Our Creative Writing Grade 11 and 12 students have been writing, memorizing and performing Spoken Word Poetry. We are creating a Spoken Word team to perform in Alberta’s Provincial Youth Poetry Slam in April. Here are two of our poems by Nazeefa (Grade 11) and Abhay (Grade 12).
Mathematics: Try and Calculate Me
Spoken Word Poem by Nazeefa A – Creative Writing 25
Mathematics: try and
calculate me. Determine
the set values of my
symmetry.
Mathematics: solve algebraically,
the coordinates forming my
parabolic anatomy.
Mathematics: prove me
with your trig identities, and
try to figure out
the complexity of my
geometry.
Mathematics: follow your
order of operations, your
methodical foundations, and
place a definition beside
my identity.
You, derive logic from chaos, and
reason from digits,
find limits contained in one tenth of a minute;
angles from slopes, and
side lengths from tangents.
But
your obsession with accuracy, your
perfectionist mentality,
fails to interpret the vastness of
my personality.
You, look at me
with frustration, only seeing an
unsolved equation, so
you restrict my domains, and
quantify my range, and
graph my inequality so
my values may never change? and
bound my beauty between greater than and less than;
you look at me and see someone to solve, to prove, to sketch, and
you try to classify my incongruities
by using probability to predict my inconsistencies.
You may illustrate and extrapolate,
and verify after you evaluate,
but your rational mind can’t stretch far enough
to reach
my infinity.
You, desperately try to explain,
where my parabola is on your cartesian plane, but
Mathematics, I
am still the unsolved variable to your
erroneous equation,
my solutions having
no constant definition.
Mathematics, my values are beautifully miscellaneous
but you just call them extraneous, because you
fail to understand that my beauty wasn’t planned.
It can’t be plotted point by point on your stern command.
Your maximums and minimums will not sway where I stand.
Mathematics, you
describe me by rearranging digits from zero to nine, but
the square my values blows up your calculator everytime.
With the real number system,
I cannot be confined.
Mathematics, you may try to
bound me in a right angled triangle with
ninety degree vision, and
Pythagorean precision, but
a2 and b2 will never equal c2
because the hypotenuse
continues
curves
and points, telling me
that I require no proof to become an identity,
that I am unpredictable, thriving in my spontaneity,
that my beauty is too massive for you to try and
calculate me.
So Mathematics,
Please try,
and calculate me
We are Given one Face but Paint Ourselves Another
Spoken Word Poem by Abhay P – Creative Writing 35
I look up,
I look around,
I see that dark horizon.
I look up,
I look around,
And I see me.
I see how the day begins,; how I wake up with one face and end with ten. I have an inside and an outside and don’t know how to mix them. Just like the stars ache for that dark night, I ache for a cover of darkness to cover me like a blanket, something that won’t slip and occasionally forget to cover my feet as well.
The faded glow from all the powder and pretension, revealing itself as cracks on my skin. These colours remain and refuse to let go, so I keep on concealing, concealing, concealing: a hint of cologne to mask the indecent smell of my insecurities, a small dab of pomade to slick back my disordered self, a final look in the mirror - a face not familiar.
We are given one face but paint ourselves another.
Like a painter who paints our portraits perfectly, occasionally seeing a glimpse of our insides. An overwhelming fear builds up: what if they have seen too much, what if they know too much.
My desire to vanish so strong in this moment, my desire to remain so weak. The way I show myself is not what it seems and sometimes I like this ambiguity, and sometimes it just hurts. All who I trust, all who trust me - shoot past the horizon, never again to be seen.
We are given one face but paint ourselves another.
Smiles are not just smiles. They carry the weight of so much more: pretension, posing, pain. Look beyond that crooked smile, and you’ll see how I’m a double sided coin with one face completely removed; that side is only for me to admire and not for the world to corrupt. So when I flip that coin, my odds seem pretty strong - I made my own luck.
Now, because of it, I stand on the shore - I stand alone. My loved ones turning into strangers and so am I.
We are given one face but paint ourselves another.
I see that dark horizon:
I look up,
I look around,
And I see me.
Click here to see the Spoken Word Poetry videos from our students.