My Agony, My Ecstasy

Mathematics was a friend;

we’d stroll down corridors

together, not arm-in-arm

but chatting, distant comrades.

We sat next to each other

in classrooms, enduring the best

and the worst each school

had to offer,

until, trusting my friend,

I followed him into the surrealism

of geometry, a forest of crystal trees

with jagged edges tearing

at my flesh, my mind, and flashing

lights of what was claimed to be logic,

demanding tattoos of proof and theorem.

I escaped, bare and barely,

to the warm embrace of algebra

and its fraternal twin trigonometry,

my mind clearing, order restored

as I danced with equations, flirted

with sines and co-sines, still

shuddering at what I’d left behind.

Mathematics was my agony.

Mathematics was my ecstasy.

This month at Tweetspeak Poetry, the featured poetry prompts are based on math, science, and technology. See the post for more poems. I’m sure there are at least two people who liked geometry.

Illustration: The Theorem of Pythagoras, colorized by Dany Jack Mercier via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.