arrhymatic poems, for mathmatical diversion

The result of a Math training in Accelerated Math lies below.
In the program ACC MATH was a math term dictionary.
I got lost inside.
With hours of other things I need to do - the words took me away.
I'm not a good enough writer, but the words are so wonderful:


A

Asymptotes

I am asymptotic, alas
So far, as you can see, it's asymptomatic
But I note
That nothing quite reaches
Where it is supposed to go,
My intentions fall short,
The psychiatrist I consulted
Suggested lowering the bar
But it's still missing the mark.



Apothem

She drew a polygon
On her tiny paper
As we were standing outside by the picnic table,
On a cold windy day
It had six sides.
Then placing a dot smack in the middle
She exclaimed,
"Right here, now draw this line straight down to the side.
That will be for his face,
whiskers will go here and here."
She completed her directions.
After her Apothem,
All the rest unfolded,
As it turned into a mighty
Lion that grew a fringe
And my lesson was completed.


Annulus

One has to watch
Who one calls
An annulus.
There are those
That just donut say it.


B


Binomia

Some said it was twice the curse
Of unomia.
Some said polynomias
Felt the term
Binomia was a dual diagnosis.



Bivariate Data

In her heart she wondered
If while she ate Thai
He might be on another coast laying his head
On his pillow on the floor,
Could she be waking
While he was getting a mid morning cup of tea?
Perhaps it was crazy- but over time
She thought she heard
Echoes of his life
In hers,
While both lived different lives
On a plane of existence
That would always connect them.



C


Conditional Statement

If
You ask me to tell you what love means
Then
I will tell you I do not have the words

If
I ask you to never speak again
Then
You will argue with silence

If
We grow through the pain of introspection
Then
We enjoy the loss of innocence.



Cartesian Plane

"We are no longer Cartesian," he wrote on Facebook
In a joke I read, instead
Of doing something I should be doing
And anyway I can't remember except I thought
He was talking to a sister-in-law
Or a girl he flirted with, I wasn't supposed
To be reading it
But I was.
He was saying the world
was not flat, plotted and pointed
On a surface like a road map
Bumping that into a snarky, exchange where two
Very educated, very comfortable elitists
Reveled in how very dimensional things
were for them in some understanding
Between the two of them.

I pulled out my grid plotting
Graphing on my axis the clues
Looking up "Cartesian" carefully in my dictionary
Seriously combing a book or two
Wondering if the world
Was not Cartesian what it had become
But that is very hard to discover from
The mayflower.






Centroid

The location of perfect pain
Is perhaps your hemorrhoid
The site of a horrid growth
Is undoubtedly the cancroid
You might marry the daughter
in the family of the clupeoid
The surface of your face
resembling granitoid,
And it might be said
Your ear is helicoid-
But of your balance
It is really quite centroid, my dear.


Convert

When you grow up
 Inches from your neighbor
Feet from the fire department
A stone's throw from help
Cozy, measuring
Your worth in the King's English
It's a bit of a shock
To find one morning that
You thought you had at least 32 degrees of warmth
But it's plummeted to zero.
It was for me brought home
As I boiled my tea to toasty 212
Only to see the thermometer,
Which I was testing for candy making
Stuck at 100.
All of it required my conversion
The miles I went to avoid those deep thoughts
The pounds of flesh shed

I would say I became a convert
When I realized that I could not see the miles ahead in the 15 K race
I'd gotten into,
Nor imagine the yards to go running the ball downfield
Against a stunning defense
It freed the mind
From some weighty measurements
That had been holding me back.


Cosecant 

Somewhere in Oklahoma
Or East Tennessee sits a kid
With a straight back
legs stretched out long
Hypotanual, well, almost,
Speaking to his friends
as his little sister struts along the fence line
He's perched on, she's
Telling the boys
as she's a talking
That AD has to watch her
ALL DAY so
"Cosecant go on down to trout fish
cause he's got me to tend
 for my Aunt Edna's visit later tonight,
so you boys just go on home now."
This divided the boys into two minds.
Those that thought him hen pecked
And those that knew
Living adjacent to his sister's room
was a bit like learning how to
slip by the eye of that hawk up on the ridge line.


