*i.
He told her
That mathematics was too
Sombre.
Too, too
Linear
To be poetic.
She said that
He had only seen himself
In a mirror,
A reversed hologram
Of his external self
Burned into his retinas with
His subconscious filling in the gaps.
But she had seen him
The rays reflected straight off him
Into her eyes;
Not some half-assed reflection
Off some silvered surface.
ii.
She said that
His jawline was
The slope of a curve
Pencilled on a graph sheet.
His candlewax skin
A wavelength
Quantifiable on paper.
His spine
A number line with
Dashes, to show real numbers
The set of which was infinite.
She said that
A Fibonacci sketch was
A minimalist rose,
A post-modern bouquet.
And that
The reflected pale morning sun
In a half finished cup of camomile tea
Was a cardioid
With fixed coordinate values on the axes
And an algorithmic tangent.
And he
Was a negative infinity
A paradox not sorted under
Quine's classification system.
iii.
She had
Recorded his heartbeat and blood pressure;
Measured the distance between his lips with her own;
Tried so hard, so very, very hard
To put him down in a numerical form
And write him off as an equation.
But all she could say was
That he was more
Than the sum total of his meagre parts
And that she
Was his reciprocal value.*
Feb 23, 2013
Feb 23, 2013 at 1:05 PM UTC
*i.
He told her
That mathematics was too
Sombre.
Too, too
Linear
To be poetic.
She said that
He had only seen himself
In a mirror,
A reversed hologram
Of his external self
Burned into his retinas with
His subconscious filling in the gaps.
But she had seen him
The rays reflected straight off him
Into her eyes;
Not some half-assed reflection
Off some silvered surface.
ii.
She said that
His jawline was
The slope of a curve
Pencilled on a graph sheet.
His candlewax skin
A wavelength
Quantifiable on paper.
His spine
A number line with
Dashes, to show real numbers
The set of which was infinite.
She said that
A Fibonacci sketch was
A minimalist rose,
A post-modern bouquet.
And that
The reflected pale morning sun
In a half finished cup of camomile tea
Was a cardioid
With fixed coordinate values on the axes
And an algorithmic tangent.
And he
Was a negative infinity
A paradox not sorted under
Quine's classification system.
iii.
She had
Recorded his heartbeat and blood pressure;
Measured the distance between his lips with her own;
Tried so hard, so very, very hard
To put him down in a numerical form
And write him off as an equation.
But all she could say was
That he was more
Than the sum total of his meagre parts
And that she
Was his reciprocal value.*
