Four times in a row the poem gives the same order, "Feed them fear," and the repetition works like a drumbeat or a chant. There are three stressed syllables, a hard *f* sound at the start of two of them, and no softening adjectives. It sounds like someone rehearsing a rule they have learned to live by. Then the voice breaks its own pattern with a question: "Why am I so afraid?" The confident commander turns out to be frightened, and the title, "You Are What You Project," starts to make sense. Judging by this turn, projecting fear onto other people may be a way of hiding it in yourself.
The next move is the cleverest in the poem. "Feed them fear" becomes "Feed me fear." Only one word changes, but the speaker steps from inflicting to receiving. "I will recycle it into curiosity" is a strange phrase to use about an emotion. "Recycle" is a practical, almost industrial word. It treats fear as raw material to be reprocessed into something useful, not as an enemy to be destroyed. This is a modest kind of courage, and it sounds believable because it is so unglamorous.
What follows reads like a short list of lessons: "Experience is the teacher. / Pain gives pleasure meaning. / Pleasure gives you hope during pain." The lines are flat and declarative, close to proverbs, and the last two form a loop. Pain gives pleasure its meaning, and pleasure gives hope inside pain, so neither can stand alone. Notice that the pronoun has slid from "I" to "you." The speaker now sounds like a person offering advice, perhaps to someone else, perhaps to themselves. The calm is a little too tidy, and the poem is about to test it.
The test comes in the final stanza. "Attached to the skin, / attached to the feel of your lips, / attached to the desire" repeats the word "attached" three times, but the repetition travels. It moves from skin, to lips, to desire, and finally to "the narrative." The sequence runs from concrete to abstract, so the beloved begins as a body and ends as a story the speaker has built a whole life around. The word "attached" also suggests something that hurts when it is pulled away. The line "attached to the narrative, you're my only reason for living" is the longest in the poem. It changes direction in the middle, from a list of attachments to a direct address, as though the speaker can no longer keep the sentence under control.
Then comes the blow: "Yet, here you are dead and I'm still existing." The small word "Yet" turns the whole poem. The earlier lesson that pain gives pleasure meaning now faces its hardest case. The two closing words, "living" and "existing," almost echo each other through their *-ing* endings, but their meanings pull apart. Living is what the beloved made possible, and existing is what is left. "Here you are" is an odd, painful phrase, because it speaks to the dead person as though they were still in the room. The poem never says how or when the death happened, and it does not need to. A reader might also look back at "Why am I so afraid?" and suspect that this is where the fear was heading all along, though that is an inference and not something the text states.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme and no steady meter. Its lines are short, and many are made of one-syllable words. Single-line stanzas leave white space around each sentence, so the thoughts seem to surface one at a time. The look of the page changes at the end, where the lines lengthen and the language grows more personal and less aphoristic.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to let its own philosophy comfort too easily. Turning fear into curiosity, learning from experience, and balancing pain with pleasure all sound wise. Grief is the situation where such wisdom is put under real strain. The poem ends without a lesson, with a speaker who is still here and can only say so.