# Three Pictures, Three Poems

Three drawings, three poems. Each poem is the artwork’s shadow
— what the image can’t say, finally said.

I · ○
Water in the Heat
II · ◇
Me & My Machine
III · △
To My Dear Ones

Peace, Love and a Little Madness — Nomad.

I · The Elemental · ○
Water in the Heat of the Day
Oh the joy, the joy
Set forth it’s way
In the image of water
In the Heat of the Day.
A precious salve
That’s a
ParadoxTorment before contactThirst is not merely the absence of water but the presence of wanting it — which means water is already tormenting you before it has done anything. Desire is the pain; relief is the argument for its existence. The poem refuses to sentimentalise the water as purely good. It names the suffering the water requires in order to be ecstatic.
Until it contacts
The flesh that’s without
or within.
A moment
Of
On sufficiency“Is all it can be”This line could be read as deflating — only a moment, only a satisfaction. But the grammar refuses that reading: “is all it can be” is not diminishment but precision. The ecstatic moment is complete in itself. It doesn’t need to be permanent to be everything. The poem is quietly arguing against the tyranny of duration as the measure of value.
But what more
could you want
or expect
From Water
In the Heat
Of the Day.
Close Reading

The poem’s central move is to name the salve and the torment as two aspects of the same fact rather than opposites. Thirst is not the absence of water; it is water’s hold over you before it arrives. The torment is caused by the salve’s existence. This is a minor observation about hydration and a major observation about desire: the thing that will relieve you is also the thing that makes your current state unbearable. You cannot have the ecstasy of water in the heat without first being tormented by the heat and the wanting.

The drawing reinforces this: an elderly man brings water to his lips with the focused intensity of someone who knows exactly what this is worth. There is nothing casual in the gesture. The hands are clasped with care; the posture is inward and complete. The image is the salve mid-contact.

This is the poem’s most audacious move. It could read as resignation — don’t ask for more than a moment of relief. But the register is not resigned; it is genuinely satisfied. The question is rhetorical in the direction of sufficiency, not in the direction of loss. What would you want that exceeds a moment of ecstatic satisfaction? Permanence? Then it wouldn’t be a moment. Repetition? Then it wouldn’t be the heat. The poem is quietly dismantling the assumption that more duration equals more value.

This is also a poem about knowing what is enough — which is the kind of knowledge that belongs to the elderly man in the drawing more than to the young and anxious. The water is enough. It has always been enough. The question is whether you can actually experience it as enough while you have it.

A casually extraordinary line. Water on the skin and water swallowed — the exterior and interior body simultaneously. But “the flesh that’s without” also carries the older sense of “without” meaning lacking, deprived: flesh that is in a state of absence. The line means the flesh that is on the outside AND the flesh that is in a state of want. Both conditions are resolved by the same act. The poem compresses a lot of embodied experience into a preposition.

II · The Pyrrhic · ◇
Me and My Marvelous Machine
As I sit upon this
PositionThe lofty throneThe tiny figure perched on the robot’s shoulder in the drawing is literally elevated — the throne is the machine’s body. But “lofty” already carries its own irony: the elevation is borrowed, not owned. You are only high because the machine is big. The throne is not yours; it is a seat on someone else’s infrastructure.
The world ablaze around me.
My faithful servant, standing proud,
Its shoulder a perch below me.
Where, I wonder, is left to wander,
Now that
What, I wonder, is left to plunder,
With no one there to fight me?
InstrumentalityThe machine after its purposeA weapon exists to destroy enemies. Once all enemies are destroyed, the weapon is obsolete — but it hasn’t ceased to exist. The machine can’t decommission itself. The empire that has conquered everything now has a standing army with nothing to conquer, a death machine whose function has been achieved and whose presence has become a category error. Power that cannot exercise itself is still power — and the most dangerous kind, because it is looking for a reason.
What is the point of any machine,
The terminal question“but not you”The poem pivots here from political to existential in a single line. The machine’s obsolescence after conquest was absurd but external. This turn is internal: if you no longer exist — not dead, but emptied, purposed-out, the person you were before you built the machine no longer present — then the machine is also purposeless. It exists for you; if you are gone, it is just mass. The question asks whether conquest destroys the conqueror from the inside rather than the outside.→ Pyrrhic victory
Close Reading

The drawing makes the poem’s argument visually before the poem says a word. The mech is massive, angular, armed — a proper death machine in the super-robot tradition, chest-logo and all. The figure on its shoulder is approximately the size of its fist. The disproportion is the point: the conqueror sitting atop his conquest is a passenger, not a pilot. He is perched. He is not driving. The “faithful servant” framing in the poem is the conqueror’s self-flattery; the drawing quietly shows you who is actually bigger.

