The Man Who Forged Pain

You watched him forge the tuning
fork in the white hot flame, ignoring
his actions as you taught the class
the fundamentals of science:
discover, hypothesize, experiment.
Your eyelids never shifted as his
experiment took place; digging the
tool like a miner’s pickaxe under my
skin, forming bubbling peninsulas.
You never wept as the conclusions
were formed by my crystallizing tears,
you were only interested in the equations
that I never could understand.