Is it urgency?
The prospect of a sudden predator
rearing up to
grab you as you try to run away?

Frenzy
pierces the self who
still hopes for the best,
who insists,
in trepidation,
that things can still
turn out okay

that one can slip and slide
through these tremors,
this trembling landscape,

take your shattered self and jittery children and make it safely to the other side

the other side of what?

Of what had become
unbearable
of what finally was
untenable
too risky after all.

The other side
of what had once been solid ground
or so we thought.

How could we so mistake the landscape?

This is chaos, we think.
Nothing is stable
everything is moving
in unexpected ways
that are somehow familiar —
maybe expected after all.

But chaos isn’t necessarily dangerous,
doesn’t impale the spirit,
the belief in
who we are in the world,
the surety of
the place we made in the world.

Chaos isn’t personal
it isn’t transitive.
It’s an environment we move in,
not our fault as we negotiate
its indifferent surprises,
cunning revelations.



Frenzy is different.
Frenzy conjures a predator
and we are the prey.
Frenzy is keenly purposive
focused
malevolent.

Frenzy is deeply personal,
profoundly transitive
sets fire to imagination.

We apprehend our most dangerous enemy — our worst imagined self.

We hear it
in the
‘I told you so’ of the mothers

The ‘it’s your own fault’
of the fathers

We drink it in, inhale its punishment

What’s the difference between chaos and frenzy?

The self
doubting itself

imagining the worst

and damning itself.