PAR LE MORT DIEU

And it came to pass at noon

that Elijah mocked them,

telling the anxious priests of Baal:

“Shout louder! After all, he is a god.

Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s thinking it over.

Maybe he stepped out for a moment

or wandered off to take a shit.

Perhaps he’s taking a nap

and someone needs to wake him.”

About three in the afternoon

Jesus cried out in a loud voice,

“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”

One imagines the tenor of Christianity

would have been different

had he, at this point, leapt down from the cross

and massacred Jerusalem and Rome in disgust.

Nietzsche could see

where all this was going.

Eventually the Hubble Telescope found the skull,

marble and baroque,

floating in space out past Sedna

in the dark cometary suburbs of the solar system.

NASA, the ESA, JAXA, Roscosmos, CNSA,

ISRO, AEB and the Vatican

sent a joint, manned forensic mission.

It was the size of a large asteroid,

it was complex beyond human power to resolve,

roughly the same age as the universe

and have been dead

for a very long time.

Cause of death: Unknown –

but given it’s a giant skull, not a dead comet,

probably suspicious.

If there is a god, I would hope

he had more important things to worry about

than me;

the world is such a mess;

the tantrums of an omnipotent Caligula.

I’ll stay away from his house if he

stays out of mine.

I’ll absolve myself.