A Chaos of Poets

A haibun

I call any group of poets “a chaos”

A Chaos of Poets

We are diverse because we’re postmodern poetry postmortem humans. We’re the amazing Technicolor multicultural Equal Opportunity Poet/POC/LGBTQA/DEI accident. We’re all overeducated, underemployed and unsuitably attractive. We’ve been challenged all our lives or had easy mode and are unpacking those invisible backpacks, Kroger bags, and Birkin bags now. We’ll help each other tote them bales, break those forms, submit to submission. Bring the bad days, the successes, your strangeness because we are a dysfunctional little family forged in challenges, a group avoiding Facebonk eye rolling. Bring your good, your great, your attempted poems dying to be free, bring your ancestors, your baggage carts, bring your love, your pain, your passion, bring your fears, your grief, the microagresssions, your endurance, your crimes and misdemeanors, your softness, your beautiful selves, your ragged selvages, bring out what you hide. Lean into the vulnerability, as that is where the strength comes from. share the warm glow of sub(mission) space, words bound in page, breathless to be read. Challenge us, damn it, push us! We will rise to it! We endure, exact the flogging of each piece to perfection, poems Cathars and cathartic. Each weft and warp of our hair shirts another letter to a world we do not belong in. Bring the madness to be honored and the spectres to be exorcized. Your flavor of crazy is the Special of the Week. Let’s refine it, until you feel it’s right and ready to release unto a terrible world that craves mediocrity as we peg the patriarchy (but not our friends who are unwilling), crush the kyriarchy, topple governments, and rob billionaires, while we do it. We will behave inappropriately and authentically until future generations read us in literature courses. We will speak the truth and our truths until they are heard. These are our lives. We have weapons and words. We endure. We persist. We are armed against real and imagined injustice. We are weaponized. Poetry is a weapon and a shield. Blank pages are never white flags of surrender. They are infinite possibilities and nexus lines. Let us cross portals together. We are infinite possibilities and outcomes. Dreamers of other worlds, wearing our Samsonite hard-sides like jewels. Our trauma bonds now stronger than covalence. Chaoses of poets are the center of the universe. And the center cannot hold all this wonderful weirdness. We chose this, as much as it chose us. We wait for the starting gun, the chime, we’ve warmed up all our lives. Now we are incendiary. We endure. We persist. We are armed with heavy metal armor piercing words. We are weaponized. We are weapons incarnate. We must reshape this universe. We are the future. We are the saints of sin. We are the fools. We are the prayer and prey. . We are the visionaries. We will rebuild every time. We love too much. We are the dreamers, expanding in dark matter. We are reshaping reality.

Blank page not white flags 

Infinite possibilities 

Weapon ink-stained with love.

"the muse and the age of the poet"

Jack Michael Weinblatt

"The Silent Voice" (1893) by Gerald Moira

Gerald Moira “The Silent Voice" (1893) is an inspired by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Two Voices. The poem explores psychomachia. The "two voices" representing contradictory thoughts—one of despair, urging death, the other of hope, urging perseverance.

The part of the poem that directed the painting reads:

"Thereto the silent voice replied;

'Self-blinded are you by your pride:

Look up thro' night: the world is wide.'”

Giorgio de Chirico - "The Poet and the Muse" (1971)

Salvador Dali, The Poet and the Muse

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