Poetry
Numerology \\ Office Lunch
Numerology
Multiply me
Catch me on the page and write a table of contents for me
Draw me along your compass and send me in circles
Do I fit on your ruler
And should I figure out how long the page isn’t?
In your foggy place of 10-digits
Make me a part of your equation
Can you build me a kitchen tonight?
I want to practice my long division with a stir-fry
And then after dinner let’s slip between the ruled sheets
To do some multiplication of our own
We can swap tabulations like sweet nothings
And repeat the two times tables like pick-up lines
The calculator is our graven image
And our love is in numerical order
On the weekends, our favourite pastime is three times twenty-three
(You do the math)
Our addition is perfect and I never dreamt
That someone could round my decimals points like you can
Let the neighbours do their fractions
The only excitement in their lives is their phone number
We’ve got our abacus, so nothing is going to be in error now
You plotted yourself on my graph
So we can flip, slide, and rotate
Through all our transformations
And I know that I will never do geometry alone again
Office Lunch
This is life on the park bench:
Galahad arrives in lingerie
The wisdom of King Solomon turns cranky
The other men who sit nearby are turning pages
though they could just as easily change their politics
Someone in the distance is selling lipsticks of loneliness
because that’s the way to be in a corporatized time
You and I have chairs of simplistic adulation
where we share discussions concocted on enigmas in the end
and our class of sex is not determined
Shall we go to the show tonight?
(which really means
shall we lounge naked in the middle of winter
while singing jazz riffs
and sipping hot tea?)
Softly teach me to be a jester
it is such an exquisite philosophy
My ordered mind becomes a choir of telegrams
passing the message on
In this scraped away wonderland
we are expounding the noontime perfunctory
Our faces are a flash of a grin
warmed next to a sleeping leather jacket
All this happened on the edge of an afternoon
Mindlessly, and through plastic teeth it happened
But this is life on a park bench