Rubric

Rubric

The rubric was, 'Solve the puzzle'.
My task: to unscramble your heart,
your cube of a heart, regular,
three by three, eighties red, blue, green,
yellow, blue, white, each colour a feeling,
a quadratic to be lined up,
unmixed,
undone.

Unravelling the parallel, perpendicular contours
of your mathematical, athematical organ
wasn't easy for mine: rounded, unboundaried,
its linguistical, unlateral muscles melting
and moulding themselves over the hardsharp corners
of yours. But I pushed, I struggled, I took
the iron from my blood, melted, smelted in my chest
and galvanised my aching atriums,
and I tried to solve your riddle.

In fingerless gloves
I etched the patterns on my petalled valves,
the formulae strangely alien, archaic,
like something primeval, a cave painting
in the dust of my beating flesh.
I daubed algorithms along my arteries.
And I learnt them all by heart.

But when I moved your pieces,
rotating them around their even sphere
and I matched each emotion to an edge,
there was nothing but cold squares,
each just two dimensional, unreal, undecipherable,
just a ruse to confuse.
My rubik's cube.