So I have this friend—an engineer. He told me once that he avoids revealing his profession on a first date because past experience says it will preclude a second. And I have another friend—a poet. She wrote a poem about first dates and used the term “yawn-worthy engineer” in the final line.

Clearly, the world (or maybe just the world of engineers) needed a poem in defense of engineers as dating prospects—a position I wholly support. So I borrowed a textbook from Friend #1 and set about it, step-wise.

Not unlike an engineer.

————————–

how to enjoy an engineer

Step One: Hold
that yawn.

Step Two: Wait
for the shy smile
to break into a wry humor.

Step Three: Understand
that analytical is kissing cousins with attentive
and that his knowledge of leverage and sliding friction
is intimate.

Step Four: Imagine
the pleasure of a methodical
approach to the curvilinear
structures that make up your body.

Step Five: Believe
that the heat in a body is useful
only when it communicates
with another body.

Step Six: Be still
while he traces the flow of current
along your bones, producing a harmonic distortion
from your lips.

Step Seven: Watch
how torsional stiffness
modulates the rolling of bodies
as they negotiate curves.

Step Eight: Ask him
about the desirability
of vibration in hard steel
and elastic bodies.

Step Nine: Invite him in
to manipulate all the degrees
of your freedom at the point of coupling.

Step Ten: Instantiate
the law of action and reaction.

———————

This poem first appeared in The Best of the Royal Bean, 2011, Main Street Rag.