i can feel a poem coming on now.
a gurgle of words,
a black foam of letters catching
in my throat,
threatening to spill through my lips
and drip down my chin like vomit
but i clamp a hand over my mouth
for i am in math class
and what would they think
if i simply barfed out a waterfall
of words not measured to the tenth
of an inch nor rounded
to the nearest hundredth?
what would they think when an
inky stream of poetry
slams through the desks
and into the chairs,
overturning x’s and y’s,
slope formulas and quadratics,
pulling parallel lines and perpendiculars
under a single sweep of a foamy arm?
what would they think of this
possessed tidal wave verging on tsunami,
drowning out their algebraic vernacular
and geometric jargon,
snapping equations in half like children
do to popsicle sticks,
flicking numbers off pages like flesh
do to stick figures?
what would they think of this
vomit-turned-river
swarming, coursing through the room
like a tantrum,
like an epidemic, the black death
gone wild?
what would they think,
poetry in math class
a riot unsettling the quiet monochrome
of right and wrong, positive
and negative,
a revolution against the systematic
tyranny of numbers?
simply what would they think?
so I pull out needle and thread
to sew my lips together
but it is too late.
i am vomiting words all over this page
and there is no stopping the tidal wave,
turning this room into a sea of word vomit and stick figure corpses.
already, we are drowning.