Confessions usually arrive with a flourish. Dave Bonta's "Vicarious" makes its admission in nine short lines and barely raises its voice. The opening sentence, "writing I have not / been good / at touching", has no punctuation to settle it, so it splits into several meanings. It could say that in writing the speaker has failed to touch anyone. It could say the speaker is bad at both writing and touching, the two failures merged. Or it could mean that writing itself is something the speaker cannot get a hand on. The line breaks add to the uncertainty. "been good" sits alone, so for a moment we read a flat moral verdict, "I have not been good", before "at touching" narrows it to a lack of skill.
The title explains the problem. To live vicariously is to feel something through someone else's experience, at one remove. The poem never describes an actual touch. Everything arrives through something else: writing, instruments, music, reading. In the middle stanza the speaker is "spoiled by all / the instruments / of love". "Spoiled" works two ways. It can mean ruined, like food gone off, or pampered, like a child given too much. "Instruments" is just as double. It suggests musical instruments, which the last stanza's "music" supports, but also tools and go-betweens. Love here comes with equipment, and having so many ways to approach it may have cost the speaker the direct way.
The last stanza moves into the bedroom, the place where touch would be expected, and puts "music to read" there. Music is normally heard, so reading it hands an art of the ear to the eye, a small crossing of the senses that adds distance. The poem doesn't say whether anyone else is in the bed, but the phrase leaves the sense of a solitary reader. Then comes "that leaden / tumult". The word "leaden" is heavy and slow, "tumult" is noisy and chaotic, and the two pull against each other. The pointing word "that" makes the feeling sound familiar, as if the speaker has met it many times. The line break holds "tumult" back until the last possible moment. Judging by the word, "leaden" may also recall the lead of a pencil, which would tie the weight back to writing. That is an inference, but it fits a poem so concerned with the act of writing.
The form is as spare as the argument. There are three tercets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capitals except the pronoun "I". The lines are very short, some only two or three syllables ("of love", "tumult"), so the poem keeps stopping and starting like someone choosing words carefully. The second and third stanzas never settle into a full sentence. They are phrases that hang in the air without a main verb, and the poem ends with no full stop. The grammar is as unfinished as the touching. Sound does a quiet job too. The hard t of "touching" comes back in "instruments" and returns at the very end in "tumult", so the thing the speaker can't do turns into the noise that fills the space where it should be. "Bed" and "leaden" also share a short, dull vowel, which suits the heaviness they describe.
What makes "Vicarious" worth studying is that it does what it describes. A poem about failing to touch could have been emotional and direct. This one is cautious and indirect, circling its subject and never quite landing on it. It never explains whether the speaker is a writer, a lover, a reader, or all three, and the ambiguity feels deliberate. It also asks an uncomfortable question about art: when we make music, writing or any other "instrument of love" to carry feeling, do we end up replacing the feeling with the instrument? The poem gives no answer. It leaves us with a reader in bed and a heavy, noisy silence.