An Asymptote

My poem intersects its reflection on the damaging ramifications of personal loss with its negotiation with shared social isolation necessitated by political tyranny.

I will first address the theme of personal isolation and connection. A person’s recent departure from my life unsettled me in a way that I didn’t anticipate. I was emotionally unprepared for the consequences. In addition to extant social and political forms of violence, nationally and globally, I ended up waging a war against myself as I stopped eating and sleeping properly. What saved me from myself was poetry. Unexpectedly meeting strangers and seeking shelter in their words emerged as another survival strategy.

In my poem, “you” alludes to a past whose absence is the cause of the speaker’s misery. “He” is an invocation of the present. Although the speaker addresses “you,” it is “he” who accompanies her in her present. It is their togetherness that challenges the authority that “you” exercises even in his absence. Their togetherness may be inseparable from the past from which they hope to move on, but it persists and gives the speaker the strength to envision connection and companionship. That's why I think that the poem acts as a closure to the speaker's past.

The theme of political isolation doesn’t culminate in flourishing, though. Politically, the speaker represents a nation and “you” its Leader. The speaker can neither overcome her commitment to hyper-nationalism nor to the Leader. She mourns the Leader's false promises, but is unable to enact positive social change. “He” can be read as another nation or another entity. Viewed from a political lens, the poem may be read as a comment on how cultural decadence across nation states is driven by social submission to the seductive forces of authority. The outcome is existential isolation.