The argument ran thus;
“What has Maths ever done for me?,
I mean it’s not like I even pretended
to take notice of the sex life
of the binary equation
and the evening antics of bisect,
the washing lines of Bicester not safe
when bisect was around, I haven’t given a toss
about trigonometry or the centimetre
since I discovered word play,
a cuboid is a Star Trek legend,
to estimate is for friends
the formula is a sport I don’t follow
a nine sided polygon is just
a parrot who has let himself go,
mean, well some of the girls in the class can be,
mode, I walk everywhere, that’s my transport,
a parallelogram is what the Romanian girl
excelled on…but before my time Miss,
X-Axis, the dirty Nazis and their
collaborators sir,
the locus, well the way City have played this season,
it will be the only team
we have got points from…
what exactly has Maths ever done
save be a lesson in which
I could be reading instead in?
It has changed the world,
so you say
but it has never
given me the confidence to go up
to a girl I fancy and say eh love
the square root of that large number,
man what a blasting chord mix that is, Nor
has it given meaning in the dead of night
as I sit with headphones on
and the volume turned to the point of
beauty and have me think
I could write a noir story about
integers on a train,
never once did I use the phrase
Absolute Values Apply
when talking about Phil Collins’
debut solo album
and the only areas between curves
I care about sir are those attached
to my latest crush…
A fraction by any other name
can still boggle the brain,
see my point sir,
what exactly has maths ever done for me.
Now of course computer geeks,
the Maths base ten proud owners
of the world and the collector of
amorous kisses from their supermodel
girlfriend, who count in double digits
whilst I still sing songs from four
decades past…
well they’re welcome to it,
they will never know the joy
of teenage romance in the 1980s
when a Progressive Rock song
would bring a beauty queen
to her quivering knees.
Ian D. Hall 2016