John Cage was surrounded by sounds and their consequences throughout his life. His active and inventive relationship with sounds and silences of theworld reverberates in all practices in which he was involved. The different ways in which texts, poems, music, visual arts, films, performances, are written embody a poetics that is created by listening intensely to reality. Poetics which, in the exercise of their complexity, between order and contingency, sets in motion inventive and powerful ways to destabilize the world and their languages, and gives voice to other possible formations of communities. The following ten words have been chosen from his various works: circumstance, devotion, discipline, structure, imitation, indeterminacy, intention, interpenetration, method and notation. It is in those ten words that this text is written and inscribed, crossed by procedures and chances, putting into practice its ethical and aesthetic thinking.