Unprotected Texts by Tom Beckett

This time I notice the note he's left, that calls me friend, and am especially pleased because we've never met. We have however learned to read each other, out there, in pixels like his hummingbirds, adjusting by turns our definition and blur. So I begin to read with a smile on my face. It's appropriate to feel the tension of my mouth as an awareness of my body this way when sitting down to read his poems. The words that are bodies too. They are the bodies we've come to know each other with. It feels intimate to read them, to offer some in answer.

Shifting. Mirrors. Heads, tongues, zombies. Bodies are worn like clothes, turn to ash, are listed, organized, sorted cramped into telephone books. (These are our directories of what, potential conversation, possible connections, why do the zombies read them if they only want to eat brains? This is a secret about zombies.) A movement in starts and stops, stops move forward by inches, move forward and back, covering the same ground in little circles, larger circles (these are frames, they are lenses of varying sizes), swoops and arcs, a run of sentences, a brace of fragments. We laugh here and there: the joke about the sentences that ends with "period!" is only funny among friends. It's okay to admit we're obsessed by punctuations, befuddled by pronouns, feel interchangeable and multiple and at the same time unreal. We're real. We're bound by invisible strings to entire constellations of staggering zombies. He says this.

Writing in
Seduction is
Memory has
Clean, well-muscled
Being in
Spirals, vortices
A torso
Voice (repeating . . . )

This is from "The Haunted Self," and it continues: An awareness / was prey and who is doing the hunting? These words have some of what I come to them for, and there are many other pages. Repetitious, flickering along by scenes and recut scenes, like a spliced film, "Volume" works in circles, loopings, cycles of words, shiftings (fittings): dresses hers shes hes visitors mouths couches lights, the tea. "No one thought to excuse himself" and the no one is specific, is he. "She was imagining what he thought." And then "The dress was lost." Things continue, she continues, he continues, they switch places and continue. Then "Imagine everyone conscious of the tongues inside their mouths." We feel both the metaphor (self-consciousness, awkward speech) and the real body. My tongue does sit in my mouth. It's warm. I'm drinking tea, just like in the poem, but I have no visitor. Or do I? I like the word: steep.

A part of "Diptych," the first part:

Hummingbirds are pixels
Constituents of an image
On a screen

One doesn't like one's family
So one watches
One on TV

Which one is this one?
-It's a rerun

Hummingbirds weather
definition and blur

The hummingbird opens and closes, but the rerun repeats without being repeated. The family is defined and blurred. One doesn't like. One watches. One is defined. One is blurred. One is a constituent of an image (a family). One moves in and out, attempting to focus.

"The Picture Window" I've read before, but not in (the context of) this book, and it is different here, because coming several pages after "Volume" (I'm reading in order because the book works in sequences) it feels like its continuation, if not in narrative then in mode, method, shape. Who was it I was reading the other day saying narrative was uninteresting to them? Tell it to to the Big Bang, you can run but you can't hide. Narrative is human. (Characters, ventriloquism, action over time, time to regret, the concepts of past and future. You, what are you but your story? Who tells it, how, and who reads?) And what is human is always compelling. Yes, there's narrative here. (Later, he asks "Does anyone out there really like their plot?") When I saw Last Year at Marienbad I thought of this poem and I think of the film again now.

The word brick is a noun like the word glass. His composure feels encumbered.
. . .
We are a presentable couple. That which has happened can be said to be the case. She has a lovely pair of breasts. I remember meeting. One might feel given to say what one is thinking. She is not herself when she's alone.

Tempting, to write it out whole.

Her world is pictured. Things rubbing or folding. A gap between them. In exhalation. The partition presents a side on the left and on the right. Sometimes one might remember thoughts. A window might be said to be a label or a brick. Depression constitutes this place.

I reached for the notebook at "One might feel given to say what one is thinking" to say yes. I turned back to the sculpture on the cover at "The partition presents a side on the left and on the right." Instead of writing anything I want to read, turn it into a recording of how I hear it in my head because it's both a way to listen and to say. Our selves. Pressed boundaries. One pair is faced. What constitutes meeting? [I asked this above.] They are what a surface is. A boundary might name thinking. I won't tell you what happens. A poem happens. A he and a she become a we. They happen. Well, the poem is more romantic (these poems are very sexy in parts). But "Partitions are lovely sometimes."

The form at the end of "The Nude Sentience, I wanted to sign it. (I can never bring myself to write in books.) To promise to obtain "appropriate relief" from my reaction. (Here it is.)

Thinking: he forgot to mention reading too when he says "Writing and sex are inseparable utopian projects--messy searches for connection coupled with the exploration and explosion of limits. Both are material expressions of desire, of the need to recognize and be recognized, of the need to be intensely with another for awhile." The backcover: "sex and text are synonymous here."

I won't say more. Except to quote again:

Description defers knowing
in the blink
of an aphorism

I suppose reading is not material? I take a book in my hands. I make notes.