February 9 - PROVE YOUR IDENTITY (qed)

Write your nature in sinusoidal terms
Multiply by your reciprocal
(that guy, you know the one,)
(who would fit perfectly into your curves)
(as you would fit perfectly into his arm)
Look at your identity...
         Is it what we expected all along?
Rip yourself apart - into factors of your being
Raise yourself to a new power
Are You common?
         You should be..... half anyway
         AND perhaps monomial
Finally, combine.
         After all, you're not that different anyway.

February 8 - Cosine

Sometimes I get bored in math class.  When I get bored, I write poetry.  When I also have to study for a test, I write poetry about math....


look for the setting sun,
drawn in red marker
stark against the white
        of the board,
watch that you don't cross beneath the
waves cast in the same red ink
and enter the domain of the leviathan -
which we arbitrarily define so that the
        arc is a function -

Take a sip from a wine glass filled with
a radian - t liquid,
watch it doesn't spill when you shift and stretch - ripping it away
from its prescribed borders according to the "d a b c"s
Inverse, arc, secant, cosine - they're all the same to me.

All a wretched mix of graphs and angles
TAUNTING me with a poisonous liqueur...

February 7 - The Gospel of Desire

On the corner stands a woman preaching the gospel of desire. 

Her sacraments: the laying on of hands, and legs, and lips, and love for an hour

She opens her hand for an offering turned over for salvation from the sin of wanting

            in exchange for the sin of lust.

And past her walks the kind of person who was once told that looking twice at her would mark him as debauched

            or worse a man.

And so he walks past her glancing at a hand and a leg and her lips

            and imagines what might be.

Leaves blow across the street on a current of a grey winter wind in teardrop eddies of regret and loss

She feels the sting of converts

He feels the sting of a wife and child who do not know what he needs and who cannot help him

They walk home.

He to a lonely house full of suburban saints

She to an apartment

            in which her scriptures are written in the cracked ceiling and stained sheets