D


Deleted Neighborhoods

You internalize stories and situations
From your life of listening,
watching, reading, then in discussions
Of what once happened
Some are vivid, others like a wallpaper hung
On your consciousness

Sometimes it is as if you were a moving picture creator
Some piece of your hearing playing inside seeing when a ghetto was formed
From those rounded up, that is me suddenly,
You just imagine it really,
The barbed wire, the rawness on your skin, the loss of property, status, paintings
The identification with oppressed firmly (not oppressor for me)
Fixed within that inner window, flipping

One place that happens 
In the deletion, the eradication from the all of us
The neighborhoods, homes, lives, of some of us that somehow
In forward momentum we still are able to remember, not yet totally gone
To actually sit back
Think about how our boundaries
Or lack of limits, took someone's presence away
Forever.

And there you are- with a life reduced to a box
Or a bundle, then to a group on a train
Or a scrap of a mattress or a spot under a ledge
out in the elements, a relationship lost
My mind has to collapse to be just inside my body, my mind
Feeling responses or a set of conditions
This is how close I have come to
You, without truly being you.


Delta

Fertile soil
Uncertain times
Travelin' country frog
With his pants
Pulled down
Cigar box strumming
The delta blues



Del Operator

Imagine being a bestman
But never the man
a bridesmaid
Never chosen
For the white dress
Never having the actual
force, direction
But standing there
On a page
Symbolic notation.

Del can
commiserate with all the rolling
Font on the internet
Typed out to mean
Things no one does.



Discrete Data

Discretion is the better
Part of valor-
Might be why the four star generals
Resigned
After the voluminous data
Revealed spikes in email
During deployments
In foreign lands
That heated up
Burned, and showed
Digression, but not a drop
Of discrete 
Norms.


E


Extremum


Go to the ends
Of Heaven and earth
Questing
Here to there
The function of  maintaining
Secrecy is complete privacy
Zen in your extremes.


Empty Set

What we have
Is a set of parenthesis
Not to harp on it
But is that enough?
After all?


F


frustum

 His bite
bit 
my 
ice
cream cone
His tongue
laved
the 
pistachio
across
the 
plane

Gone.
Truncated



Flip


Wilson used to crack me up
as Geraldine
How a man
Could so project
The fine powerful
Busty womanhood
Of Black America
So that she could tell it
Like it is
Was Flip.



Fortnight

The rendezvous
a fortnight away
Was anticipated
in a 14 day
journey
Through the
Cumberland Gap.


G


Googol

No, don't google it
A googol.
It's beyond comprehension
So we write it
Like this:
10¹⁰⁰

W^e
Always write the
incomprehensible
Comprehensibly
In our math.
Think of
The simplicity of
∞


My Sylvia at four nodded in perfect understanding.



GLB

I try to stay away
From this but
For David Cox-
I'll wade in,

I knew the gay men-boys-
Of my town
As artists, friends
In the years when AIDS was emerging,
When my artistic nature was
The curse of blooming creativity
The monthly cycles that came every three or four really,
Bleeding me nearly to death,
My father rejecting me to walking roadways
In the dirt shoulders
Of country roads.
(Not only the art
But my existence-he denounced)
On some level then
I deeply understood shunning,

Several gay men
Including and especially
David, Chris and certainly Peter
My cousin Bob
Wrapped me in their humor
Love
acceptance
Confidences
I never broke that
Except now to say
No men
Treated me better
Ever before, or since.

That said, I also had the love and
Support of lesbian
Women friends.
Even as locker mates.

So, I was ahead of the curve
Not in acting on my sexuality
But in forming my
friendships.
They say
In everything there is growth,
Because I saw
the GLB community not as the far out, when out,
But
As focused on
Understanding why
We seem to be attracted and love
Out of order-
The brain's
Reasoning the last to know,
I grew.

I accepted that.

It is, after all
About acceptance.

David Cox
Lived in an old Victorian
Rented by Carol's Dad.
(My brother loved her),
That house apartment divided
In a roughshod
Rental lord's greed.
Wasn't even running the water
In the shower down the drain.
(he had me over to see THAT-
David never knew the degree of my poverty)
He and I liked to play
"Go to the antique stores",
Dress me happily in all I could afford from a Goodwill,
Small, happy days.

