You are here in the ground of
Pere Lachaise beneath a stone
big enough to hold you down. The space
around you is full of names you’d know,
Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Modigliani, de Nerval,
Perec, Proust, Pissarro, Wilde, Appolinaire, Alice B.
This is no humble place, it’s a city.
To get around you need a map.
Given what you did I expected uproar like Morrison gets.
Sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands, young men
with revolution inside their heads. But there’s nothing.
It’s as if you’d not changed the twentieth at all
challenged its serial monogamy made it
ripple with how the brain turns.
There’s no bramble nor trees near you,
no ivy growing across your name.
Just a rose someone has left,
shrivelled now, and a stone in the
shape of a heart dropped above
where yours might be.
Old and young and gone and gone
it’s forever ever and ever forever just like this.
Peter Finch