Every line of this poem makes a promise it doesn't keep. "Now I will tell you a secret," the speaker begins, and what follows is "I am nodding my head." The secret never arrives. In its place we get a small physical movement, as if the body has slipped in where the words should be.
The poem runs on that gap. The first half is built from one repeated formula, "Now I will tell you...", and each time the speaker raises the stakes. First comes a secret, then the truth, then something that "can't be questioned," then "the facts." After that come phrases borrowed from a courtroom: "something I'd swear to," "something that can be proven," "something there is no denying." The language grows more solemn, yet the actions stay trivial: stretching, waving, moving a leg, changing position, folding arms. The comedy comes from that mismatch. The speaker sounds like a witness under oath and behaves like someone fidgeting in a chair. We start to wonder whether the more loudly someone insists on being believed, the less they have to say.
Then the speaker's sources start to fail. "Something he says is so" hands the claim to an unnamed "he." Next comes "something he says he read in a book," which is hearsay on top of hearsay. The firm "I'd swear to" has become a rumour. Even so, the body keeps going, with a shrug and then crossed legs. The shrug is especially fitting, since it is the gesture for "who knows?" and it sits right where the certainty gives way.
The poem then changes its grammar. The future-tense promise ("I will tell") disappears, and the speaker is simply in the present: "Now I am walking. Like this." Sentences shrink to a few words, each followed by a tag: "That way." "In this manner." "Just like that." "That's how." "This is the way." These phrases only work if someone is watching. On the page they point at nothing, so the reader is left in the position of an audience who has been told to look and can't see. The poem reads like directions for a performance, though that is an inference from the text and not something it says.
The most unsettling word appears here: "it." The speaker is "building it," "removing it," "putting it in place," "looking at it," and finally "taking it." We are never told what "it" is. The verbs form a strange sequence in which something is made, unmade, installed, observed and seized. The last verb, "taking," carries a harder edge than the gentle gestures before it, and the ending feels slightly threatening. The speaker moves from claiming knowledge to claiming possession, and the poem stops on "This is the way," as though the question of truth has been settled by doing rather than saying.
Formally the poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. It sounds like plain speech, and its music comes from repetition. The opening phrase returns like a refrain, giving the first half a hypnotic, almost legalistic chant. Some line breaks fall in the middle of an idea ("I am / changing position," "I am turning / around"), so the lines seem to move awkwardly, much as the speaker does. The imagery is almost entirely bodily: head, hands, leg, eyes, arms, shoulders. There is no landscape and no metaphor, only a person making movements.
Vito Acconci is better known as a performance and video artist than as a poet, and the poem fits that background. It treats speech as something a body does, in front of other people, in order to be believed. Its significance lies in how plainly it exposes this. Authority in language can be a matter of tone and posture more than of content. A voice can say "the facts" and "no denying" while telling us nothing, and the listener is moved by the performance of certainty. By the end, the poem has also made the reader complicit, since we have kept waiting for the secret.