When Ideas Collide

For Albert Camus,
who should have stayed in the back seat

Wars are senseless but recurring,
like the conflict between cocky, overpowered cars
and mature trees growing by the roadside.
The tree is considered boring,
standing still in one place for centuries with
no satellite radio, no GPS, no keyless entry,
no heated seats, climate control, fast USB charging,
no gunning it, and yet,

throw two tons of metal at
the ho-hum tree and going nowhere
wins every time.

The car zealots are not impressed.
When the city planted front-yard trees here,
my neighbour was visibly upset,
pulled the sapling from the ground
and threw it in the street.
He was yelling and said
when he looked out his front window
he didn’t want to see frickin trees—
he wanted to see cars.

Camus would surely nod and say
the world is not a reasonable place.

---

Resumé

I am a man of modest proportion,
three score and eighteen years on this earth,
ten stone, seven
and typographically speaking,
400 picas head to foot.
Though never a printer’s devil
I have ink on my hands and the
alphabet in my heart.
To contact me for work
forget the www.
Carve your request on a piece of hardwood
and leave it in my garden at midnight
so I know you’re serious and
can be trusted.

---

Joseph’s Coat of Dark Threads

Adrift and alone at sixteen, you make harbour
in the port city of Marseilles,
unlike the Magdalene, put to sea in Palestine
in a boat without sail or rudder, drifting
1800 nautical miles against the wind and currents
to wash up in this same place. What you lacked, Joseph,
was God’s finger, propelling you.

The bakers here make a sweet pastry, the navette,
in honour of Mary’s consecrated shuttle.
You give sweetness a wide berth, and decide
to end your bitter life with a pistol aimed at your heart.
But there is a navigational error. Thanks to bad aim,
a through-and-through leaves you with a tender hole;
the wall behind you takes a bullet.

So you ship out, and master a new language,
threads of story trailing in your wake.
Each book you write in this imprecise tongue
costs you a tooth, but the pages ring
as the sailor wends back and forth
across seas and up rivers, gathering the threads
that tell of a universe cold and dark
that just doesn’t care.

---

His Halo Clatters to the Ground

After Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child

Of what unholy mischief is a child
of God capable to spur an angry mother,
ambiguous in her divinity, her oceanic blue
skirt slipping down her thighs, her skin-tight
red dress hiding nothing of her vast womanhood,
to wallop the holy buttocks rosy, while
a tightly-framed trinity of surrealists
tune out the wailing saviour, hearing only
echoed cries from centuries of prim
and improbable madonnas?

Perhaps the growing boy child was testing
boundaries of acceptable human
behaviour and crossed a line—
a useful lesson for future architects
of moral code, and who better to teach him
about frail humanity?

---

God Pushes the Reset Button

Six chapters in, and already God regrets
his idealism. His proud creation is greedy,
corrupt, and murderous. So he plans a purge,
a flood to wash away his failed experiment,
telling only Noah, guardian of seven humans
and two of every creature.

The chosen ones ride out the fury of God
on the monumental love boat
and emerge to repopulate a virgin world.

Four generations later, the bad gene persists.
Nimrod, a local tyrant, resents the faithful
Godites, demands complete fealty and plans
a real estate coup, a monumental tower
to honour himself. It will be slathered
with pitch to keep out God’s water, and will
shove aside the clouds.

God is only momentarily flummoxed.
He has a new plan—¿Entiendes? Forstår du?
Вы понимаете?