Sestina for Math Class in Florence

Hi. I wrote a little in Italy and this was something like that. Except that I edited it today, in Tallahassee.

I didn't post it then because it was a giant mess and still a little bit is. Some lines have a good 10 syllables and others have 9 or 11, so just ignore that. Ignore whatever you think makes this poem lazy and corny and bad. It's a really great poem if you do that.

I wrote it about this feeling that I have all the time but really really have in math class. I'm actually in math class right now, if you can believe it. The classroom I'm in has no windows. If I spend more that ten minutes or something here I start to get the same stress headaches I get during depressive episodes. 

Lately I've been pushing the fear and the stress of being trapped indoors away. I've been trying to believe that the feeling is immature and keeping me from being a respectable member of society. It's keeping me from earning six figures and knowing a lot about science and being respected. So I've been trying to accept the blank rooms I have to be in. But I've been worried lately that forgetting about the feeling is forgetting something that I truly believe in.

This is a poem about how humans on average spend 90% of their life indoors and workers report that 40% of their time is spent on repetitive tasks and about all the things you long for in those moments. I wrote like the little voice that screams whenever I'm in a room with no windows. I wrote it so maybe you would feel the obsession. The longing. So you'd get the same headache I have right now. 

Pray that I strike a balance between financial stability and the horror of suppressing my nature?

Hate math. Use eyes to eat a windowpane

Colored pale green, like a crushed grasshopper

Or high-tide ocean. Like alpine granite

And wet moonstone, like if the almost-dawn

Bled slow into shell and Italian snot.

I watch the sun come up from these blank rooms.

Where the fields roll outside these rooms.

And always some taunting windowpane

While I sit by kids with Italian snot;

By little parts of crushed grasshoppers

Who should’ve been at the next almost-dawn,

Under an alpine sky and wet granite.

Radon poisoning is caused by granite,

When kids are stuck in granite rooms;

Rooms with no windowpane to see the dawn.

So really I am grateful for a windowpane,

Which if I wait will show a grasshopper

Or tree grow. But it blocks the wind like snot

Blocks air from the lungs. I am the snot

And I make it. Though we cannot make granite

It spawns in the streets like grasshoppers

Peaking up from rolling fields. And blank rooms

Are ground from mountains until windowpanes

Become the only way to see the dawn.

Until this world of buildings shadows dawn.

I’ll begin again- build with bones and snot

And never plug the walls with windowpane

Where there is sky. And leave all granite

In the caves which wait like silent rooms

Until the sun comes up. A grasshopper

In a rolling field meets a grasshopper

And together they welcome in the dawn.

Never trapped by the shell of these blank rooms.

Never crushed against the granite like snot.

I saw moonstone trapped there in the granite,

Behind where the sun hit the windowpane.

I saw the grasshopper crushed like snot

(There’s something like dawn, cast on the granite)

In a blank room. I watched a windowpane.