Archimedes and Socrates
Plato and Horatio
Euclid and Ulysses and Odysseus
Crumbling white busts
Galileo and Milton
Copernicus, Newton
Aeschylus, Sophocles
Ancient technology
Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish
Lady Gaga and Rihanna
They're today's culture
~ vulture and piranha
True beauty, indeed (to all number-theorists),
reveals the distribution of the primes.
Beauty, too, is courage, the defiant fists
of a defender that we praise in rhymes.
Beauty are oaths, that Prince Hector all times
keeps to shield city, child, and princess bride;
or King Priam's grace for thoughtless Paris's crimes,
rather than wrath for his treach'rous regnocide.
What beauty is not, is Euclid mortified,
if Riemann's Hypothesis's not in sight,
or the Zeta function's proof verified
(for the spread of primes) gives zero insight.
But beauty is what frames your lovely face:
which even shames Helen of the Trojan race!
Zero to the thousandth power
logic on the run
Oblongata left in pieces
nothing zero-sum
Squaring the root unto itself
Euclid at the cliff
A equals B as B disappears
the quotient nondescript
Hickory Dickory’s mouse on the run
though nimble Jack gets burned
Formulas crumbling as integers balk
what’s ‘given’ mocked and spurned
Zero to the thousandth power
reason clones its fear
Classical thought—not selling or bought
Pythagorean tears
(36th & Chestnut Sts: September, 2023)
“Is 'Mathematics...not only [a] Truth,
but [a] supreme beauty—a beauty cold
and austere, like that of sculpture [uncouth
to men for whom this concept is too bold],
without appeal to any part of our weaker nature,
without the gorgeous trappings of painting
or music, yet [is still more] sublimely pure,
and capable of a stern [un-feinting]
perfection such as only the greatest art
can show?'” So, thus geometrized Euclid
(to Russell's youthful mind and fervent heart),
and taught,—by a draped, stone caryatid
at the Library of Alexandria;
from whence “The Elements” spread without lemma!
I
digits through nine
faith came easy
enter zero - infinity
II
God had to go
God would fill all space
creation is born
III
space is his disguise
like zero, it's No-thing:
No thing, not nothing!
IV
Euclid gave us wins, loss -
Curves have no points
Logic boxes us all
V
Oceanic thinking, now
More needed than ever
yin-yang, not in and out
How like a prison is my cubicle;
A prison,a trap, a cell,a place of fear.
For humans,this is truth indubitable;
We need to roam ,to see,to smell,to hear.
Yet in the bureaucrat realm , we must observe,
The rules laid down by generations gone.
And from their ancient code we cannot swerve.
Even if by rules we are undone.
Did Euclid discover how grave was a bath?
Did Moses fear to see the burning bush?
Did Einstein follow someone’s else’s path?
Did Socrates give voice to utter trash?
Imprisoned spirits are to revolution called.
Lest by Ariel they should be mauled.
like sparrows on the streets and in caves
consider how they swoop and dive
and fatten on dusty pizza crumbs
consider the raccoons how they squawk and squalor
peck and fight for space to grow fat gray hairs
and live as a family in the wild consider them
consider the homeless man on East Euclid dragging
Giant-Eagle cart on the sidewalk every hour
with rags searching through litterbins for a meal
consider the hare the rabbit the crow and ants
with no pay stubs yet with no long days of boredom
and they lie in cleanest beds and smile at dinner times
then consider me after the gavel and the long sentence
living with cancelled checks crying over lost purpose
scarred of sirens and hunting shelters for meals
consider me sleeping in fields with dead numbers
consider me whose far-distant ancestors never crashed
in any trash but drank coffee with Carnegie on his birthday
consider me coming out of institutions that mark me forever
with a bindi that blocks my name from the list of humans
and to live I have to peep through thorn bushes and grunt
What fools do sing of Karma?
Justice meted out like some kind of sick equation as though
any thoughts or theorems are constant.
I'm sure Pythagoras and Euclid would be very proud of all of us.
See this place and time:
Sigma batwings beat like boomerangs,
doors slamming out the dust-choked sunlight,
trapping sinners in the saint saloon.
An argument!
There at the corner table where
pink flesh meets inlaid wood and
the oily leather squeaks and cracks around the
ultimate geometry machine the
steel bed for brass and lead and rifling.
This is bar-graph justice, an
erxcercise in mean and percentage, or
was it median?
Bam!Bam!
Like a prophet fired from the kiln those bullets eat the air
between the foresight and the torso.
This is aborigional justice come
'round full circle on a decent man.
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