Whether a funeral or a wedding,
I cannot spar with this.
Totems strewn about listlessly,
as if to mimic a kaleidoscope.

I writhe from the ghost of her touch.
Squirm at the memory of her hands.
Retreat due to her force. Totem one.

A consolidation of both kinds.
Her understanding and familiarity.
The common ground and the calm.
Kind breaths to my lungs. Totems two.

My path a cardioid.
I come close for only a moment.
Her gravity keeps me in orbit,
I see my malignant shadow cast on the darting eyes of those guards. Totem three.

A monsoon.
The sun and stars.
Grassy hills.

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 ***** 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.

see there? yes, there—
behind the mirror—
no, a bit to the left,
well, go up a bit;
it's under the cloak
and you'll see it if you
peel up the corner some.
it's tiny and crumpled,
about the size of a fist
and maybe just as round,
and weighs a fraction
perhaps shy of three tons.
and it's not really heavy
but for the emotions weighing
and sagging and pulling
it all the way down.
it's why it sinks in my pocket,
see, because it's so heavy.
it's why i'm so scared
to give it to you because
for all i know, it'll slip
from your fingers and smash
into the smallest of pieces.

My mother got married in a hand stitched dress
that each of her four sisters contributed a  
piece of their souls into the embroidered lace:
a skein of swans in perfect v formation
flew up her left sleeve, doves fluttered down
her right, peacock trains fanned cardioid eyes
of the most luminous white across her torso and
bluebirds hermitaged in the ivory lines of her back.
And since, they knew from experience that men  
are fickle- each secretly sewed coins and jewels
into the hem, for the inevitable day when her
children would scream too loud in his ears and he
will see only her fat and leave like a wolf in the night.