Tom Beckett
ANDSWERVING FRAGMEANTS
1.
I should get started.
2.
You have started something in me. Something which I would like to show you.
3.
Am I capable of showing anyone anything? Who says one can’t answer a question with another question?
4.
My range of voice, levels of usage; the uneasy correspondence of this so called self’s template to the position of color components, journal entries.
I rarely know what to say, rarely know if I have said what I have had to say adequately, and have an extraordinarily hard time making my feelings plain within the constellations of utterances I move within.
5.
I am marked by you. Are you marked too?
6.
What keeps us apart is a part of who we are.
7.
You’re an image. I’m a mirror.
You’re a voice. I’m an ear.
8.
What one is subtracted from is more than the sum of our understanding.
9.
The side I choose doesn’t locate me.
Whatever I do doesn’t, of necessity, make me real to myself.
Whatever I do isn’t actually apparent to me.
A parent to me?
10.
Shadows: dark traces we leave behind us. (Partial representations of forms, our forms.) They (these shadows) erect a nebulous staircase of potential obsessions.
11.
Things said, realized, recognized over and over again. What has been discovered before is discovered anew. This is remarkable and it makes trouble.
12.
I think my penis is a girl.
13.
I find myself in the folds of feeling lost.
14.
I believe in intersections above everything.
15.
Encounters, obstacles, vocabulary problems, cognitive dissonance, shattering recognitions, malapropisms, maledictions are the keywords and concepts I navigate by. These keywords and concepts project my relation to you.
16.
My list of my sense of the census of things, states of affect I am connected to, is infinitely small.
17.
Size is a consequence of weather.
18.
Whatever is plural.
Whatever is meant by “whatever,”
however often it is said.
19.
I vibrate situationally when confronted.
20.
I care about others. This is a problem for me as an individual.
It is also a philosophical and poetic problem.
It’s work.
21.
I do have strong feelings about “individualism,” “capitalism,” and “dissent.”
22.
As for myself, the sentences I extrude are the ladders which take me to the edge of intelligibility.
All I can do for myself (and no other) is to try and test each rung.
23.
What I might be able to do for you and not myself is to
mirror you,
establish your presence.
24.
That I am I and you you
seems incontestable, but impossible at the same time. I understand that there are boundaries between us, but I have no clue how to locate them. Or to alter them.
I just know that I want you
in me.
25.
The dimension of change is all
encompassing.
26.
Surrender means discovering the others rooting in me.
27.
Whatever one consumes is all consuming.
That which is taken in will out.
28.
My political boundaries are nothing but the social limits I move within, the constraints which structure my days.
29.
My textual/linguistic/cognitive boundaries are my lingerie.
30.
To recognize, being recognized – there’s no reciprocity between the two states -- yet aren’t these states among the bases of love. It’s not a question.
31.
If I were to stand before you and open my mouth I’d likely have nothing
to say.
So I dream of kneeling before you with an open mouth, having nothing to say and everything to prove.
32.
Listening is a form of submission. Ears are anuses. Ears are cunts.
Stick your fucking words in me. Wiggle them around.
33.
No.
34.
Writing is sex.
35.
Speech is oral sex.
36.
I have no fucking idea.
37.
To see what someone is saying would be like sculpting a sonata out of gelatin.
38.
I’ve often thought I’m speaking to no one. I’ve often thought myself flaccid in the Others’ ears.
39.
I want to be available to you.
40.
I want to be present.
41.
Yes.
42.
The future is available to a comparative few.
43.
Too much.
44.
Nothing.
45.
My personae, my embodied questions, those fragments of experience which I can recognize as my own, however evanescent.
46.
No one (the only one whom takes pleasure in me).
47.
I don’t know that I can rise to the occasion, but I will tell you this: the secret I would tell you has been told many times before, by many others.
What seems of singular importance to me, earth shattering in its personal significance, means little to anyone else. I am often uncertain as to whether I exist.
48.
Every molecule of matter, every utterance is a consequence of desire.
49.
Poetry is amorous or it fails.
50.
I love you.
51.
Yes.
52.
Right here. Right now.
53.
If consciousness could be mapped no one would be able to read the Map of Consciousness.
One would be unsure what one is looking at.
54.
I am always unsure of what I have just done. Did I say that out loud?
55.
I’ve thought a lot about repetition.
56.
One repeats oneself in infinite numbers of ways. For example:
Alphabetically,
Breathing,
Caustically,
Damnably,
Emphatically,
Foolishly,
Grunting,
Heaving,
Intermittently,
Joyfully,
Kindly,
Lovingly,
Musically,
Naughtily,
etc.
57.
The 24/7 news cycle breeds monsters.
58.
It’s not that I believe in hierarchies of experience so much as I believe in those among us who are paying attention and paying back.
59.
Whenever I’ve said the word “hegemony” out loud I’ve been repaid with puzzled looks.
60.
The thought of what America
The thought of what America
The thought of what America
Would be like
If my unpublished book EXPOSURES
Had wide circulation
Troubles my sleep
61.