I moved away.
Without a phone for years
No way to know
Where David landed.
What his art became.
One day,
-in an extended parent conference
With a parent from West Virginia
Step-momma to a dozen Mormon kids including
My student, Hazel Ann- she spoke of David.
Our David.
Best friend to her sister.
I knew about his red-headed girls down in
The southern county of their birth in West Virginia.
But here was one sister red hair across a country in a hood
Stuck...

She told me he died of AIDS not
Long after I left.
Before all the medicines arrived.

I've held that story close to my heart
But,
Because he found a way to tell me
Like the quilt he wrapped me
In our friendship
As loving as he could,
I know there is something to love.

I can't put a label on someone based on their orientations in sexuality
And love.
No more than I can say in words how that day felt.
Love is unbounded
In a world still labeling it.


H


Hexaflexagon

Ultimately it comes down to just how many triangles is enough
People have preferences, of course
Workouts, drill, preparations for geometric gymnastic-thons
(thons, not thongs, pay attention)
Until last Wednesday
Hexaflexagon was my baby,
All dolled up in that veneer of tightly bound compacted order
Until I turned on my television to the trials
And spotted coming across the dais the newest thing-
Trihexaflexagon.
Oh baby it's all in those threes.
 


Histogram



I don't know why he kept throwing in my face I deleted him,
Because he certainly knew that he was acting badly
And my reactions were not the reasons he was on the net
Romancing, flirting-and causing me to ask him what was going on
But I kept looking at the patterns in the interactions, what it evoked
So I said " history."
Which was true, I deleted him based on what happened
Just as quickly adding him back, he mattered to me.

He just deleted me
There was no search for understanding or re-adding in his actions, I'm gone.
Just as earlier I guessed I was as replaceable as finding two other Sara's he added
On the day he told me he was turning to other venues,
It actually is there in the historical data
Another graph, in a timeline of my life.



Hole


Man in a Hole Underground
It has a haunting refrain
Jack had a burst of creation around our becoming lovers
Writing beautiful love songs
Man in A Hole Underground was one of these
-Was about a man with a finger on a nuclear trigger all day and night.
Locked in, ready to respond with our ultimate end.

He sang these in a cafe hallway in Monterey, on the linoleum at night
Once being heckled by a conservative old drunk Australian woman
For what she saw as the Hole's liberal biases.


I

Improper Fractions

Are they the entrepreneurs of the fraction world?
The elite, or anti-elite?
Do they take it to the limit,
Blow the mind with their brazen disregard for the norms?
Just how are we to take 4/3 rds of a pie, on two dishes or just piled on one?

Shall we label them a creative class? The avante guard?
Or are they just inappropriate in mixed company?



Inequality

Less than, greater than

The premise of with, without
Is life as we know it

But when we condone it
We have an equation
Balanced, maybe even true,
But nothing to live by.



Incenter


Look to the middle point of your triangle
There where the in radius meet
Carefully plot your way, bozo
Take a seat
Wait for me to track you down
You unrepentant clown.


J

J

J for math
is just beyond the imagination
It sits waiting for the next variables
Brilliant minds of the future
will fill the letter with their jewels
But for now-just cool your heels.




K


Kite


"Why don't we ever do anything
Just read about it and take a test, test, test, test? "

Paola was leading a small mutiny
"I want to actually build a kite."
These are the moments when I know the heart of American ingenuity
Demanding- even at seven-
More than a multiple miss test,
Don't undersell that spirit.
It's flying a beautiful design over Oxnard right now.


L

Limaçon

Looped, dimpled, convex
I've found my family
The curvacious one.


Lemniscate

Let me skate
This figure eight.


Lemma

He said to me
This is what I do,
I've been studying lemmas
analemmas, the works.
I started to point out
That it seemed
Different,
But decided
To postulate it
Another day.

Sophia says in the background,
as I try to write my math poems,
"There is a program on called Unleash the Power of the Female Brain.
My god, she says, it's just a man on talking."



