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Best Poems Written by Erin Beckett

Below are the all-time best Erin Beckett poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

It's All You Got, Kid

Don't take any of it too seriously.
That's all I got, kid.

Fling paint on the bedroom walls
if you want to,
and call it interior design with a modern touch.
If it happens to look good,
it's still nothing.
Just like all the nothing we call art. 
So what?
If it feels  good, do it.
If it feels really good, do it a lot,
if it's really worth going against the grind.
(Moderation's a nice touch, but I prefer doing things 
however much I want to. Until I get bored and move on,
no self-regulation required)

I recently started drinking more.
That's my new thing.
They say drinking a lot too often,
ultimately causes cirrhosis of the liver.
(For years, I bought it)
Well that's just fine.
Hell, why have a healthy liver just so you can live long enough 
to watch yourself decline,
until there's no more good time games 
to be had in secrecy? 
Long enough to watch yourself stop walking fast,
stop screwing hard,
stop wiping your own ass even?
I'd rather live fast, 
and die even faster.
But that's my thing.
Yours may well be something else,
like painting daisies, or growing tomatoes, 
for the hell if I know why. 
(They'll give you plenty more 
to choose from through the years)

A bit vulgar for your tastes, I know.
But vulgarity is life. 
You may as well embrace it,
enjoy it. 
I probably shouldn't be saying this to a five-year-old, 
but it's all you got kid.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

I'M Not Afraid To Die Anymore

I'm not afraid to die anymore.

It happened when I realized what it'd really been like to be young.
There were all these things coming in, 
and all of them fascinating,
like the unbiased smiles of potential friends
on the first day of school. 
When I didn't expect the pain to last.
When I didn't acknowledge that laughter would end.
But everything does, 
all the good things and the bad things,
eye to eye, hand in hand. 
I'm not afraid to die anymore.

Ring around the rosie, we all fall down. 
A cheerful song for death,
because when we were young,
we didn't divide the lines 
between right and wrong so quickly. 
I was hateful without knowing hate,
self-indulgent without apology,
loving, giving, happy, sad,
and for a little candy,
anything could be forgotten. 
And everything will,
so I'm not afraid to die anymore. 

Now I'm older,
and the smell of rain on the sidewalk
tries to remind me what it was like.
Sometimes I slow down and let it.
There was the sound of church bells,
when they didn't remind me of the failures of god.
Dogs could entertain me for hours.
A movie watched a hundred times,
and a song replayed daily, for months on end.
For everything, I ached.
For anyone, I grinned.
That was then,
but it turns out that none of it was really lost,
that can't be found. 
All I had to do was hit the ground,
after losing a thing I loved too much. 
And get up to find that I could walk
with less care than was learned,
with a little less love than what was bought. 
With less attention, the little things distract me now.
With hands that are open, but don't attach themselves too much
to what is felt, I can touch almost anything,
and nothing can pull so hard.
Not even life.
Not even death.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Living Forever Would Be Boring

We love to make things and keep things.
We collect as much as we can, 
as if to suggest a certainty
in the length we'll have to enjoy whatever it is.
A lot of bother 
about a whole lot of nothing.

And then, like holes that creep inside a jar,
and wind escapes,
and rain seeps in,
we lose it. We always have. 
We always will. 

I used to watch the ocean for hours on end, 
wondering what had been lost in the deep through so much time.
Things loved before they were lost, 
things that were held on to, 
things that amounted to nothing,
because they lost us too.

It's funny how hard we fight the storm.
I think sometimes,
and more often than not,
it'd feel better just to watch it pass in amusement.
In awe even. 
It seems easier, that.
But we almost never do this in the beginning,
until the pointlessness of the fight hits 
like a cold hard wind to the face.
Then we finally re-evaluate our priorities.
Mine are simple, 
keep a handy bottle of Jack.

And when the time comes that the morning hides her face,
as it will without a doubt,
in the best of all possible worlds,
you could say that having fun
was how you went.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Notes of a Twenty-Something-Year-Old

I wonder if some part of me was running,
while I gathered up my thrills in wanderlust;
scattering them like dust to the fire, that feeds a lazy afterglow.
The Adventure of Wonder. The one I embellish just a little,
because that time away is my big trophy 
full of glitter. I can't hardly reach in without distortion.

