Exponent

Middle school memorial to Mr. Geometry
Uncalculated horrors on grey-green screens
Distractions, notes, bedridden throats
Scoured by expectations, soured on limitations

Surely seriousness can't have such a price
Hours and days waiting, sitting, lifting a hand
Whose opine tree clippings make gradations
Out of paper, pencil, rarely scissors

History repeats itself every period
Commanded to make three-minute journeys
Dodgeback frontball sweats at the possibility
Of lateness to yet another drone doorfare

Listen, try not to hear, your subjective experience
Must fold eight times, eight and a half, by eleven
If you can expect to wear fitting clothes
By the time you reach teaching age

Recommit daily to the chessboard
Whose penny pile on the sixty fourth square
Wrecks tangles into impressionable heads
Who see patterns and groups
And only want to be loved