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Page 165

Blankness facing blankness, backed by
blanknesses yet unopened (one page's emptiness
concealing another's) -- nothing to nothing,
a scoreless game. Actually, nineteen to nothing
is also a scoreless game, for is not a score
twenty?

When I make love to my wife, I don't call it
"scoring", since love means no score:
We're on the same team now; it's no longer
the boys versus the girls or the shirts versus
the skins or the vice versus the verses (fornication
is SO distracting!). It's you and me, Babe,
against the world! (But please don't tell
the world.) Monogamous --having a single gam,
but at least a leg to stand on. (Is not marriage
tetragamous?)

In music a scoreless sheet is blank (he noted).
"To score" -- from old Nordic, to cut notches,
or, in stud parlance, to perform au notchurel.
"Scoria" -- slag (meaning, having no refinement)
is from the Greek word for "dung" (skatos).

Scratching (sss...) to get to the the core that we hope
isn't dung. Loveless love, score without succor,
N-ding in scorn. I prefer courtly to escourtly love.
Remove that piece of S, leaving core -- heart;
and refine scorn to corn, silly, but wholesome,

not yet poetry, nor even love, but the words we speak
when we should be looking, just looking, even less
than looking, seeing more than we could possibly see,
looking at each other, blank with the fullness
between us, scoreless, uncut (the original uncut
virgin versions of selves, loaded with extras),
but not, unless we insist on upstaging ourselves
with the words we've learned
from the movies -- not clueless.

Note: Stanza 1: If a "score" is twenty (as in "four score and seven years ago", then a 19 to nothing game is scoreless.

Stanza 2: I call marriage tetragamous, because we have four gams (legs) – two each. Some of you (especially females, who kept their shirts on from an early age) may not get the reference to "shirts versus the skins": In school, boys would be divided into two teams, sometimes, by having half of them take off their shirts. The shirtless were the "skins", their opponents the "shirts". For some reason, we never had the pants vs the skins.

Stanza 3: The "he noted" refers to the notes found on a musical score. A stud is sometimes said (when he screws someone) to have cut another notch on his gun, which, in the context, seems gory – like multiple circumcisions. I refer to sex here (I'll do almost anything to extend a pun) as performing "au notcheral", referring to "au naturel", that is, naked.

Stanza 4: I break up "score" into "s" (the scratching) and "core". "Courtly love" refers to the traditions of chivalry. I mean "escourtly love" to refer to the hiring of "escorts" for sex. The piece of S (piece of ass) or nitty gritty of sex, removed, leaves core, the heart, which is not the scorn in which "score" ends (scorning those with whom one has scored, for if we remove the S from scorn, we get corn – corny romantic "heart" stuff, often silly, but with redeeming value.

Stanza 4: "Scoreless, uncut" – another meaning of score is to cut, to make scratches on something. Here we encounter something that is not mere scoring, but is also not corny – unless we insist on filling these already bursting silences with "the words we've learned from the movies", that is, out of fear of the bigness and strangeness of the experience, attempting to categorize it. If we DON'T do that, we are scoreless, but not clueless (referring to a movie that does get into the ways kids corn up love, but also referring to one or more related meanings of "score" and "clue". For example, someone who "doesn't know the score" is "clueless". But in this case, the scoreless person is NOT clueless.

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