SUBTRACT ME

Tags

death, Ending, female, Fragmentation, identity, irony, loss, love, mathematical, Mathematics, meaning, Metaphor, philosophical, poem, poetry, power, Pythagoras, Sexual, Unity, wordplay

SUBTRACT ME

would that you would
subtract me, retract me

not divide
nor subdivide me

so divisive when
you do so
whether long
or short

or all the way down
to the absurdum of
lowest
common denominator

assigning
minus sign

my neck hung around
like dog in the proverb
taking my preordained place
in the negative
column

this negative space
what
in my
case
could be
more iconic?

where better
to split hairs, split atoms
balance
the equation?

countermand the stridency of
ego as infinity
absolutely plus one

though if we were to
deconstruct, go descant
suddenly
sing a tangent

from cheap
seat in the margins

(for which always the poetic risk
of becoming drawn, and quartered)

full-throat the love
that is such a
tough customer
when it
come to quantification

that sweetest voice
not always disembodied

even if
counterintuitive, counterfactual,
beyond definition

and yet
still mathematical

as it carves me up
as you
carve me
up
as you always do

me and you together
not a simple matter of
multiplication or
addition
thing in my
brain
going back to Plato
back to Pythagoras

my hand on
your hypotenuse
saying it
“does not compute”