Two Short Poems Written 3 Feb, 2026

Firebrand 

Tucking my dress into my pants
for anonymity. And bringing it out, unfurled like a flag
as I take the box connected to the megaphone.

Dead End

Disappearing into the woods never to be seen again
doesn't work: I have to be wherever I end up. 

Musings of a Troubled Seeker

 I have felt adrift recently. A few late nights, aimless drives, uneasy daysleeping. This is on the heels of some tumult in my life, and, I think, on the cusp of change.  One thing to come of this is a reexamination of my relation to magick. 

I decided to take up chaos magick a couple months back as a way to challenge my powerful tendency toward cynicism. I have always been a skeptic; attending Hebrew school as a child, and sitting in temple, I was never convinced. Not only that, I couldn’t understand how others believed in God. Not when it smacked so obviously of something we wish was true, that we invented ourselves to satisfy our existential fears. And of course, if God were real… Which one?

I still don’t think I have within me the capacity for belief in a higher power. But I also recognize that rationality is the product of imperialism, motivated and blinded by white supremacist egotism and greed. Empiricism is real, of course, but still limited by the blind spots inherent to the human condition.

So when science tells us that once we die, we simply cease to be people, become meat, to rot and feed worms, I think it’s reasonable to be untrusting. How can we be so sure? Isn’t it hubris to assume we can?

Hence chaos magick. I love Unknown Armies; it speaks to my soul as a weirdo, heterodox, out of alignment with the way society tells me I should be. In being a part of the game’s fan community I’ve learned how it draws on real modern and postmodern occultism, and moved through respect for it to curiosity on a personal level. 

A friend sent me some online reading to get me started, and I started with sigils. There was a clear step-by-step process to follow, and follow it I did, in good faith. Although I don’t think I quite believed at first, and so it didn’t work. And then, worse, it became a pattern, a thing I did because I Practice Chaos Magick, I Cast Spells By Burning Sigils. Surely any power that might have been present evaporated then.

But as I’ve been unmoored, or depressed, if you like, I have tried more honestly to open myself to chaos. No more trying to understand, only to allow it in, and to allow my will out. Last night, I upped my sigil game, driving the pattern I had drawn into the road and letting it fly out my wound-down window when I finished. I asked only for “new direction”, and let chaos fill in the rest. I believed that time. It remains to be seen if it worked.

Tonight’s experience, again in the dead of night, was sufficiently personal that I don’t wish to describe it outside of this: I came in contact with what I think of as a ghost. It was personal for us both. 

What I didn’t expect, but perhaps should have, was that this was not a good experience. Important, I think, but not pleasant, not spiritually enriching, even though I think that’s what I was hoping for. 

I’ve long been skeptical of “Lovecraftian horror”, not only because Lovecraft was an unbearably bad writer and, of course, sickeningly racist by the standards of any time, but because the whole concept strikes me as reactionary. Things beyond the “natural” world of humankind are impossible to understand and those who try are doomed to gibbering madness. Thus avoidance or destruction of the unknown (the unknown to characters who are sheltered, rich, cishet white men like Lovecraft saw himself, or wanted to) is the only reasonable course of action. Burn down Innsmouth. Run away from the cemetery. Don’t look back.

Because of this, I’m all the more unsettled not to find solace now that I find myself in touch with things I cannot explain in rational terms. In writing this, though, I’m reminded of my first time feeling something spiritual.

During the lowest point in my life, another member of the UA fan community sent me an MP3. This was an extremely obscure track, cited on the first page of the 2nd edition core book, from a band that must have been defunct for at least twenty years by the first time I heard their music. They were called Alpine Valley Mystery School. 

I couldn’t find the song whose lyrics Stolze and Tynes quoted online. Not even the name of it, nor of the band. After all, they must have heard it live in some dingy bar or club while drafting the book, somewhere in one of their hometowns. 

The lyrics quoted in the game book are fucked up, and the song is melancholic. Listening to it fed into my sadness at the time. I remember that I had just begun reconnecting with my mother while still homeless, miserable, and unmedicated. I tried to explain to her what this all meant to me, broke down crying, and genuinely scared her. But amid all of that, it was spiritual, to have gotten ahold of this song when I went out looking for it, to feel the emotions it brought me, to have it given from a secret source because I cared enough to seek it. And there was beauty in that for me, then and now.

Tonight’s experience had a little of that, too, even though I came home cold, just as anxious and confused as when I went out, and sadder than before. It’s quite possible I’m trying to wring a note of hope from another dark time in my life (albeit, thankfully, a rollicking celebration compared to the earlier anecdote). But even then, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

I’ve found some tension in trying to be open to forces beyond my control while still angling to get something specific out of the process. I haven’t got the hang of it, certainly. But I have at least had a spiritual experience, on purpose, and I think that’s something I should hold onto. At the very least.