I want to be filled, overfilled, overflow.
62.
I aspire to live at the intersection of thought and feeling.
I aspire to give myself away to the first taker.
I always fail.
63.
Agency is porous to the environment—that’s eco- not ego-system.
64.
Art is attention and accident.
65.
Incomplete thoughts.
66.
I’m not aware of any certainties.
67.
Boundaries are everything, in a sense.
68.
The blur in blurb. Praise raises fuzzy questions.
69.
There’s no more consensus in the world of poetry and art than there is any other field of endeavor.
70.
To name names in a poem is to invoke community, to make a political statement.
It is an affective act.
[Even if you’re listing the names of your enemies (see Dante).]
71.
I either watch too much TV or don’t masturbate enough. Unless, of course, I have that reversed.
72.
How much is enough is the question. It’s really not about one thing or an other. It’s not about the Other. It’s about becoming other.
73.
When one speaks the ventriloquist speaks too.
74.
Voices, shadows, everything.
75.
Art is alteration and the limitlessness of limits.
76.
Art is an irritable series of attempts to achieve access to iteration within an excess of history.
77.
I’m a skeptical person.
78.
What I want from a poem is much the same as what I want from a person: engagement and a certain frisson.
79.
In the beginning, when I was young, poetry began for me as a surrogate for sex. It’s not so different now. Except, perhaps, I’ve learned a little. Maybe my technique’s better. I don’t know.
80.
Poetry writing is a form of substance abuse.
I can’t find my connection often enough.
81.
The we in “this” moment is severely attenuated.
82.
Sadly, we’re apart.
83.
Goodbye, Columbus.
84.
This is an inexact talk.
85.
Piano.
86.
Actually, to be honest, kissing is my favorite sex act.
87.
Lists and collage are my syntax and grammar. I come alive within active juxtapositions.
88.
I should be naked (always (never).
89.
The t-shirt in question was homemade for the event. It was a black garment with white block letter printing. In the front it read: WHAT DO I KNOW? In the back it read: WHAT SHOULD I DO? I thought of it as the sandwich board of quandary I exist between when I sit myself down to write. I love it but have thus far had only one opportunity to wear it in public. It is my lucky poetry reading shirt. It waits in a drawer.
90.
Why do I always have to ask?
91.
Right wing ideologues are mean-spirited bastards because they have learned to delight in the unprincipled nature of so-called reality.
92.
No.
Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.
previous page contents next page
1.
I should get started.
2.
You have started something in me. Something which I would like to show you.
3.
Am I capable of showing anyone anything? Who says one can’t answer a question with another question?
4.
My range of voice, levels of usage; the uneasy correspondence of this so called self’s template to the position of color components, journal entries.
I rarely know what to say, rarely know if I have said what I have had to say adequately, and have an extraordinarily hard time making my feelings plain within the constellations of utterances I move within.
5.
I am marked by you. Are you marked too?
6.
What keeps us apart is a part of who we are.
7.
You’re an image. I’m a mirror.
You’re a voice. I’m an ear.
8.
What one is subtracted from is more than the sum of our understanding.
9.
The side I choose doesn’t locate me.
Whatever I do doesn’t, of necessity, make me real to myself.
Whatever I do isn’t actually apparent to me.
A parent to me?
10.
Shadows: dark traces we leave behind us. (Partial representations of forms, our forms.) They (these shadows) erect a nebulous staircase of potential obsessions.
11.
Things said, realized, recognized over and over again. What has been discovered before is discovered anew. This is remarkable and it makes trouble.
12.
I think my penis is a girl.
13.
I find myself in the folds of feeling lost.
14.
I believe in intersections above everything.
15.
Encounters, obstacles, vocabulary problems, cognitive dissonance, shattering recognitions, malapropisms, maledictions are the keywords and concepts I navigate by. These keywords and concepts project my relation to you.
16.
My list of my sense of the census of things, states of affect I am connected to, is infinitely small.
17.
Size is a consequence of weather.
18.
Whatever is plural.
Whatever is meant by “whatever,”
however often it is said.
19.
I vibrate situationally when confronted.
20.
I care about others. This is a problem for me as an individual.
It is also a philosophical and poetic problem.
It’s work.
21.
I do have strong feelings about “individualism,” “capitalism,” and “dissent.”
22.
As for myself, the sentences I extrude are the ladders which take me to the edge of intelligibility.
All I can do for myself (and no other) is to try and test each rung.
23.
What I might be able to do for you and not myself is to
mirror you,
establish your presence.
24.
That I am I and you you
seems incontestable, but impossible at the same time. I understand that there are boundaries between us, but I have no clue how to locate them. Or to alter them.
I just know that I want you
in me.
25.
The dimension of change is all
encompassing.
26.
Surrender means discovering the others rooting in me.
27.
Whatever one consumes is all consuming.
That which is taken in will out.
28.
My political boundaries are nothing but the social limits I move within, the constraints which structure my days.
