3^rd April, 2026 • Søren Aas

Hook Of Tenderness

On rank, surrender, and the violence inside love

There is a fear without a clean name. Not the fear of losing someone. Not the fear of being left. Something narrower: the fear of not being the one they want most. To be loved equally is, in this poem's logic, to not be enough. Some Fear is about that condition.

The following is a commentary on the poem Some Fear.

The title withholds. Some fear — indefinite, unspecified. The poem opens in third person:

A woman who gives herself completely — not to one, but to whoever stands before her. The fear is not infidelity in the conventional sense. It is a faithfulness so total it is available to anyone. The word that carries the weight is as. Not less than. Equal to. That equality is the wound the rest of the poem opens.

The meat hook enters without announcement. It is an object of industrial utility, designed for dead weight, described here as tenderly wrenched. The hook doesn't slash. It settles, finds the most undefended place, sinks in.

The word really is a qualifier. Not a final cannot — the sound of someone who understands that leaving is possible and finds it isn't, because the hook and the love have become the same thing. To extract one is to destroy the other. The possessive in their own heart matters. The murder would be self-inflicted.

The poem has remained in third person throughout. Then:

The shift to I is unannounced. The speaker who has been observing is the one with the hook in them. The advice — be kind to yourself — is what is said when nothing more useful is available. The response is not resentment. It is the absence of knowledge: I don't know how. Not I cannot. Not I refuse. The mechanism is simply not there.

The final line is paradox without comment. The silence wails. A pain too internal to speak that does not stop making noise. The poem ends where the pain is: inside, inexpressible, ongoing.

Note The poem stays in the specific. A man, a woman, another man whose existence is the source of the fear. The fear is not abstract longing. It is the dread of rank — of being one among equals when the need is to be the one.

🌊Follow the current on Bluesky