Ode to Chemistry

By M.

You make my brain sore night and day,
From Boyle to Charles’ to Faraday
You force upon us all your laws
But no one cares for these useless bores

You make the world seem black and white
With constants: Avogadro to the Speed of Light.
Why they count in “moles” is well past me,
Why not just say six-point-oh-two times ten to the twenty three?

Bohr, your name is a convenient pun,
Because who in the world finds atomic structure fun?
Electrons whizzing round electron shells
Like thoughts in my brain during crazed chemistry spells.

To scientists Aufbau, Pauli and Hund,
I tear out my hair out when I read what you found.
Chemistry was already hard enough for me
So I ask you, were subshells really necessary?

Van der Wal, instantaneous dipoles were you game,
But just one thought: could you get a real name?
Covalent, ionic and metallic bonds, you’ll be
Forever stronger than chemistry and me.

Born-Haber cycles, you aren’t too much fun,
Atomise, ionise, lattice enthalpy – and you’re still not done.
Give me a two plus charge and your dead,
Cos adding in second ionisation is too much for this head!

Kinetics, kinetics – “It’s all practical work,” you say?
Well I checked the theory – we’re still 16 syllabus points away!
I think you’ll find there are some equations to learn
And Maxwell-Boltzmann has got some nice curves.

Arrhenius, sometimes I think you are trying to confuse me?
Oh sorry, I didn’t realise it was as simple as k equals A times e to the power of negative Ea over RT.
As for the log equation, hardly brain power raisin’,
Isn’t it obvious that natural log of k = negative Ea over RT plus natural log of A is a simple linear equation?

End point, equivalence point, what’s really the dif?
Oh yeh, the latter YOU CAN’T ACTUALLY SEE.
Sorry to mess up my rhyming scheme there,
At times my chemistry emotions are too strong to bare.

From pH to pOH, to pKb to pKa,
It’s all so confusing and there’s not much more to say.
Indicators, buffer solutions – you drive me insane,
Chemistry is taking over my precious brain.

The equilibrium constant? I don’t really care,
After all, my birth certificate doesn’t say Le Chantelier,
Escalators at Centro and peddlos at Albert Park,
I was just watching that video thinking ‘What the farrrrk?’

Organic, could you be any more of a pain?
Twelve hours for standard level, plus HL is ten!
That’s twenty-two hours all up, oh heavens,
For Psychology, French – think of the sacrificed sevens!

No time to be a free radical while studying this,
Nucleophilic substitution and homolytic fiss.
I’ll never quite know why ‘optical isomer’, they be,
When in fact they are something you can’t actually see!

You ask me how to get from an alcohol to ketone,
And I say ketone… is that like a trombone?
SN1, SN­2 – substitution takes me a while -
And why fear men and young children, when there's nucleophiles?

I have often considered how to escape this grind,
And the mass spectrometer came into mind.
Being an isotope would be okay --
Vaporise, ionise, off and away!

Chromotography – didn’t I do that in Year 3?
And even then it wasn’t fun, there’s a trend, don’t you see?
Absorption and adsorption, the both look the same,
A ‘b’ and a ‘d’, come on, that’s pretty lame.

So I come to the end of my chemistry rant,
And now I must work, but quite simply, I can’t!
Thanks to this subject, I am a procrastinating queen.
Oh Chemistry, Chemistry, what a year it has been!