Sack of Symptoms and Other Poems

Tom Beckett October 16, 2026

Four poems: Sack of Symptoms, Civil War, Progress Report, and A Room. A name is spoken until it comes apart; address continues after listening has stopped. These poems anatomize the fractured subject as a site where the contradictions of social existence are internalized, reproduced, and rendered illegible through the unstable boundaries between self and other, body and language, presence and disappearance. Resisting the liberal fiction of an autonomous individual, Beckett’s poetics exposes identity as a precarious relational construction, while the failure of communication becomes symptomatic of a deeper crisis in the very categories through which subjects apprehend themselves and one another.

poetry

contemporary

Sack of Symptoms

for Charles Borkhuiis

Sack of Symptoms
assembles itself
in a crazed mirror.

Sack of Symptoms
resembles no one.

Sack of Symptoms
reads its Daily Horoscope.

Sack of Symptoms
cannot contain itself.

Sack of Symptoms
is busting at its seams.

Sack of Symptoms
sometimes hums softly
and sometimes screams.

Civil War

After all
these years

I can’t
hear you

so I’ve
stopped listening.

*

I worry
about everything

and can control
nothing.

*

Who are
you anyway?

 Conjured selves
I suppose.

*

Ghosts of
sexual desire

text from
remote passages

of some
sort of

body (mine?
yours?).  Lips

are chapped.
Throat parched.

It’s difficult
 to swallow.

*
Ever wonder
what happens

when shadows
and bodies

switch places?

*

It’s always
the present

                      but

one’s not
always available

or able
to breathe

it in.

*

My self

a shadow

of you.

*

Who are
we kidding.

Binaries govern
our thoughts.

*

I am
you you

are me

but in
wobbly ways.

*

What do
shadows dream?

What dwells
in them?

*

It is
said shadows

are cast.
What is

their
dramatis personae?

*


 After all
these years

I can’t
see you

so I’ve
gone unseen.

*

How should
I be

with you
in me?

Progress Report

My jokes
Are so funny

They have
To be explained.

Disappearance
Is an art.

Holes contain
Almost everything.

Hope expands
And Contracts.

My lack
Of focus

Continues to
Be interesting.

A Room

A bouquet
of gestures

enters a room
framed by description.

Things quickly
become sexualized

but just as
quickly calm down.

Who can remember
whether words

are bodies
or pheromones.