The middle stanza uses simple rhyme almost aggressively — wander/wonder, plunder/fight — in a way that sounds like a child’s adventure poem, which is exactly the register of the fantasy being dismantled. The conquering emperor surveys a world with no one left to fight and finds not satisfaction but an absence so complete it can only be articulated as more questions. The rhyme scheme performs the hollowness: it’s jaunty, it bounces, and the questions inside it are existential voids.

This is the poem’s genuinely sharp observation about power: absolute power is not the end of the problem. It is the beginning of a different, worse one. The enemies were the point. Now they’re gone and the machine is standing in the ashes with nowhere to point itself.

Reading one — death: The conqueror has died, perhaps in the very campaign that completed his victory, perhaps of old age. The machine outlives him. The empire persists without its builder. The machine exists; its creator does not. In this reading the poem is about legacy and futility: you build something that will outlast you and then it outlasts you, indifferently.

Reading two — erasure: The conqueror is alive but has become someone else in the process of the conquest. The person who wanted to conquer — who had something to prove, somewhere to go, someone to fight — no longer exists. The machine exists, but the “you” that needed it is gone. This is the more interesting reading and the one the rest of the poem sets up: the “where is left to wander” questions are not triumphant. They are the voice of a self that has completed itself into extinction.

The poem doesn’t choose between them, which is the right decision.

III · The Discernment · △
To My Dear Ones (All of You)
Look out
For the man
Of whom it is said
That even
The tellAnger that performs as kindnessThis is a description of a very specific and very recognisable kind of charmer: the one whose every reaction, including his rage, has been folded into his performance of magnanimity. His anger is presented as a gift — evidence of how deeply he cares, how invested he is, how moved he can be. The anger is proof of love, which is also proof of power. Every affect has been recruited into his self-mythology. There is no unguarded moment, because all moments have been made into scenes of his character.
That Man is a Liar.
But when you hear
Of a Man
Who even
In Anger
Is Kind
Always ask:
“How can I tell if it’s True?”
And if
You encounter
A man
On your path
Who is
The distinctionAnger as consequence of caringThe causal order is everything. In the first figure, Anger IS Kindness — they are the same performed affect. In the third figure, Anger is the CONSEQUENCE of Kindness — he is angry because things that matter to him are being damaged. The caring comes first; the anger is downstream. This is the anger of a doctor losing a patient, a parent watching injustice, a person who could leave but chose to stay and fight. It costs something. That cost is how you know it is real.
He is the Man that you Trust.
Close Reading

The poem presents what looks like a binary — liar vs trustworthy man — but is actually a trichotomy. There are three figures, and the middle one is the most important:

Figure one — The man of whom it is said that his anger is kindness. This is hearsay — a reputation, a legend about himself that he has cultivated. His affect and his virtue have been merged in his public presentation. He is a Liar.

Figure two — The man who even in anger is kind. This is not described from the outside as a reported quality but encountered directly. You hear of him; you don’t yet know him. The poem doesn’t say he’s lying — it says: ask first. The question “How can I tell if it’s True?” is the critical faculty the poem is asking you to keep active even in the presence of apparent virtue.

Figure three — The man who is angry because he is kind. The causal order is reversed from figure one. He is not kind in his anger; he is angry because he is kind. The anger is the evidence, not the performance.

The figure in the drawing has a wide brim pulled low, sunglasses beneath it, and a half-smile that is specifically ambiguous: it could be knowing, warm, or sly, depending on what you bring to it. The eyes are hidden. The hat does the work that the poem is describing — it obscures the very feature you would use to read sincerity. You can’t see whether the eyes match the smile.

This is a portrait of a figure who could be any of the three men in the poem. The drawing doesn’t tell you which. It makes you do what the poem demands: ask. The face is a test of whether you will apply the poem’s epistemology or simply decide it is trustworthy because it is smiling.