My portion of that place was different than I expected-
a beauty exceeding the dreams
I'd constructed from photographs, but it was tamed and balanced-out.
Tugged under gray skies like a great god asleep in some hidden cave
beneath a thriving city.
And I made to-do lists daily, as I'd done in college to ease the pressure
(with specially constructed spots for sightseeing)
And some days when I wandered off to little Irish villages,
I looked for better places to stuff the notes 
of future plans. (I found them everywhere)
I found them even in the glare of the rocky cliffs that stood naked
to Atlantic winds. And I shoved them in and went off
and saved them inside my tiny travel-friendly lap-top, which I took
even on days that I felt like a god,
because no one I knew would ever walk the same places
I had. I grew up and I grew proud
and then lost it again, when plans
collided with the world that was. And the cycle repeated;
It still does.

And when the day finally came that I descended 
hazy-eyed from the journey of dreams, I felt the same 
as the day I left. That familiar blend of joy and thrill
and anxiousness, that leaves my chest tight for days.
Weeks passed before I grieved.

A dancer in Leeds once told me: 
sometimes all you need is a new pair of eyes
not a destination. I believed her,
and I still do.
And I'm happier too, when I see the faces
of the ones I'd missed; the memory of something lost still fresh.

But then there's that other feeling,
the one I let take me across the Atlantic
like a stranger with welcoming eyes (that somehow seem familiar)
that has me writing everything down, arming against disaster.
Only now the notes die faster. 
I wave them off hoping in the future (when that twenty-something year-old 
sense of urgency dies, or transcends into realities of peacefull coping)
I can use them as a witness to myself, and they'll tell me nothing's lost
in the breakdown. Everything just comes and goes. 
And whether we've never had it, or we have it all,
I think I'll never know. There are those things
we must learn to let go.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

The Woman With the Violin

The painting's old and weather-worn beyond a time
I'd never know, and dust-lined 
and bold. But still it's crude
how the oil paint collides with aging lines in an age-old taboo. 
And daring me to find

a part too daring in something named divine,
and vivid in it's truth or steadfast with its lies. 
A shameless sharing of life
that spreads a reality in color-sewn light
that's told her she's promiscuos, she's been kept in strife

to the old shadows of the night. 
But here she is after all this time, a smile for all as she takes flight
unchanged. She's not aged
with the passage of judgement, and unshamed.
She stands erect, bare-chested and sure of her right

to be what she is. A woman that lived
with her quiet resistance. She lived to give
her quiet echo through the distance.
And now her pride could match a man's,
as she bears her breast and strokes her violin.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Werewolf

Everything glitters
after dark.

Little by little,
I fell out of love with the sun,
slipping between the black and the white.

I started to appreciate the sound 
of music with hot loving.
So good, so giving.
Blood so hot, you barely notice that it's boiling,
until everything's on fire, 
everything's moving.
(It hurts so good, it doesn't)

And now,
I can't sleep for the need, it litters
my mind like an infectious disease.
(Though I'd been searching for it)

Little by little,
I caught it, 
hands open,
palms burning.

Anything seems bigger
spread by shadows.
Now I think faster, 
laugh louder,
love harder, 
go quicker.

And when the morning sun litters
the sky,
it's an unwanted savior
to people like us. 
(Because we know what's best, 
we've seen what's better)

So we rest a little,
hiding strangeness with normalcy,
lust with routine.
But when the sun sets, 
I watch with curiosity,
shadows wake and spread 
(as if it's the first time) 
legs open, arms wide, 
inviting me in 
to stop pretending
I'm something that I'm not.

Little by little,
I don't need much of anything,
knowing that love 
will find me
in unusual ways.

Maybe it already has
but I lost count of ways...
too in love with shadows...
too in love with the night...

Too late.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Twenty-Six

Twenty-six came fast... Possibilities
close in by the hundreds, as if they were marching
to the sound of a choke-hold.
Pressure's a good thing
when it has us make something
beautiful, or something hot.
Stardom, creation, art, 
invention, love, whatever...

Those are something.

But twenty-six years
don't guarantee illumination-
that a step forward won't be going back 
where the space is too expansive for comfort.

Why does the emptiness scream so loud?

