Succubus
by Tim Turnbull (Stranded in Sub-Atomica, Donut Press)

How much stranger love is
than he could imagine. She fills
his answerphone with abuse so shrill
it’s barely comprehensible.

She leaps from a neighbour’s garden
and drags him squawking into the way
of the W3; the bite marks on his nose
and cheek are visible for days.

The bus shrieks and shudders
to a halt. The police are called.
His house is glazed with hardboard.
Rubbish covers his lawn,

graffiti, his walls. Love, it seems,
is two parts terror to one part despair.
You can’t shake hands and call it a draw.
You can’t just declare

because love follows you home at night.
It’s skulking in the shadows there.
It lifts tiles and rattles window frames.
Love electrifies the air.

When passion for another person emboldens you to feel a sense of possession, you are already on the way to becoming a stalker. Some people believe their partner belongs to them because they love them, and sometimes it’s that possessive streak that brings an end to the relationship – as one would imagine might be the case in this poem.

A succubus is a female demon that has sex with a sleeping man (an incubus is a male demon that has sex with a sleeping woman). The man in the poem may not be asleep, but the parallel is clear; his life is made unbearable by an individual from whom he appears powerless to escape. One could say she exhausts him of the will to live, for her attentions are so violent and relentless that there appears to be no way to dislodge her, just as a succubus exhausts her victim during his unconscious hours. Fixated lovers have nothing else on their minds but the satisfaction of their own self-absorbed need for another person, entirely to the exclusion of that other person’s feelings. They are wholly oblivious to reason and think only of what they want for themselves.

The woman’s abuse of the man – the vile messages on his answerphone, the physical assaults and her efforts to drag him in front of a bus – escalate until “the police are called” and his house is turned into a battle zone. Because there is – or has been – a romantic relationship between the two protagonists, I am persuaded to think that the woman may genuinely believe that her assaults on the man are a result of her “love” for him. Her unrepentant attentions confirm her need for a straitjacket. (We often forget that some men suffer very real domestic abuse.)

Line by line, the poem describes a life of persecution in a landscape that has been wantonly vandalised in the name of “love”, which we can clearly see is something else entirely. The poor man longs to escape, but when “love follows you home at night” we can imagine the deranged woman lurking in the shadows, waiting for him.

Real love can transform us from a lacklustre individual one moment to a ball of vivid joy the next: the last verse allows both the idea of this and our knowledge of the man’s fear of his (ex) beloved. Real love will rattle the metaphorical window frames in our core being, but the love of the woman in the poem will rattle the man’s real window frames: “Love electrifies the air” in both cases; in the first instance through passion, in the second through panic.

“Love” (infatuation/passion/desire/and anything else that we confuse with love) may be the woman’s excuse for the abuse that she inflicts on the object of her affection, but it is a false, purposeless love that does not deserve the name. Love of one person for another is no such thing if it is selfish, needy, demanding, possessive, jealous or punitive; it is simply the manifestation of one person’s insecurities, ruthlessly inflicted on another to disguise their own inadequacies. Real love should know when to forgive and let go.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy