They print their lives on a price tag,
Those big fat numbers,
All they do is brag.
My daughter’s a neurosurgeon,
Graduated from Johns Hopkins,
Saving lives by the hundreds.
My son a number-crunching accountant,
A career that keeps his wallet thick,
And his pockets filled.

They wonder what I do,
I tell them I work with words.
They gasp,
Eyes widen.

I tell them that,
I can count the spaces between adjacent letters in a word,
String words together to build a sentence,
Layer each sentence above another like bricks,
Place a single powerful mark of punctuation in between,
The glue that holds the bricks intact and forms a wall.
A wall of stanzas,
Connected by commas and semicolons.
A wall of paragraphs,
Big enough to block numbers out.

Because words fill souls while numbers fill pockets.
Words are immeasurable.

Infinite.