On the Semiotics of

by Luke Horsey

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​
​Take whatever you’re grieving
and put “On the Semiotics of”
in front of it.

Lord, you have to
become an academic
to hold this kind of shit.

Among us, there are those
who theorise to survive.
Indeed, that is me, when I’m

juddering like a juggernaut
in my platforms through the aisles
of the Senate House Library

and clutching works from every
cluster of my epistemology.
I’ll call it my Sisyphean neurosis:

how I have to take it with the subject
terminology, how I have to call it
a psychic epidemic, how I have to

turn it all into a goddamned thesis.
It’s not that he didn’t love me--
he just couldn’t posit me.

It was but another snag
in the signifying process.
We’re getting to the crux

of it now, how I got into
this mess. Still, I’d rather not
put that theory to the test just yet.

​

Luke Horsey is an MA student, English tutor and poet based in Glasgow, Scotland.  


SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026