week of april 29th.
prompt: write about or use asymmetry in your writing. what is the intrigue in imbalance? maybe work with different-sized stanzas or long, long sentences followed by short ones, or think about how no two bodies are the same, nor two halves of the same body, or how the feeling of a painting shifts with where the objects sit.
Ode to the Infinite Sum
Destroyer of limits,
breaker, Rejoicer,
pleasure axiom!
Defiler of constants -
I feed you consecutive integers,
my years coiling within me, blossoming
against your teeth.
Unnatural flowers like these
cannot be named, so we do not have to try.
The syllable will still arise on your tongue, two tabs
to celebrate uncanny victory, beyond insanity.
I write this in free verse because there are no rules.
I speak to you in the only language left to me:
transgression.
Life is one great acid trip
and you are my unfalsifiable girl!
A theorem that cannot be logically proven false
might as well be meaningless,
but you remain for me, aperiodic.
Chasing the tail of consumption,
of history folding in on itself, at some critical point
life becomes modular, the face
of a clock.
Oh, we have tried.
We have tried and failed!
Gilded in broken cycles,
the group of our naked selves with the binary operation of transgression
is infinite.
Everything matters, so I cut it down and reignite it.
I cut it down and reignite it, forests propagating
from every particle of significant ash.
Another lizard grows from the writhing limbs it sheds, and
divergent universes spiral out from your spark.
Strike the match, my love, and watch the circle burn.
It will never recur again.
Love scares me
when all I have known is asymmetry.
I cannot reciprocate without giving you the world
in sigma notation.
I cannot take a single shape,
but you want their cumulative sum.
We are greater than the sums of our pain,
but I cannot quantify how deeply you have changed me.
What you want is almost convergent -
the maximum of myself
in a stable equilibrium,
but boundaries are built to be broken, baby!
I divide reality by zero,
so take me to the hospital
and try to explain what you see.
It is only through my own eyes
that I can see every colour.
It is only through your eyes
that I can see their exponential reforge,
galvanic delirium and a complete obliteration of the set.
Your eyes are marked by me.
My eyes are open.
I woke up early today, and the sky was so bright
that I could go to the beach.
There are as many stars in the night
as there are grains of sand,
or so they say.
I hate the seaside,
yet I live on the coast. There’s some comedy,
exposure therapy, tragedy
spilling from the sun
as it casts a linear path over the ocean.
I used to think that every moment in time held equal weight,
but the pressure only increases with each contribution
to the cumulative sum. I can take
that weight, you can take me as I take the planet,
and we will laugh as we push it out of orbit.
Take me where the sky meets the sea
if and only if
I can take you where all laws decay:
the death of rigour.
Mathematics decomposes into life that can sustain
something as illogical as myself.
Universe killer,
destroyer of limits,
precious and warped into a human form.
All you want is to live, so I will take you up on that offer.
I have never taken so much.
□