{draft} to a set of poets, regarding (dirty) talk

[fandomonymous]

This is meant to be delivered as spoken word; maybe I'll perform it one day, who knows. I haven't written poetry since high school, and I haven't written anything 'artistic' for the past two years or so, but ah, I was inspired, as you will soon understand.

Here's a taping of a performance of Rives' "Dirty Talk" for reference. At any point that I'm quoting it, I imagine the cadence of reading this to match.

Also the ending is the weakest part of this, sigh. Needs work.



So there's a poem out there,
by a fairly well known artist,
about who is worth fucking and why.

Maybe you've heard it? It starts like

> Seems pretty simple.
> You want to get
> your teeth cleaned for free,
> date a dentist.

I love that poem.
A poet introduced me to it,
and if you remember the rest of it, I'm sure you can figure out why,
and what /precisely/ their motivations were.

But maybe you're not familiar with it,
maybe you don't remember?

Here:

> But if you need someone to talk dirty to you in bed,
> you better fuck a poet.

Ahh, now you understand.
And yeah, it's on the nose. I love dirty talk.
But you see, I got a bit of a problem.

Despite being here, in front of you,
on a soul-baring stage under
bright, bright, too motherfucking bright lights...

...I'm not a poet.
Nowhere close, no, no, much much worse.
I'm...
I'm a mathematician.

I could try to sugar coat this as much as I like.

The bigwigs, rolling in Teslas through Silicon Valley,
they call me "data scientist",
as if I'm the equivalent of an astrophysicist
who will take you to the heavens and back
or a biologist who knows
every inch of your body

just with...numbers, I guess?
Not so sexy.

And there was one beautiful, beautiful nerd
one of those rare ones who knows how to craft words
he called me "statistitrix"
which implies a power and control
on the spreadsheet and on spread sheets
hot image, awesome!
but man, no one else uses that word!

No, the truth, sad, sad truth
I'm a mathematician, barely able to seduce with words.

The poet tries to put things in my mouth.
No, not those things!
Okay, yes, those things

Words.
Metaphor and simile, phrases that paint pictures,
but man, it's wrong, it's all wrong.

I cannot say that my lover is greater than the sun, or even the moon,
or that their nibbles on my ear and kisses on my neck are like lightning bolts running through me
or
or

No, I can't.
I cannot even fill in those blanks.
those things are illogical,
lies, exaggerations.
untruths are foreign to the mathematic tongue.

But sometimes - sometimes! - I can find truths and state them.

I find signal through the noises
that is leaving my lover breathless.

Sometimes I get to marvel at
bilateral symmetry
how anything input I do
with my fingertips, with these minor arcs of my nails,
with lips and teeth and tongue
How anything I do on the left
can be mirrored on the right
and get the same output
of gasps and shudders and moans

And sometimes it's reversed -
I find someone who creates
a discontinuity
Who creates a break point in the usually continuous function
that is my eternally pattern searching brain

And in those rare cases -
p less than 0 point 01, because I believe in rigor -
that I find someone wonderful, different, inexplicable
enough that numbers and patterns and logic fall away

I mean, I do try to understand it in the way I usually do
scrambling through all my hypotheses, and reject them one by one
looking for an explanation for how someone like this could exist
and coming up with a null set

because this lucky, lucky soul
is what we call an outlier
who makes me redraw the axes
and create new rules to fit in my logic

so I can find out, once and for all
if my love is truly unbounded
if its limits do not exist.