kids now limping 
into the weed shop for arthritis relief, 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 unswaddling 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 hallowed 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 few but tumbleweeds roll through her Depop page
selling “vintage, preloved, and reworked” clothing
(upcycled y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,”
tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks,
cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams,
steampunk corsets, sexy 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 
non-metaverse 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 anything from her Redbubble shop
listing iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Babygirl” 
along with 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.
Few more than a hundred follow her wellness woo
on YouTube, where she vlogs on various matters:
chakra teas, marijuana strains, horoscopes, bitcoin,
and even using gaming worlds for manifestation.
“Having our Sims avatars live out,” she tells viewers,
“our dream romances and careers and experiences—
that can literally séance such possibilities into reality.
It can do so more powerfully than role models even,
which makes sense because our avatars are versions
of us, rather than some 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 GTA, they watched with the Cheeto fingers
change from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair over one eye
Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity obsidian,
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). 

Consider the infinite alternate realities close this one.
Consider, more specifically, the many worlds between,
on the one hand, our actual world where our brujita
is the same—and so 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, on the other hand, the world where, although 
still obsessed with corralling her life 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).
Now, for whatever it might be worth to mention,
in many of these possible worlds near her own
she has already jumped out from an artificial cake
(topless just like in that Seagal movie Under Siege, 
tight nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond
the little-yearling diameters they share in actuality)
to dance for bills at some bachelor party (a hand job 
for one persistent tipper whirling 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 as well, 
reeking of booze and musk and stomped cigarettes)—
her self-flesh dissociation in the pulsation of music,
unmuted each time the door opened, keeping intact 
her self-identity through the sadistic hair-tugging
by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.

Sitting 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 easily say—
French inhales a sativa strain from a cone (Raw-brand)
to snap a messy-sexy mirror-pout selfie for her Tumblr.
Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed
to look like a pixel-art rendition 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 Lolita anime girls in panties with heart eyes
pulsing, the occasional manacle, kinky scenes
of shirtless men chokey and yet 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
(she thinks) from Taos Navajos, and a dream satchel,
fringed 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 recollection of her dreams,
sodalite to help avoid panic attacks and nightmares,
amethyst to help remain in deep sleep below dreams,
garnet to help keep down intrusive thoughts of suicide. 

Her clear quartz pendant (resin), wellspring of clarity,
dangles free of her chest as she leans in—paused, stuck.
Its machine facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi,
one sip left (to avoid guilt). The bottle stands beside
a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and her bible Liber Null,
the defining book on chaos magic. It sits open (spine up),
highlighted pink and green and blue as if homework—
margin stars and all, especially on the passage she finds
most moving. “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 deep pen—“utterly revolting,”
“no matter how extreme” [(“No matter how” she writes)].

A sudden insight snaps her from what does not recall
in its demand to be written down. Worried it will pass,
she pushes aside another key book Babalawo (source,
however, 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,
care for myself, the less I depend on love from others.” 
Once she buys some rosewater from Amazon, 
yet another amount the countless things she keeps 
putting off, she can finish the ritual: voicing the words
before bed in the flickering light of a rose-oil candle 
echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card, sprinkled
with finger-flicked rosewater, under her pillow 
until morning, at which point she must hang it
(a pink ribbon threaded through the middle)
in ample sun, most likely next to the teen photo,
her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a depression trigger
but now, having lost all the flab, 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 holding 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.
Isn’t that 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:
skincare and shopping and lip gloss (all that).
I am the central character in the universe.”
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),” a modern young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, societal expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasies. 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.

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