The title’s parenthetical is a move of deliberate inclusion that flattens any hierarchies in the address. “My Dear Ones” could be intimate — a private note to people close to the author. “All of You” insists it is not private. The wisdom is being distributed, not hoarded. The poem is protective; it is written to prevent harm. The universalising parenthetical turns a piece of hard-won personal knowledge into a public warning.

It also implicates the reader. If you are reading this, you are among the Dear Ones. You are being told something the author thinks you need.

The poem sets up a two-line stanza, then a six-line stanza, and then — suddenly — a single line on its own: That Man is a Liar. The isolation is the verdict delivered without qualification or appeal. There is no explanation, no hedge, no “might be” or “perhaps.” The sentence stands alone like a door being closed.

This is not the anger of someone who has been fooled. It is the clarity of someone who has figured it out and wants to make sure you don’t get fooled in the same way. The sentence’s brevity is the brevity of certainty. He’s done with the man. The rest of the poem is about how to recognise the one worth trusting.

✶ On water, desire & the sufficient moment
Wabi-sabi — Wikipedia
AestheticThe Japanese aesthetic sensibility that finds the complete in the impermanent and the transient. The philosophical tradition closest to “Is all it can be.”
Hedonic Adaptation — Wikipedia
PsychologyThe mechanism by which humans return to a baseline level of happiness after positive and negative events. The poem is describing the one window before adaptation closes — the ecstatic moment before the salve becomes ordinary.
Apophatic theology — Wikipedia
PhilosophyDefining God by what cannot be said about it rather than what can. The poem’s final question — “what more could you want or expect” — is apophatic sufficiency: the good is defined by nothing remaining to be added.
✶ On conquest, machines & the pyrrhic
Pyrrhic Victory — Wikipedia
HistoryKing Pyrrhus of Epirus won a battle against Rome at such cost that another such victory would undo him. The poem’s machine-poem is the interior Pyrrhic: what is lost is not troops but the self that needed the victory.
Ozymandias — Shelley
PoemThe sonnet about the shattered statue of a king who commanded all to despair at his greatness, now in a vacant desert. The machine poem is its contemporary cousin — the conqueror alive to witness his own irrelevance rather than discovered after death.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
MythThe creation that outlives its creator’s control. The machine that continues after its operator no longer exists is a very old fear dressed in a new mech-suit.
✶ On sincerity, performance & reading people
Sincerity — Wikipedia
PhilosophyThe philosophical problem of whether sincerity can be demonstrated, or whether the demonstration itself undermines the sincerity. The poem’s test — “How can I tell if it’s True?” — is the oldest question in this literature.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life — Goffman
SociologyErving Goffman’s foundational account of social life as theatrical performance. The first figure in the poem — the man whose anger has been fully recruited into his self-presentation — is a Goffman case study.
Moral Anger — Wikipedia
PsychologyAnger as an appropriate response to injustice or harm, distinguishable from personal-grievance anger. The poem’s trustworthy man is angry from moral injury, not from thwarted self-interest.
Supplementary Note
None Can Stop Me: The Pyrrhic Structure

### The question that shouldn’t be possible

“Where is left to wander, now that none can stop me?” is a sentence that a conqueror in the middle of conquering cannot think. It requires standing outside the project and noticing that the project’s completion has erased the project’s purpose. You only think this when it is too late to un-think it. The voice of the poem is not triumphant; it is the voice of someone who has just noticed that “invincible” means “nothing left to win.”

### Pyrrhus and the interior cost

King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated the Romans at Asculum in 279 BC at a cost so catastrophic that another such victory would destroy him. The poem’s version is the interior Pyrrhic — the person who completes the conquest is no longer the person who needed it. The cost is not troops or territory but the self that was constituted by the struggle. The machine exists. The combatant does not.

### The machine as mirror

The drawing places a tiny figure on the shoulder of a mech it clearly cannot control — the figure is a passenger who has told itself it is a pilot. The poem’s final turn, “if the machine exists, but not you,” makes this literal: the machine outlasts the meaning-maker. It continues to function. There is no one left to ask what it is for. This is not a poem about weapons or war specifically — it is a poem about any project that takes so long, and costs so much of the self, that completing it removes the person who wanted to complete it.

→ Pyrrhic victory → Ozymandias