Consolation

Blaise Pascal drops from the crumbling page and stands
at the window pari-mutuel, making for me

a cynical bet. It’s okay, Champ, he winks. Demented,

muttering into the snot and marmalade that stiffens
his gray moustache, poor Friedrich Nietzsche
takes for me one last mountain-top-

to-mountain-top leap. I cup my hands and yelp towards
the summit’s desolation: Der Chef ist tot!

in what I hope is a passable Tyrolean accent. But God
Himself presses down the top of my head

with His vast weightless thumb – O Divine Zeppelin! –
while the rest of the World looks fondly on

and says, Hush, it’ll be nothing but hush soon enough…