29.
My textual/linguistic/cognitive boundaries are my lingerie.
30.
To recognize, being recognized – there’s no reciprocity between the two states -- yet aren’t these states among the bases of love. It’s not a question.
31.
If I were to stand before you and open my mouth I’d likely have nothing
to say.
So I dream of kneeling before you with an open mouth, having nothing to say and everything to prove.
32.
Listening is a form of submission. Ears are anuses. Ears are cunts.
Stick your fucking words in me. Wiggle them around.
33.
No.
34.
Writing is sex.
35.
Speech is oral sex.
36.
I have no fucking idea.
37.
To see what someone is saying would be like sculpting a sonata out of gelatin.
38.
I’ve often thought I’m speaking to no one. I’ve often thought myself flaccid in the Others’ ears.
39.
I want to be available to you.
40.
I want to be present.
41.
Yes.
42.
The future is available to a comparative few.
43.
Too much.
44.
Nothing.
45.
My personae, my embodied questions, those fragments of experience which I can recognize as my own, however evanescent.
46.
No one (the only one whom takes pleasure in me).
47.
I don’t know that I can rise to the occasion, but I will tell you this: the secret I would tell you has been told many times before, by many others.
What seems of singular importance to me, earth shattering in its personal significance, means little to anyone else. I am often uncertain as to whether I exist.
48.
Every molecule of matter, every utterance is a consequence of desire.
49.
Poetry is amorous or it fails.
50.
I love you.
51.
Yes.
52.
Right here. Right now.
53.
If consciousness could be mapped no one would be able to read the Map of Consciousness.
One would be unsure what one is looking at.
54.
I am always unsure of what I have just done. Did I say that out loud?
55.
I’ve thought a lot about repetition.
56.
One repeats oneself in infinite numbers of ways. For example:
Alphabetically,
Breathing,
Caustically,
Damnably,
Emphatically,
Foolishly,
Grunting,
Heaving,
Intermittently,
Joyfully,
Kindly,
Lovingly,
Musically,
Naughtily,
etc.
57.
The 24/7 news cycle breeds monsters.
58.
It’s not that I believe in hierarchies of experience so much as I believe in those among us who are paying attention and paying back.
59.
Whenever I’ve said the word “hegemony” out loud I’ve been repaid with puzzled looks.
60.
The thought of what America
The thought of what America
The thought of what America
Would be like
If my unpublished book EXPOSURES
Had wide circulation
Troubles my sleep
61.
I want to be filled, overfilled, overflow.
62.
I aspire to live at the intersection of thought and feeling.
I aspire to give myself away to the first taker.
I always fail.
63.
Agency is porous to the environment—that’s eco- not ego-system.
64.
Art is attention and accident.
65.
Incomplete thoughts.
66.
I’m not aware of any certainties.
67.
Boundaries are everything, in a sense.
68.
The blur in blurb. Praise raises fuzzy questions.
69.
There’s no more consensus in the world of poetry and art than there is any other field of endeavor.
70.
To name names in a poem is to invoke community, to make a political statement.
It is an affective act.
[Even if you’re listing the names of your enemies (see Dante).]
71.
I either watch too much TV or don’t masturbate enough. Unless, of course, I have that reversed.
72.
How much is enough is the question. It’s really not about one thing or an other. It’s not about the Other. It’s about becoming other.
73.
When one speaks the ventriloquist speaks too.
74.
Voices, shadows, everything.
75.
Art is alteration and the limitlessness of limits.
76.
Art is an irritable series of attempts to achieve access to iteration within an excess of history.
77.
I’m a skeptical person.
78.
What I want from a poem is much the same as what I want from a person: engagement and a certain frisson.
79.
In the beginning, when I was young, poetry began for me as a surrogate for sex. It’s not so different now. Except, perhaps, I’ve learned a little. Maybe my technique’s better. I don’t know.
80.
Poetry writing is a form of substance abuse.
I can’t find my connection often enough.
81.
The we in “this” moment is severely attenuated.
82.
Sadly, we’re apart.
83.
Goodbye, Columbus.
84.
This is an inexact talk.
85.
Piano.
86.
Actually, to be honest, kissing is my favorite sex act.
87.
Lists and collage are my syntax and grammar. I come alive within active juxtapositions.
88.
I should be naked (always (never).
89.
The t-shirt in question was homemade for the event. It was a black garment with white block letter printing. In the front it read: WHAT DO I KNOW? In the back it read: WHAT SHOULD I DO? I thought of it as the sandwich board of quandary I exist between when I sit myself down to write. I love it but have thus far had only one opportunity to wear it in public. It is my lucky poetry reading shirt. It waits in a drawer.
90.
Why do I always have to ask?
91.
Right wing ideologues are mean-spirited bastards because they have learned to delight in the unprincipled nature of so-called reality.
92.
No.
Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.
posted by mark young at 2:25 PM
1 Comments:
this is beautiful. inspirational. it should be housed a book here on the shelf beside my self...
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