Latus Rectum

So here it comes
In math,
Bums,
Once named
Latus Rectum
You can no longer see
Any other possibilities.



M


Modus Tolens

(If p then q
If p is false
Then q is false)

If someone I'll call Martin loves someone I'll call Sarita then the world turns on an axis
If Martin likes to change his mind then

No, no, no

Stop it.
This is a class in logic
Not in your imposing self and stupidity on centuries of thought.


If Sarah is writing about math then the math training inspired her.
If Sarah is not writing,
Then the math training was useless.


No, no, no


Mensuration


Every year
The geometric figure needed to
See his tailor
For a good fitting,
As he aged, like all of us
Things settled.
So he got in
Friday for a measurement-
length, angles, area, volume
the works.

This year he got off easy
Not a minute's difference.


Matrix

Look I never watched The Matrix
The closest I've come is the brains in a jar
On Star Trek,
And some vague memory of pods where people were
Being sucked dry, which was a very bad dream.

A world based on sentient machines
Jesus.
It's like the science religion
Yikes.
Since Wiki says the matrix can't be described

I'll leave it to your imagination.



Moire Pattern

When you think of your mother-in-law
You get the drift
Of the Moire Pattern.

First you've got his way
Then you add to that her patterns
Both the families combine

But the ultimate expression
Of what will go wrong
Can be predicted and seen in their mothers.



Minuend


Who does not love a minuend?
On an evening dressed
In the fog and doldrums- as it lifts the spirits
Something to take away from the blues.



N

n-tuple

I like to think
This 
n-tuple
Represents our relationship
across the
eons
The life force
reincarnating
In our relating.


Negative Numbers

Negative numbers
Put me off
With all that minus this,
Take away that-
always getting small.
They never move in a positive direction
It's just let's see
What would be a little bit less.
What downers.


O


Oblate Spheroid

Dear  oblate spheroid,
Mother of us all
The form we call home
carry us this day
on another journey
The perfect spaceship
we call earth.


Odds

When we met
He was playing the odds
Rolling the dice
Giving it the "only live once"
Trials.
But somewhere close to Christmas
He tallied
Deciding that his chances
With me
Were less than a million to one
So he
Discarded the game.

Because he'll always insist
He come out ahead.


P

Pentomino

5 squares
Meet, in a bar
They become fast
Friends
Sitting side by side
Telling jokes
About
Their
Wives.


Q

Q1

My students
Fall here
In the opportunities
Affluence
even lower
In the concern
Of those in Q4

With that in mind
I'm blamed
Reduced to data.

Poem blooming
As the peach put her first blossom,
On this February day.


R

Radicand

I was born under the sign of a radicand
Undivided
At birth by
Evil or good
A whole.



S

Subsitizing


Hold out your hand Jack
Look down
As I place these magic beans inside
Just a few
Don't count
Look quickly
What do you see?

Can you imagine
What will grow
From that fist
of seeds
A golden goose
And a Giant
Fi Fi FO FUM



Surd

Why would I
Try to write reams
To express
the irrational
feelings
Of your loss.



T

Torus

Powdered
With sugar
Creme perhaps
Oh Jelly filled.
Sprinkles?
Crispy Cremed
How will you take your Torus?



Tautochrone

Perpetual motion machine?
If I have a frictionless wire
And release a bead
And another
And another
And another
And another
And another
And another
And another
And another
At the same time
Different spots
They'll meet
For tea
At the bottom
At precisely
The right moment.




U

Union

We formed a country
Based on the notion
Of a More Perfect One
Marriages rest
Upon them
Can we unite
As one?


V

Vinculum

 A stranger
To us all-
Never named-
A line of demarcation
Drawn in the sand
Numerator
Demoninator
And
Vinculum?



W

Washer

An O ring
Brought us down
Brilliant scientists lost to
A washer
That
Doomed a mission

How could this be?





 X

X is off his axis
Again
Y we do not know
The triggers seem embedded in
the cross he
Carries.



Y

Y-intercept

Y intercept
A message
In a bottle.



Z

Zero


The Mayans
Invented it
A conch shell
In their world
In ours
What symbol?
An
0.

all of these written by S. Puglisi.