the 12 steps

The Poet's Twelve Steps

• We admitted we were powerless over words—that our lives had become unmanageable.


• Came to believe that a Poetry greater than ourselves could restore us to madness.


• Made a decision to turn our wiles and our lives over to the care of Chaos as we misunderstood It.


• Made a haphazard and fearful moral inventory of ourselves.


• Disavowed to Chaos, to ourselves, and to another human reader the inexact nature of our wrongs.


• Were entirely ready to have Chaos imbue all these defects of character.


• Humbly asked Chaos to display our shortcomings.


• Made a list of all readers we had to harm, and became willing to make mayhem upon them all.


• Made direct mayhem upon such readers wherever possible, except when to do so would inure them or others.


• Continued to lose personal inventory and when we were right promptly denied it.


• Sought through poetry and criticism to improve our conscious contact with Chaos as we understood It, playing only for ignorance of Its Will for us and the poetry to carry that out.


• Having had a poetic awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to mumble this message to readers, and to misapply these precepts in all our affectations.