Equation
My math teacher said: calculate, solve, and check.
Come on brain work I screamed in my head
I sat there after waiting for a grade.
Math contains numbers and symbols until
they decided
it wasn't hard enough
and propelled in the alphabet as well.
Even great math professors cheat and look
up in a book for the correct answer
My teacher says they are not all the same,
he is an outlier nothing like that
Like that: the lie. Like that: the deception
He said: Solve the easiest problems first.
Do not hasten through it or simply guess.
That will increase your chances of failure.
I kept hearing it, failure, echoing.
Failure morphed into lure after hearing
the word repeated so much, out the door
the sun beckoned me to escape outside.
My focus slowly fading from the paper.
And paper turned into pauper, like
I had put some foreign accent on it.
Pauper, like a book I read in
a class I would rather be at then here with
a test that looks like I will fail for sure.
The figure drawn, the three lines that hold much
weight, like the strong man traveling with the
circus. He has completely given up
on me. It has been an hour, pages still blank.
Calculate. Well I don't have time so guess.
The little hope I had flickers like a
candle sent out into the wind, so much
riding on this one test. It's just a test.
Pencil
My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.
Look, I told myself.
And waited to be marked.
Clouds are white but they darken
with rain. Even a child blurs them back
to little woolies on a hillside, little
bundles without legs. Look, my teacher
would surely tell me, they’re nothing
like that. Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.
She said: Respond to the heaviest part
of the figure first. Density is
form. That I keep hearing destiny
is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage
once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone
so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.
Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose
awry into her microphone, triumphant.
The figure to be drawn —
not even half my age. She’s completely
emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour.
Look. Okay. But the little
dream in there, inside the think
that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life
is charcoal, the wood already burnt,
a sacrifice.
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