Parallel Lines Do Not Meet Poem by Dónall Dempsey

PARALLEL LINES DO NOT MEET.
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Happiness...is not...a mathematical formula
that one can apply to supply an answer.

Rather...it is the sum of who you are
multiplied by who you are willing to be.

Happiness...like Mathematics
is something I was never ever any good at

& always made me weep

with equal parts

Desperation
Exasperation

&
Frustration.

Or DEF for short.

For example:

If it took a man a lifetime
to dig himself into a hole

how long would it take
for half the man he used to be
to dig himself out again?

Questions – such as this
only caused me grief..

In Mathematics(like Latin)
which I could also never know

I would cheat & repeat
words full of sound & no sense.

E.g.

The cares of the hippopotamus
are equal to some of the cares
that the other two hippopotami confide.

Happiness...like Mathematics
was all Greek to me.

I don’t know...that’s all I know.

But I do know that...
Happiness happens

every now...& then...

the only trick
is to be aware that it’s there & that...

Parallel Lines do meet...

...at Infinity

.
Q.E.D.


*******

About five years ago working with challenging kids I got my arm broken and had only recovered from that when I recieved a head injury which took out the other arm and paralysied the left hand side of my face. The next five years were a long day's journey into night and sheer agony and I became a ghost haunting my own life. I had to learn how to speak properly again(still with an Irish accent) and it took a year for me to be able to close my eye again and another 6 months before I could blink and wink at you.
This is my whistling past the graveyard poem with me hoping that the light at the end of the tunnel was the the light at the end of the tunnel and not another oncoming train.

I had forgotten what happy was.

Before the pain and paralysis rushed me I took a step back and like an American football player I threw my happiness up up into the air and ran forward into my future to try and meet it. The ball seem like it would never come down but...my happiness finally came to ground in the form of this lovely lady. It was touchdown and my esctatic heart went wild.

I know now what happy is.

A woman called...Janice.