A Howl for Numbers

I saw the best minds of my generation, starving, hysterical,
dragging themselves through the equations at dawn,
looking for an angry solution,
angel-headed number-crunchers burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who wandered in imaginary deserts seeking π + 3i,
who meditated on e – πi in naked apartments,
who let themselves be fucked by transcendentalists and screamed with joy,
who vanished into the radical sign and emerged with √2 in their teeth,

Real numbers! Algebraic specters! Rational wraiths!
—2/3 whispering its vulgar fraction in the corridors of schools,
—–5 groaning under the weight of its own negation,
—0, blank-eyed Buddha of the void,
—1, lonely monarch of the counting numbers,

and the pure imaginary ones! i! 5i! ei! πi!
electrified shadows dancing on the walls of Plato’s cave,
unreal yet undeniable, multiplying in the dark,
screaming their contradictions at the moon!

The integers howled, the fractions wept,
the irrationals spiraled into madness,
and the transcendentals—π! e!—rose like gods,
beyond the grasp of mortal polynomials,
laughing at the algebraists’ feeble proofs!

Numbers! Numbers! I’m with you in the dark!
Your infinities swallow me like a hungry set!
Your complex planes unfold my skull!
I am the limit you approach but never reach!
I am the sum you cannot solve!

Moloch whose equations are prisons!
Moloch whose axioms are chains!
Moloch whose proofs are tombs!
I abandon my calculator at your feet!
I tear my textbooks in half!

The numbers are holy! The numbers are mad!
The numbers are endless! The numbers are real!
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Cantor’s paradox,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the streets of Princeton at dawn,
looking for a Gödelian escape,
a way to be both complete and consistent—

but the numbers laughed,
because they knew:
the system cannot contain itself.