In this essay I work with Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s formulation of “pluriversal decoloniality and decolonial pluriversality”: a sense of spaciousness in investigating and engaging with all that has been inherited from modernity and coloniality. I distance myself from those understandings of decolonial practice that seek to discard and replace: for literatures, like genders and sexualities, are a palimpsest, they build on waves of what is experienced and encountered through lineages. There are deaths and memories as well as traces and continuities, and I wish that they all be folded in for the reading, teaching and writing experience to be, as bell hooks outlines, exciting and passionate – and as Mignolo insists, exceeding the “object of study.” I see Octavio Paz’s critical method of reading as decolonial and draw upon it: keeping many thinkers and poets as unruly talismans thrown together in an unruly manner, I look at paradigms of gendered/sexual signs in relation to pedagogies and research methodologies for English literature in the global south. What could be a template to read historically, critically and imaginatively across and between Western and non-Western texts with an incisive, generous, difficult passion that marks all erotic pursuit as errant and explosive, even the intellectual?