In a French travel book for the Middle East, a drawing of an ancient bathhouse sparks a visual poem inspired by the Arab poetic tradition of “standing by the ruins.” The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring imperial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, homoeroticism and violence, archives and ruins, histories of sex and of empires – all co-mingle in this essay film.