What Are These Signals From?

Steve Benson

In this complete section of a longer work in progress, Steve Benson finds himself asking himself one question after another and doing his best to answer each one, at once, before sleep. If not keeping the ball in the air at all points, he dribbles or throws himself at it. The illusion of perpetual motion in reciprocity of response still allows for shifts in pace, frame and orientation that mediate its restless relentlessness.

“If I have quite a few poems,

and I only ever read some of them,

why do I need The Collected?

No reason. Why not read the same poems

again and again until I die?

There are only reasons to do so.”

STEVE BENSON keeps tabs on his online writing and other projects here. His previous chapbooks include Steel Idea (Miam), The Busses (Tuumba), Briarcombe Paragraphs (Moving Letters), Dominance (The Coincidence), the ball (ubu) and the forthcoming Time Squared (Trafficker). He collaborated over a 10-year period with 10 friends to write The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography / San Francisco, 1975-1980 in 10 volumes. Since 1996, he has co-parented two offspring and worked as a clinical psychologist in Downeast Maine.