Unravelling Worlds | Toxic Love

Toxic Love in Unravelling Worlds

Once, I was a poet.

The master will not redeem me now—

a rebel against the teachers of the metre.

In vain, I scribble garbled words for pennies

that no one ever reads.

All the horrors of my life—reams

of pages pasted on the tunnel walls.

I'm nothing now — an old gypsy, my pen

Is dry and all my poems are fake.

Your smoke signals are vague.

A modern day Odysseas, I sail my

wrecked schooner to the world you borrowed—

a seething world of green and rage.

My colossus of the perfect rhyme,

you should not have wasted your gift!

How will I know it’s you when we meet?

Have you changed much? I never

really knew you then though, did I?

There is a monkey dancing

on the shoulder of the moon

and you my love, fiddling old tunes

on your pretend Stradivarius violin.

All the time, the little voice gets louder.

She shrieks in my ear—you are so wrong.

And even though it’s crazy

I wait for you each dusk by the shore.

Trekking down south, I thank her

for a lifetime of sadness.

She cries, she quivers, and calls me a pervert,

but who will get to press the button first?

Part of the Mosaics cycle of poems

A few words about the poem…

Toxic Love and Desire in Unravelling Worlds

Toxic Love sits at the centre of Unravelling Worlds, a poem from the cycle Mosaics, not as a theme to be denounced but as a condition to be inhabited. From its opening lines, the poem announces a voice already compromised: a former poet who frames his present self as diminished, displaced, and suspect. What unfolds is not a confession seeking absolution, nor an accusation aimed cleanly at another, but a fractured meditation on desire, dependency, and the difficulty of knowing where responsibility truly lies. Toxic love here is not merely destructive attachment; it is a landscape the speaker continues to traverse even as he claims to leave it.

The first paragraph of the poem establishes a familiar posture of rebellion—against metre, authority, mastery—but it quickly becomes clear that this rebellion is less aesthetic than existential. The speaker’s defiance of “the teachers of the metre” echoes throughout the poem as a resistance to imposed structures: artistic, moral, emotional. Yet this resistance is hollowed out. He scribbles “for pennies,” unheard and unread, suggesting not heroic marginality but exhaustion. Toxic love often begins in such spaces: where self-worth has already thinned, and attachment becomes a substitute for coherence.

The poem’s world is layered with images of enclosure and inscription. Tunnel walls, pasted pages, graffiti—these are not sites of liberation but of repetition. The horrors of a life are not transcended through poetry; they are stuck to surfaces, accumulated rather than resolved. This sense of being trapped inside one’s own narrative is crucial. The speaker does not claim victimhood alone; he acknowledges fakery, contraband, imposture. Toxic love thrives on such self-knowledge without self-release: knowing one is compromised but continuing anyway.

Into this psychic landscape enters the narrator’s lover, signalled first through absence and ambiguity: “Your smoke signals are so vague.” Communication exists, but it is unreliable, mediated, distorted. The speaker styles himself as a modern Odysseas, yet his voyage lacks epic clarity. He sails not toward home but toward “the world you borrowed”—a striking phrase that suggests impermanence, occupation without ownership. The lover’s world is lush, green, seething with rage, but it is not grounded. It is a place one can enter but not inhabit securely. Toxic love often borrows such worlds: intense, immersive emotional climates that feel vital yet cannot sustain life.

One of the poem’s most telling tensions appears in the address to the beloved as “my colossus of the perfect rhyme.” On one level, this is praise—an acknowledgement of artistic or emotional magnitude. On another, it is an admission of imbalance. A colossus dominates the landscape; it reshapes proportion. The speaker both venerates and resents this dominance, questioning whether the beloved has wasted her gift, whether he ever truly knew her. These questions are not rhetorical. They cut at the heart of toxic attachment: the slow realisation that intimacy may have been projection, that what felt monumental may have been misread or in reality may have never existed.

The poem’s surreal imagery—monkeys dancing on the moon, pretend Stradivarius violins—pushes the relationship further into instability. These are not whimsical flourishes but signals of dissonance. Artifice and performance replace authenticity; value is mimicked rather than possessed. Yet the speaker remains drawn to these images. He is not disillusioned enough to detach. Toxic love persists not because it deceives entirely, but because it offers moments of enchantment that feel irreplaceable, even when recognised as false.

A crucial shift occurs when the “little voice” grows louder. This voice may be conscience, memory, internalised accusation, or the lover’s echo. The poem refuses to stabilise it. What matters is that the voice speaks in absolutes—“you are so wrong”—while the speaker continues to wait “each dusk by the shore.” Waiting is an act of hope and submission at once. The shore, a liminal space, reinforces the poem’s refusal of resolution. He neither returns fully nor departs cleanly.

The final movement of the poem gestures toward departure—“Trekking down south”—yet even this is compromised. The speaker thanks her “for a lifetime of sadness,” a line balanced between irony and genuine reckoning. Gratitude and grievance coexist. When she cries, quivers, and calls him a pervert, the accusation lands without clarification. Is this her voice, his memory, or his self-judgment? The poem does not answer. Instead, it ends on a chilling question: “who will get to press the button first?” Toxic love is framed not as mutual healing gone wrong, but as mutual destruction delayed by dependence.

What makes Unravelling Worlds resonate is its openness. The poem does not instruct the reader how to judge the relationship. It allows multiple readings: a mutually damaging affair, a projection sustained by need, or even a solitary consciousness inventing an adversary to survive its own contradictions. Sadness, loss, and loneliness are not outcomes here; they are conditions already in place, shaping desire and being shaped by it.

As part of the Mosaics cycle, the poem functions as a tessera—a fragment whose meaning deepens when placed beside others. Alone, it captures a single emotional geometry; within the cycle, it suggests repetition, variation, and recurrence. Toxic love, in this sense, is not a singular event but a pattern, one that resists neat closure.

In the end, Unravelling Worlds does not offer redemption. It offers recognition. And for many readers, that may be enough: to see their own borrowed worlds reflected, green and seething, and to understand that leaving them is rarely as simple as pressing a button.