Tom Beckett

My Limitations

It’s scary to always be face to face with your own
endless limitations I, or someone else, could
write an entire book about.
Masha Tupitsyn, Beauty Talk & Monsters (184)
 

Limitation is mostly imitation.
My endless l(imitations)/(l)imitations.  My wan perimeters,

nesting frames.	

Where do you and I begin and end?
The drama, the mess of self and other, the mess of eros.

I’m convinced that when I touch myself I’m touching someone else.
Are you?


Room for
Shifts or

Which to
At every 

Form nude
Drawings pencil

I can’t recall a time in which I didn’t see (set?) limits for myself, within 
myself.  Even if I’ve shakily tried to act otherwise.

What am I doing?  

Another screen
Between partitions

Beyond this
Depicted by

The presence
Of association

When I was a child, the father who told me what I couldn’t do, couldn’t 
be.  My father.  Nesting frames.

Strangely phenomenal
The paper

Becomes empty
Dramas which

(dis)Locate perception
And weather

Where am I?  Located, I guess, somewhere between things.  Both res cogitans 
and others.  In the mix of messes and misdirected messages.

Other forms
Of aim

Concentrate apparent
Lack between

Against relationship
Of anecdote

Where one comes from and the choices one makes.  Scarcity and conspiracy 
theories, say. 

Am I afraid of my shadow?  Absolutely.

David Bromige wrote that “Terror is mostly error.”   

The beauty of the world is wrapped in confusion and noise.

Between against
Relationship assemblages

Leaking aromas
Order forms

Around any
Particular scene

The limits of my language.  The ever-changing limits of what I understand.  
The limits of pronouns.  My imperfect body and body of thought.

Tension figures
Process swimming

Wan perimeters

Crayon desires

Thinking buttocks
Contour emphasis

Limit-states.  Conditions of potential failure.  

Lines interrupt
Social demands

Move to
Choose to

Rather than
Avoid contamination

My uncontrolled body/body of thought. My confusion of activity and passivity.   
My never quite wrangled desires.

An enormous
Fragility (p)Reoccupies
Swollen overtones
Sudden autobiographies

Unpunctuating arias
Disarticulating surfaces


I’ve written vanishing points,
written forgetting,

written appearances,
written zombies,

written fever dreams,
written questions,

am being written, overwritten
and unwritten.


Pictures assemble
Hems of

Thermometer resemblance
Glued to

Gather silhouette
Subsequent screens

There is always movement I’m not part of, things I cannot see, hear, 
be touched by or experience.  Hence, yearning and occasional despair.

The relation to a limit is a question.  A question is a hook (in all senses).

Tattered parallels
Juxtapose folds

Soundholes touch
Spinning items

Bent outtake
Structures loop

Father is nearly falter.  Falter is mostly alter.  An altar is something else 
entirely.  Falls happen.  

Also of
Balanced on

Still lifes
Covered in

Whatever comes
In series

Masha Tupitsyn:  “Boris Karloff was in between masks all the time and so are a host 
of other monsters, I discovered.” (210)

Breaking down
Overlaps simultaneous

Shapes in
Static characters

Propositions assumed
Under melodies

Masks have taken on different resonances during the pandemic.  Often monsters aren’t 
wearing them.

It’s hard to be ruthless with oneself.
Prepositions assumed under disharmonies.  

Thinking on
To another

Mannequin retitles
Borrowed overwriting

More rigid
Sandpaper templates

Masked and unmasked cognitive dissonance, gender dysphoria,  overexcited or jammed sexual 
circuitry  — my things, feelings, thoughts rubbing or being rubbed the wrong way.  My outer 
and inner limits on display.

Occasion surfaces
No doubt

A book
Of poetry

Affixing sequins
To rhythm

Sequence, sparkle, rhythm.

Understanding objects
Translate flirtation

Mutating restraints
Transitional pictures

Force phonetic
Effects of

My deep love of puns and polysemy.  My sense of the braidedness of poetry, sexuality, 
comedy and philosophy.  My life as a piece worker in the semantic field.  

Bothered enthusiasms
Case textures

Damp dresses
Entertain pronouns

Removing portions
Of space

I am the sum of my responses and my failures to respond.

Out of
Remained there

At the
Only with

Lent depth
And stain

Hide-and-seek.  I am not it, not it.  No one’s going to find me.  Did you look at me?  
You can’t see me.  I hope you can’t see me.  I want to be seen.

Confirmed by
Monotone reminiscences

Interpenetrating planes
Differentiate colors

As from
Each filtered

I have a poor sense of direction.  I can get lost anywhere.  

Nonobjective blue
Habitué discussions

Touch suffocating
Art songs

Some folded
Curtain dissolves

Charles Bernstein has called my work bathetic.  

I used to take daily baths, now can’t.

I wonder what would constitute a bath ethics.

An air
Motif of

But again
To put

On one
In all

Fear of what I am, am not, might never be might register at any given time.  

Likewise warped
Style points

Add world
And others

Tender joystick
Occasional interruptions

Punctuation situates the structures of my unease.
A lot of u’s in that last sentence!  

Is repeated
Body within

A place
Next to

Over there
By photographs

So, yeah, mixed feelings about punctuation and other approved fastening devices.

Realm of
Fasten to

Own pronoun
Like nothing

Face to
Knotted up

I’m unsure what to show here or what might show up below extended under to support 
or unfold.

Work aroused
Must define

Step into
Or shifting

As sharing
Skin view

What one’s muscles remember or have forgotten.  One’s very tissues imprisoned by memories?

Art falls
Or slips

Against space
Set aside

In fact
This is

What I come back to time and again are second thoughts, after thoughts, the shadows 
and ghosts of experience.

Separated from
Intimacy questions

Figures stretch
To which

Of such
Blotted out

I often seem to be looking for something I can’t find.

Are glued
To beginning

Drawings of
Which the

Surrounded by
Form from

I believe that the present is perfumed by the past we collectively exude — a glandular 
symphony (the Anthropocene).

Words without
Noise not

Unrelated to
An infatuation

With loosely
Tied knots

The persistent sense of being inside of a diminishing circle.

Itself is
Beside attraction

Over holes
Arranged tendencies

Toothed wheels
Turn to

I want to be touched.  The question is: can I be touched by you?

Coloring in
Exposures mirror

Curtain vignettes
Piling objects

Blotting smeared
Wan perimeters

Tom Beckett lives and writes in Kent, Ohio.

 
 

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