A prose poem that explores our use of words while playing with those words. Humor provides a means of examining the most serious subjects with a smile.

Semantics

God is dead, or, strictly speaking, Gott ist tot, declared the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He didn’t mean dead like lying in a pool of blood in a dark alley, shell casings circling a rusty drain. No. More like missing in action, or just plain gone – long after the statute of limitations has run out and the paperwork has been filed and the cleverer relatives have found a way to collect on His, or Her, insurance policy. Dog-gone!

Death: To be … lifeless; bereft of sensation or vitality; benumbed; insensible. The bucket kicked; the ghost given up; the dreamless sleep pushing up daisies.

Dead is seldom said. We prefer the deceased, the dear departed, the testator or testatrix. Strange, that there are so many words for beneficiary and just one or two, mostly unknown ones too, for the giver of beneficence. We prefer passing away. Into a realm where tomorrow’s dreams awake into yesterday’s television programs we can watch on YouTube.

I can’t help but wonder. What would YouTube have been called were it a French invention? Would they use the familiar form – such that we would be watching TuTube? Or the formal form – VousTube, which I suppose sounds a bit too much like voodoo?

But we started with God. And God is formless, or so, at least, was the earth when God said Let there be light, which, one may presume, He did not do lightly. Or She – but what matter, if God is formless? The light was separated from the darkness, which tells us that God did not create the heavens and the earth at the North Pole in midsummer, though He, or She, might have done, finding it particularly difficult to sleep. That is what too much enlightenment can do.

in failing light
bent over a battered board
checkmate