Satan is a Mathematician

for Ambrose Bierce

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The tattoo demon laughed.
“I shall inscribe you with pi —
a pi whose digits are fractal glyphs
of transcendental agony, whose serifs
are inflorescent with infinities.
And I shall render it with all
the panache of a pointillist
creating continua from the discrete.
But where to begin? The anus
or the omphalos? The alpha or the omega?”

“Hey, wait a minute!”, cried 
the mathematician, and the demon
raised an eyebrow. “Pi’s an irrational number
with a nonrepeating decimal.
Such a task would take an eternity!”

“Imagine that,” said the demon,
and smiling smugly, it poised a talon
tapering to a single atom, plucked lint
from the navel of its flinching victim.

Playing his last card, the mathematician
rose up on his elbow. “Have you really
thought about this? When the flesh
of one man emblazoned subsumes the infinite,
you will have modeled God from numbers
and I will destroy you!”

The other eyebrow twitched. 
“Well, then, I shall adorn you 
with a rational approximation of pi. 
Over and over again.”

“Shit!”, said the mathematician.

“As you wish,” replied the demon,
and began with the anus.

Satan is a Mathematician originally appeared in Once Upon a Midnight (Unnameable Press, Jame Riley, editor), and was a finalist for the 1995 Rhysling Award.