To Melissa,

who quit math to talk philosophy with God

The lecture theatre creaks with the agony of inertia.
My tutorial is dry as a desert
this subject that, for all its talk of inequalities,
could not contain you.

You left a world that had all the answers
for one that had none, only more questions.
It wasn’t that you couldn’t find the answers,
you wanted to make your own. Whereas
if you know differentiation you know differentiation
if you don’t you don’t. In which case you practise it
like those fricking piano scales, over and over again.

When they asked you to find the shortest distance between two points
you picked the route with the most exciting scenery.

Perhaps Cambridge won’t have you now. What do you care?
It was always your way to smash through doors,
guns blazing, crunching through broken glass
while I made of myself a skeleton key,
flowed to fit whatever lock I needed to fill.

We all pay our prices, dear. I pay mine, now,
as the lecturer strains every minute between her teeth
and increases it to infinity.
While you play your guitar in the open air
your dearly-bought freedom full and heavy in your lap.