My Day of the Dead

It's been shamefully long since I've blogged, but all my writerly energies seem to be deployed elsewhere. However, today I wrote a poem. Now, I'm not much of a poet, really, so I've only ever written for myself or for good friends. But I've been in France for the last week, and right now I'm in Paris, and perhaps something of its famous inspiration took hold of me. It's not a good poem, by any means, but it does capture what I was thinking. Anyway, here goes:

My Day of the Dead

I chose a quiet day amongst the dead,
Strolling in the Cimetière Montparnasse.
Morbid celebrity gawking, was it?
Inverted autograph hounding, perhaps.

See, I played Ophelia at each stone:
For Samuel Beckett: a one-leafed tree,
For Charles Baudelaire: well, flowers, I guess
Whichever evil type’s in season, naturally.

For Serge Gainsborg: a narcissus,
(He could wrestle Margurite Duras for it).
And for Ionesco, who believed nothing:
Nothing at all, the silly git.

For Jean-Paul Sartre: a poppie’s eye
And for Simone de Beauvoir: une autre.
For Man Ray: roses, black and white
For Tristan Tzara: electric goat.

For Dreyfus: I say “J’accuse” again,
For his grave’s neglected, his spirit roams.
Perhaps below, where six million lie
Abandoned in the catacombs.