Maybe I'll run off to Boston
or Brooklyn, or somewhere in Florida
where the noise is real,
where the sun can make me forget.
I hear Santa Fe's nice and full of hippies like me.
But there they are again-
options.

Was I tricked?

Twenty-six... and mother society
(that *****) 
says I should stop screwing around.
Try stability like other healthy-functioners.

But they look bored.
I'll be damned before I'm one of them.

See, I'm a should-must-hater to the core.
But I get it...
I can only say 'screw that' so many times,
til I've screwed just about every should in the book,
an obligatory slut.
And I know that somewhere in time, 
poignant obligations could become wanted.

Transformation happens to us all-
no tricks.

But twenty-six still haunts...
narrowing halls, nightmares, bad dreams...
wedding bells and crying babies
and sweat-soaked sheets.

Enough! I need a drink,
drink too much, back to square one...

But before you guess,
or relate in ways
that make your world seem smaller
and less heavy-
Before you judge me 
too far gone, or too unsafe for pleasure,
Let's at least acknowledge together
That I have one thing (make me feel better)

Time the wish-granter is still big
at twenty-six.
It's the lesson-learner, the justification
of risk, and the stupidity of youth.

(And if time's not linear as once they said,
I wonder will I always BE somewhere?
Lost in some traveling wavelength?)
Time is a mind-boggler too.

I'm twenty-six... but at fifty-two
I may not have all the answers I want.
But I can relax about that,
that's what time can do.

Twenty-six..  
all that's left for me now

is a thousand different ways
to enjoy the movement,
to take a moment and watch it spin
into constant re-arranging moods 
through the interaction...
Like a falling deck of cards echoed
into an oblivion 
of my very own.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Dust From Her Feet

She walks like a traveller in her home 
a once familiar thing, lost to her
And bright-eyed watches the same night sky 
that demonstrates new things to her,
orchestrating new patterns for her in the stars to find 
and paving beams of light across leaves 
that were strewn for her
by the dawn wind slaking the limbs of her own trees
for whatever thing lost that still is,
She searches the dust from her own feet 
that she's brought from another land in a dream

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

One Night In New Orleans

On Bourbon Street,
strippers occasionally step out for a smoke,
scanning the scenery for potential clientele.
Flashing lights illuminate eager faces,
good business in a place that hardly sleeps.
 
There's a sign up there now 
that's got a devil's tail with angels wings,
a place called Saints and Sinners. 
It goes well with the soft Zydeco 
sweeping down the streets-
Nice and easy.
You can imagine the waves of soft 
and loud voices, up and down,
are lyrics to the music.
Mellow and sharp, thronged together 
by a net of harmony.
Songs of nothing in particular.

I started thinking in the flow of it all, with the buzz
of a Pat O'Brien's Blue Hawaiian in my swing.

Then and there,
I made a half-pact with the devil,
and another half with good. 
I'd start paying attention 
to the meaning of a two-sided coin.

There's a way of thinking that goes like this:
If you're bad sometimes, 
then you're only half bad,
goodness trailing behind you
like a faithful dog. Instinct,
it's how we are.
Nice and easy logic.

To some this doesn't go down well,
like old religion and voodoo in the South.
Because it feels too good, 
looks so natural it must be sin.
But I like the music and I like the dirt,
the strippers with their sweet perfume,
and the laughter that gets heavier 
with a little booze on the tongue.
And just like love, 
a little sin can wash anything down
like a good southern bourbon.

Details | Erin Beckett Poem

Bourbon Eggnog and Ham

June is nice,
I love the air.
I’m just making stuff up,
I’m full of it you know.

Isn’t it kind of nice
to know it?

It feels fresh.

I have friends
that pretend wisdom can be accumulated,
that love grows

up rather than down.
Ridiculous.

Things are jagged and raw,
even when they look black.

But I love the challenge of hunting
for that illusory exception,
because I play for the fun.

Isn’t honesty one of those things
we like to parade around
on a pedestal, 
the god we chose?

We aren't, because we never
knew ourselves, too busy 
blaming the devil
we placed on our shoulders.

Our sins
were the high expectations
that should've led us to glory,
but didn't.

Don’t take my word for it though,
see I’m in with the drugs
and Tarantino films..
I like Christmas
for the cinnamon bourbon eggnog 
and ham.