Teeth in my shoulder,
Nails in my back.
We’re once again at a place
I said I’d never return.
Not what I wanted,
Nor what I need.
But for some reason,
I can’t stop.
Poison like honey.
I pretend I don’t notice.
But I can’t stop.
The story in my head keeps playing,
a narrative of hope,
One where I have a choice.
Some semblance of self-control.
A path that means I’m not back here,
back whenever I get the chance.
Just one more hit.
Addictive,
Corrosive?
I’ve stopped caring.
Maybe it’s not good for me,
Maybe it is.
Whatever story I tell myself,
When the phone rings
And I hope it’s you.
Tell me you’re mine
mess with my head
There’s not much left of it anyway.
All I want
is you.
It started with a barrier,
A no.
Something I couldn’t have.
You’re the cookies on the top shelf.
and the more I told myself,
I don’t like cookies
The more I remember how good you taste.
Diet plans, weight loss goals.
Pointless.
I climbed the shelf
and I can’t stop
until the jar is empty.
Every bite, I hope some more
Maybe I’ll stop
'“It’ll make me sick”
“I’ve had enough”
but, I’m past it
I’m addicted
and I don’t know why.
The fall has begun
And I don’t want a parachute.
I don’t want this
Is it that you have something I don’t?
Or that you show me something new.
A side of me I buried.
Buried because I feared it would not suit the world.
A side I refused to accept.
Is that why the feeling comes from below,
Deeper than I want to look.
Tarnished perspectives.
Traumas hidden under stone.
A seed of my humanity
That only you can grow.
I don’t want the world to know.
Keep it hidden.
Stay safe.
But you…
You are it.
And I thought it would be ugly.
I thought it would disgust me.
Unpolished. Malnourished.
It sat in my shadow.
“That’s not me.”
But I feel it.
I feel it shake.
And when you see it,
I can do nothing.
It lies exposed.
light on its petals
A flower I thought was a weed
blooming at night.
And for the first time
It is alive.
And so am I.
“One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.”
-Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982)
The line is thin.
Love.
Hate.
Red.
My mind is blurry.
I wanted something else.
sometimes,
when you’re not here,
I still do.
But I can’t pretend
“I don’t feel it”.
Reality has become too close
You see a side of me
Nobody else wants to.
As much as I fight,
As much as I beg,
Another path
Another road,
Another empty protest
“I don’t want this.”
“I do”
Erato
Erato is best known as the Muse invoked in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica.
She enters at the moment Jason and Medea’s tragic love story begins.
Erato presides over the truth that love must be spoken into existence. It must be sung. It must be confessed.
She represents the carnal in the arts.
When I began this project,
I thought love was a shallow subject.
Tragic, even, that a young artist would choose it.
It felt done. Overused.
But over time,
I realised there’s no resolution.
Not in the academic texts.
Not in the curatorial frames.
Perhaps the artist’s role is not to resolve.
But to offer a channel.
To process their own relationship to love and to share the work openly.
If immersion in its extremes brings stability,
Then the work leaves behind a roadmap of emotion.
Something for those who follow.
Erato reminds me that desire becomes real only when it is uttered.
And when we utter it, it is not always beautiful. Contempt and envy belong to attraction as much as longing does.
This week I’ve looked at my own desires, material and otherwise.
Implicit in each one is an admission.
With every I want, I say I do not have.
With every longing, I say I am not.
Desire and longing are forms of othering.
They define the space between us.
But our actions redefine how that space changes.
How we may draw others in.
How we may use desire to our benefit, or our detriment.
Not everything we do is for our greater good.
Addiction can destroy us.
And love is just another drug.
One I know I can’t live without.
Abject
Why do we desire?
I don’t think it’s as simple as hunger.
Hunger ends when the plate is clean.
Desire does not.
It circles.
It repeats.
It gnaws.
Freud thought it was because desire remembers the prohibition.
What we are told we cannot touch becomes what haunts us.
The dream, the fetish, the obsession.
All routes back to what was forbidden.
Lacan believed that the object was moot.
That what we truly want is to be seen wanting.
A kiss is only proof.
Proof that we are mirrored, recognised, desired back.
Which is why satisfaction never arrives.
Because what we chase is not the object but the reflection it throws back at us.
But what if it has nothing to do with lack.
Part of the rhythm of being alive.
Every runner gasping for breath.
Every artist lost in colour.
Spinoza thought that desire
is our way of persisting,
Expanding
surviving.
And Kristeva reminds that often
The object of our desire,
Is something that on the surface
We want the least.
The abject.
The wound, the waste, the fluids we spit out to feel clean.
The cheese that stinks.
The kiss that tastes of iron.
The grotesque.
The body picks at what we try to deny.
We don’t choose it.
We do not even want it.
And yet we relish in it.
Gossip.
Murky stories of pain.
Horror movies.
Violence.
Pain.
Passion.
Why do we desire?
It makes us and unmakes us.
It takes us back to the edge of comfort.
Without it, we would only eat, breathe, and endure.
And that is not enough.
Could it be more
With every hope and desire
There is an expectation of more.
That those conflicted passions
and endless wanting
will one day
become sustainable.
Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later…
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
As a culture
we have been taught
to absorb red as love.
Historically tied to danger,
to anger,
to intensity.
The closing of the day
and the first breaks of morning.
Here,
in the early stages of attraction,
red fits.
It is desire’s first flash.
The “be mine” of Valentine’s Day.
The first x at the end of a message.
The ❤️❤️❤️ sent to someone we love.
But it is not everything.
There is hope
that the red of passion
can be used
to build the structures we need
for stability.
That the reds can soften
into greens and blues.
…so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
But the move is abstract.
It is non-linear.
Love is not smooth.
Desire is volatile.
It is not a natural gateway
to calmer waters.
And yet if we want to love,
to feel deeply,
it is the only path we have.
And to understand that,
we must look deeper.
Endless
Once lust is solved, once desire is met, we seek safety.
But safety has its own problem.
Desire becomes hard to find again.
Futile.
What is left but a career,
a role,
a usefulness we cling to
so we don’t vanish.
Parents, citizens, artists
even the best of us chase utility,
as if participation could replace wanting.
But to reveal ourselves is already to desire.
Every action carries expectation.
So are we destined to chase forever?
Maybe desire is nothing more than the film we sit down to watch.
We know it ends, but we hope the story will be enough.
The career, the relationship, the habit.
Scene after scene until stability starts to feel like plot.
And yet it is the popcorn that keeps us in our seats.
The small satisfactions.
The dopamine, the serotonin.
The Jenga blocks of brand and routine stacked high around us, fragile but familiar.
What if I was wrong.
What if they were not the one.
What if this was all I wanted all along.
Desire keeps us looking back.
Keeps us hoping to find out.
But maybe desire is only there to remind us we are watching the wrong film.
And the worst part is
We know it.
And we keep eating the popcorn anyway.
Poets Corner
Untitled Erato
From poetry to love, make rude words rhyme,
before we die, we multiply.
Brushing arms, contactless compassion
changes the air of the world and earth,
giving birth.
Airwaves smoother than cherubim bum,
easing the tide, send it,
the contactless.
Presuming you love, but you never do
show and I do not know how,
Having never been taught, having never been told,
having back row tickets to see the show of love.
It’s a given to love those who share blood.
Come on now people
dropped on the salt,
to the scourge, to the cloud,
to the moon, off the earth,
give birth.
- Thomas May
Final Words
Wanting isn’t having
Enjoy the chase if you’re in it
Nothing but love
- R
