The following free verse poem was scribbled hastily in my calculus notebook in the minutes leading up to last trimester’s final. It remains unedited so that the reader can appreciate the raw emotion that I felt that day. One day, I hope that this will be required reading in English classes along with the writings of dark romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. If not, I hope it will be included in the reading section of an ACT test.

A calculus student sat motionless in his seat

A unit test lay unfinished in front of him

A thousand yard stare plastered across his face

Battle-scarred, he had already seen so much

He braved a look down at his paper

Those dreaded fractional exponents

He thought back to the days when he was younger, when he was free

When he didn’t feel the weight of the world, let alone calculate its rate of change

The final step of the question

“Will things ever get better? Will it always be this way?”

The derivative of a constant

No change.