Edwin Torres
the generosity of a powerful gesture
it is the words’ finding of time
and settling
on you
and moon what morning does
clemescent run
across a smear
fact elevates intention no matter
your tossed pillow
the mark you want disappeared
is the one I know you by
still
the ash finds a way from hand to skin
does it implicate
curiosity
to think this way
to trouble a boy
out of a day
to air out an open skull
why not talk to myself and see what I get out of it
has your listening turned
have you collaged the page with your own
on the poem’s line
your line
where is it
relistening into turning — is a sprung turn
/ a talking aligned with a getting — a letting in of the temporal /
So as, to blah blah blah the inkblot
/ point a to point b, is that, my z / goes / to z
So as, to mirror mirror mirror / the kid
— bringing you / the talk
This talk, juxta-proposed, to escape time
— the new kind of wordnew — why not talk to myself
° ° °
Streamingly seemed of consciousness
collaged of wordnew — for all you go-betweeners
So as to geode page — into — dystopia
For the grander we / all set for today's climb /
— stanza to stanza — to see what we get out of it
° ° °
Traversing cliff to cliff
looking for the pungent traveler — word to word
Which ledge of / the verbal / will bring what we need today
acknowledging that / need / is as uncertain as / day /
my next bringer
bringing time a timepiece / behind
— which is / in front / why not
talk to myself / why not see
Enmity of my brightest inclusion
° ° °
Is there memory in the make of the sentence that looks to eradicate time
fertilizing doubt into day time is mulch
planting interference
— to find influence
Interference is my influence
— of-take
— in-take
— gumma-take
Inconsistencies that bend arrival / blend arrivé
— to inner free
— the playopen / the free’d plum
Matter mulch
— to render non-spatial turns as time — why not
talk to myself
— why not
get out of it
° ° °
Do you wanna connect or make me work?
° ° °
Context is a limbed aperture for a poem
— I am constantly inside the reach I can’t get at
— to see what I get out of it
The longest drawl I can forge out of my page
— my escapade
— the longest scrawl I can make
Out of my stop, with you
— is dependent on my own climbing abilities
— sunk? / or / liberated?
What weaponry am I given for the crawl
— that I choose to climb / is my weapon
my glorious uncertainty of day / as suspect as my drive
To be gloriously uncertain — of point z to z
— can we fold out this map
— only in your charge — what I get out of seeing you
° ° °
Reminding we
what we need / what we offer
Again we give to reader
what we bring / only what we charge
— there is / we — as — you / all over the place —
Can we curtail the inexperienced genome
That kid-bringing mirror
— watch out mirror...kid!
Formations of pliant oppositions
— to unravel uneasy
— so as to form, what pleases — the uneasy ear
The inexperienced genome of a kid
Bringing you a mirror
— is to speak, between / what is, and not / formed
— why not, render perspective its jaunt
— why not, formalize a wayward hue
to annoy convention — why not
So as, to dimple a cluster out of cognition
° ° °
What grazes a meal from the landing spots
we harbor, here on soiled hocus
And here acsentent ensem-ble
taking reading patterns
From page-bound pheromones
stopping, and here, to stop
— ply my code / for we — as — you /
what claims ear, for hand
And take, for doing
° ° °
The explaining object over the claiming one, is to find
where doing happens
— to talk to myself
— to see what I get out of it / so as / to eradicate time
— every moment I spend with myself
I lose time, only to pick it up again —
To instant leave
For new to challenge / what is old, to an ear / unformed
To be one
— at feel with world
— sloped
— selved
— samed
— unseen
— cover
— overever
— endable
— appearable
— so as
— to be
— the longest muscle
— the psoas muscle
— babble
— appariddle pupae
Emoting through every trill
— its own blooded — why not
° ° °
I was one nation
Given to find another
As people intubated
By people
The human elegy
Of a bone
Looking for its spine
— to talk to itself, and see, what it, gets out, of it
What hardship-in-harmony
Sounds like
What difficulty makes out of
Sounds like
My thong exposure
I wore below
My thing exposure
I've decided to thing exposure — to see what I get out of it
Two strikers
Two wind slaps
Onna concrete bloom
Two pedals
Thinkers be relevant
Ass homes
Say one
Twice blinkers
Two strikers
Slap concrete bourgeoisie
Pedals — twice the flat on bone scrap
Strikers — twice the jibber
— Amalie asigos — saying what you slay
As a referential truth bomb
I don’t think twice and I’m still alright
° ° °
I can hear how you’re layering
What you’re telling me
Can you just tell me how my layering is what
You’re tellering — talk to yourself, see what you get
I’ve written about the well-crafted artist for years
The perfectly assembled bohemian
The dipped-hippy scavenger from the mountains
Now urban yet patterned for nostalgia
No matter how old you are
The challenge is to intent the extant
To intimidate the existent ear
The existent near
To frame one parable over a civilization’s other nearing
Is to position distance as discovery — my point a to your point b
What turns a people horizontal
Can refine verticality to a lifelong turner — a talker who talks
— to see what getting is
° ° °
The clue to the unsettled organism —
— that it is constantly surprised in origin
In the suffer of deeply ecstasy
—yetly fingered by existent will
To be the pound on a settled skydrop
— the ripped discovery, uplifted
By constant repetition
— to talk and see what gets of it— why not
when in doubt
slip into language
one you don’t own
° ° °
To engage — in a relistening absorbed by its starting point
Make limit resettle its line
— to see and get out of the way —
Origin for the bringer, what is —
Crossing most lucid, where is —
To be pliable or translucent — in the middle of a line — where limit re-turns
In the sprung turn
To see what sun gets, to talk to sunself
To jam shut a jibber against the setting sun
A logarithm looking for its city
Periphery — as possible climb — why not
° ° °
The story arranged in sequence is not human in origin
Metamorphed by lifetimes of fluctuation
How spirals pull in ways arranged by can’t, or don’t, or why
Where the porous turn — in the myself — declares a reveal — to the self, refracted
My deconned element — the fractured aghast, accumulating eek of echo
My nicely decent inkblot, this page — resoiled
And here, the enter announces its beginning
— to talk to myself, to see where beginnings enter
Portal out of lineage, out of the — word to word
— the climb re-listens
The gather, verbed in sinew — by luster, to see — to get out and see
to talk to myself and see — to see what talking to myself sees
To the seeing of what talking to myself, gets me
gets out of me — the why not in myself
° ° °
And here, so as to begun — something close to spillage
or at least to sponge — something to come back to
so as, to jammer the babble — and there, society enters
re-listening to it all
the doubt, the day, the harbor —
— what we, to see, get out of it
Note: This piece was written for a symposium presented by The Flow Chart Foundation entitled, “Thirteen Million Pillars of Glass, A Gathering,” which celebrated the 60th anniversary of John Ashbery's book The Tennis Court Oath. While speaking about creating early experimental work, work that no one would ever hear, he said, “Why not talk to yourself and see what you get out if it.” This piece emerged out of those words.
Poet, performer, and editor Edwin Torres is the author, most recently, of Quanundrum (Roof Books, 2021), Xoeteox (Wave Books, 2018), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press, 2014), and editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press, 2019). He has performed his bodylingo poetics widely and has received fellowships from NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and The DIA Foundation, among others. Recent anthologies include New Weathers: Poetics From The Naropa Archives, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, and American Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement. He lives in New York.
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