DUEL BETWEEN LITERARY AND NUMBER MEN

So queasy and easy is Picasso’s ease
El huncho so horrible and debasing to the touch
So mathematical figures
Don’t match up to the literary or musical
Or visual like Pablo’s pecan pelican he never etched
Or sketched
But might have meant to
In some very surreal novel made by a madman drinking
Sangria so sweet and sloppy

Like rhubarb pie near the caviar
The number men line up behind the artists
But did you ever try to eat words like numbers?
All flash, no cash
These semantics we pour like cement
Over spinning gaseous ice rings out in orbit
While the number men
Work quietly in the dark
The world spins round and round them
So humbly
So easily
And we try to be so artistically noble
In colloquialisms and Papal Bulls
I read matchstick labels if Pynchon’s not handy
So slick to the touch all the characters,
Plots and themes
They almost jump off the page as numbers grow and grow
And I growl on page 1,234-5
After I realize it all went up in a puff of belched air

 

Sam Vargo

Sam Vargo holds an MA in English from Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. He's worked as a newspaper writer and editor, an adjunct English instructor at several universities, state and private colleges and community colleges, and his hobbies include writing, writing and writing. His first major work, "Electric Onion Head and the Rotating Cyclops of the Month," will be published as an online collection of short stories by Literary Road this summer.