Category: Poetry

There’s so many little galaxies in my stomach colliding so I can’t sleep 

Or I’ll miss all these celestial epochs

Stars enter through my ears in this warm, turning air and the room of a teenage girl becomes a nursery of a premature epic explosion

That may shatter her own life or leave her forever ashamed

Or more heavenly than ever before

By the light of the moon,

That’s what scares her most

A function approaches a certain point

Where it must delve further and further down

It gets closer to the hinge of the joint

Some number the function attempts to drown

*

Into decimals, fractions, tiniest

Into pieces of grains of sand scattered

Always nearing the point that’s shiniest

Function always infinitely battered

*

As this protocol approaches something

It doesn’t quite know where it is heading

It unfurls and unravels, becoming

Unrecognizable, factors shedding

*

A limit approaching is a limit

Delving into itself minute by minute.

DERIVATIVES

You better believe that to derive

Is to take in hand the things that survive

A root from the main tree

Is all that it can be

A measure of change that swan dives

NATURAL LOG AND E

Ellen and E are warring siblings

A number under the curve or the base of buildings

They never agree

To one do they see

When combined into fillings

OPTIMIZATION

To optimize is to bring about

The best of the best without a doubt

Though within it, there’s few

We’ll be sure to make do

Till the sun rises throughout

INTEGRATION

If you want to integrate, listen to me

Sum up the whole of the parts, so weird it must seem

But rather than expand

Just trace back the land

Find everything that leads to she

INT and DER

Int and Der are forbidden to see

Despite how much love ther is for thee

To spiral or sink

In love at the brink

No option is there to be

ISAAC NEWTON

They say the apple falls short of the tree

Though Newton seems to disagree

If it hits your head

The story’s all said

To be different in numbers and fleas

RATE OF CHANGE

Quantities keep changing from one to another

Divided by some value of the change in some other

The function will grow

And the input will show

The rate at which it recovers

Anything can be connected if you

Try desperately to look within and see.

Many things are variables without clue,

Some remain stagnant in a lifelong spree.

*

Two things, people change beside each other;

Not quite at the same speed but changing still,

Diff’rent rates that connect diff’rent brothers.

Time remains the same, both climbing that hill.

*

There always could be more connected things

Though most often it tends to be just two.

A duet of related rates singing

An eerie yet jaunty, congruent tune.

*

These parallel, celestial bodies

Forever connected as normal knees.

Calculus, oh my dear, sweet melody

You derive and integrate to bring forth

The mystery of movement’s elegy

Not the compass rose, only slightly north

*

My darling, my divine you will never

Never know, never see, never take in

That movement into math is not all there

But dearest, please, take it all on the chin

*

You cannot quantify this great abstract

Movement in math will never be enough

The analogue is more than to distract

This superarchaic world of rebuff

*

The percussion of this great, beastly earth

You may deign calculus, my sweetest dearth

Pardon my blasphemy for just a sec

But ratios don’t exist without us

For if there’s nobody there, not a spec,

Then nary ratios shall be discussed.

*

Sine, cosine, tangent, and their inverses

As long as we brains persist as well

Will always exist though some in verses

Even if there’s nothing than us to dwell.

*

As long as there’s something to be compared.

(Black and white, humans and the void are some)

Then me to you and side to side will bare

As these strings of dimensions somehow hum.

*

Until there’s nothing to place next to

And a singularity as all through.

In the case of plus C, C is not real.

Well, it’s real, but not really something, see?

You’ve got to tack it on to ev’ry deal,

Like thank you or a handshake or a please.

*

It’s not, like, fake, it’s just necessary.

An acknowledgement of arbitrary!

A constant filled with nothing, quite airy,

But there all the same, needless to bury.

*

We can define it, can choose what it means

But it must be there or the sum is moot.

It must stay empty, for some number’s genes.

But it will be there, capital and brute.

*

C by nature is undefinable;

Still, doesn’t need to be assignable.

Gawain so valent

So esteemed and so true

So true that he faulted

And repented so blue

His cowl proven to be

Protector of a head not

Ruled by the heart

Morgan le Fay grants him leave

And yet isn’t it wonderful

When women are the problem?

When men create problems

And make women solve them?

When she obeys men and

Forsakes them too

A man is the hero but

Women make them fools

All of them were betrayed

By women they knew

Though a fool he is now made

Some excuse, he thinks, is due

I, me, say this

With as much bitterness

That I can muster

In this putrid circling mist

What do men know of good

Of love, and smiles and eyes

And their crescent toppers

Of anything other than lies

Of warmth and anaphylaxis and skin

Of peace and women not used as tools

For your fruitless morality

And not what tips the scales or rules

You will never have to beg

A woman for love, no hurdles,

But to please her

Gives the wrist a green girdle

Solomon after Delilah

David after Bathsheba

All we are to you are sins

Prove your nasty point, you liar

There’s longing in her heart

There’s desperation in her eyes

What a lovely pair of pairs

A knight on Gringolet, a cowl of lies

I wrote this about Lady Bertilak because when I was reading Gawain, I was kind of annoyed that the test of his morality hinged on whether or not a woman could be happy, which felt kind of unfair because she was a pawn in a trick to see if some rando would do the right thing. There didn’t even need to be a challenge in the first place, and if the highest form of valor is not sleeping with some random guy’s wife, send me a horse and knight me on the spot. Why should an innocent woman have to throw herself at a guy just to see if he’ll do something? That had to have messed her up somehow, being used for a scheme. I don’t know, it just made me stop short because they said that whole line where OF COURSE WOMEN LEAD EVERYONE ASTRAY SO I THINK SOME CREDIT IS DUE. Like no, you chose this, man whore, and that includes the guys they reference from the Bible.

May creeps in with its milky grin

And I look toward the future, much to my chagrin

The problems of a sophomore 

Have never seemed soft more

And soon 18 will be worthless again

I am rooted to the place that we met

in mind, body, spirit, melding, rotten

thy face, thee, be ridiculous, upset

Sick, the thought that I could have forgotten

*

Earth-bound the pair of us are, but not yet

Thine optical windows gorge on minutes

My grasp may weaken and thy grip may fret

But to think my mind brute with your likeness

*

Dost thou truly believe that I forgot?

And well, something of you now slips my mind

Be it the same damn thing that fell my heart?

O’er the hills bleeds the sun, coach dense with pine

*

Of this, hear me, direly, don’t let go

Evermore, thy devotee, thus locked so