In fewer than fifty words, a love affair is reduced to a logic puzzle. The speaker sets out a rule: wanting someone makes you weak, and not wanting makes you strong. Then the poem shows why that rule cannot be kept. The speaker does want, and what they want is "what is strong in you," which suggests the other person's independence or self-sufficiency. The only route to that strength runs through the other person's "weakness: / Your desire for me." The trap closes. To be desired, the speaker needs the other person to want them. But once the other person wants them, they are weak, and no longer the strong figure who was desired in the first place. Desire destroys what it is aimed at.
The title tells us where to look. "Writing under the Influence" puns on intoxication and intellectual debt, and Lacan and Laing are fitting patron saints for the joke. Lacan is widely associated with the idea that desire is born from lack and keeps going only because it is never fully satisfied. Laing is associated with the way people tangle each other in emotional binds. The poem boils that thinking down to something close to an aphorism, and there is a sly humour in how coolly it does so.
The form helps. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, flat, declarative sentences, mostly end-stopped, that sound like steps in a proof. Lines 1 and 2 are mirror images: "My desire makes me weak" and "My lack of desire makes me strong." They share a skeleton ("My… makes me…") and swap their key terms, so the opposition feels tidy and certain. The poem then spends its remaining lines undermining that tidiness. The one long, stretched line ("The only way that I can achieve my desire") spills over into "Is by means of your weakness," and the sentence seems to go the long way round, as the speaker's strategy does.
The pronouns tell the story quietly. The first two lines belong entirely to "my" and "me." Line three brings in "you," and by the end the speaker's goal is framed in the other person's terms: "Your desire for me." The colon after "weakness" works like a drumroll, and the line that follows, set apart on its own, is oddly exposed. After all the theory, what the speaker wants is simply to be wanted. The vocabulary of calculation sharpens this. "Achieve" and "by means of" sound like the language of goals and tactics, so the other person becomes an instrument. Love is handled like a project to be managed.
Then comes the last line: "This is the whirling yin-yang of love." The yin-yang symbol, in which each half holds a seed of its opposite, seems to fit the poem's idea that strength contains weakness and wanting contains refusal. Yet the word "whirling" complicates the calm of the symbol. It suggests dizziness, a spinning that never settles, and the sound of the word echoes the earlier "weak" and "weakness." The hyphenated "yin-yang" is also a slightly breezy, popular phrase after a run of clipped, clinical statements, and that mismatch can read as comic deflation. It is hard to tell whether the speaker is celebrating this cycle or quietly mocking it. I read the ambiguity as deliberate: a harmonious image is wrapped around what is essentially a standoff.
The poem is worth reading because it takes an uncomfortable idea and makes it hard to dismiss. Most love poems treat desire as warmth or longing. This one treats it as a negotiation in which each person's need is the other's leverage, and nobody can win without losing what they wanted. Its refusal to resolve the paradox is part of the point. A reader might find it cynical, or recognise something true in it, or both. Its brevity makes that reaction stronger, because there is nowhere to hide from the logic. The title admits that it is a poem made from borrowed ideas, but the poem makes them its own by showing, in a handful of plain lines, how a mind can talk itself in a circle about wanting someone.