lxxxviii

“Math is radical!”

-Bumper Sticker

            I wrote a poem today in my 9:10 Math class instead of studiously jotting down notes, like most of the time.

Business Calculus 2

…and though I’d gotten a full five-and-a-half hours of sleep last night,

my eyes can’t help but to slowly start furling up, closing the light-receiving gap

between my twenty-nine lower eyelashes and

the curled upper lid.

…and it’s not my fault, I swear to God and Pythagoras;

it’s just that the room is bottle warm and dead still,

while the professor drones on and on and on and on

in her signature flatline monotone

about the cosine charts and increasing/decreasing tangent curves

and who knows what (I haven’t paid attention once in the past two weeks.)

…and, unless she is about to walk right up to my

sixth row plastic perch,

stare me right in the face, and

tell me exactly how the rest of my life will be plotted,

on the graph paper axis of eighty years,

I’m just going to sit here, writing poetic equations of verse,

my quickly-negating attention passing the x-axis

…and never looking back.

            This next test will prove interesting.