I was a mathematician in my younger days
the dreams of numbers floating green or yellow
behind my eyes     each solution a salvation
a step towards a performance that defined
a shape     bounded and complete     I was studious
in my lack of care     my irresponsibility     my
blatant disregard for the musicality of pattern
made by water as it flowed across a surface
mapped by algorithm to a wired topology     still
spreading past the human-scaled domain into
unreachable dimensions     into a world of darkness
and of poetry     forming itself into a slide of
river colors that might breach the banks
the waters that we comprehend as brown
and turquoise     in various depths and levels of
opacity     all this is registered as numbers in
a table     a world of rows and columns     internally
coherent     a lateral tumbling into vector space.

Paul Ilechko is a British/American poet. Born in South Yorkshire, he now lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Louisiana Literature, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. His first album, Meeting Points, was released in 2021.