I Can Prove Mathematically

I swear by my mother's milk: I swear in the name of metals and minerals, in the name of coffee and cocoa, in the name of land and labor, that an emergency-poem like this one needs ample prose and even crude mathematical proofs.

I can prove mathematically that there's a difference between 90 billion dollars and 25 cents—

between one Bill Gates and 50 million Latin Americans.

I can prove mathematically that x is not y and that the moon in the sky is precisely the moon in the sky,

I can prove mathematically that the President of the World and the Word exists, that his foreign policy is screwing the universe two times over, that racism is eating ethnic food and getting fat, and that terrorism is a many-headed monster out again and again.

I can prove mathematically that capitalism dissolves boundaries between fiction and finance, between mythology and murder, and between bodies and commodities.

I can prove mathematically that there's a difference between dancing and dying, between bullshit and cow-dung, between eating and starving, and between killing and being killed.

I can prove mathematically that history is a massive wound; that history is stubborn; that it can scream at the top of its voice with facts bleeding across all the dense silences of the world.

I can prove mathematically, I can prove mathematically, I can prove mathematically that all 

mothers who lost their children and all children who lost their mothers from South Asia to South America—across the Middle East—are praying and crying and crying and praying for peace and justice in the fold of the cloud, in the skin of the tree, in the syntax of the sand, in the silence of the stone, and in the hollow of the sky. And the whole world becomes one cry!

I can prove mathematically that mathematics is more tenacious than myths and metaphors.

Azfar Hussain teaches Liberal Studies/ Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University, USA. Currently, he is visiting ULAB as the Summer Distinguished Professor.