Numerology of the Worker

Numbers are different.
You can take nineteen from nineteen.
Numbers are also the same,
because you can only do that once.
Numbers are not socialized,
a charitable disease that nevertheless
makes it possible
for the only purpose of the part to be
the whole. Yesterday, & the day just
before that, all there was
was weather, because if not people
 
then geography (& this may be called
the function). If yes to weather, then yes
to people, & if yes
to people, yes to an apple sitting still
on a workbench where a man’s left it.
My bench. His apple. Naturally
if there is an apple on the workbench
I wonder like anyone
 
who it is for & what it could improve,
& what sort of man it is who could
be improved by it, & why merely one
& not two apples.
If the man returns as I observe all this,
if the man is a satellite of the apple
& so is mathematically held in its thrall,
there is a fracture of the senses,
from which only he, or I, or the apple
may emerge significant, only if it is me
 
it is doubly so, as unlike him I am not
an approximation. What is in a man is
not a whole, but the series of functions
by which he is educated
about death & the lack of consequences.