The prompt for NaPoWriMo today was absolutely brilliant:
For today, I challenge you to write an elegy. Classically, an elegy is a poem written in response to someone’s death, a poem of mourning and remembrance. Your elegy can be about a specific person, a group of people, a pet, a plant, even an idea.
I love elegies, so here’s some spontaneous combustion in poetic form:
Meditation on a Makeshift Floor
I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl
~ Red Hot Chili Peppers, Scar Tissue
I must have been absent –
minded when you fell
through the cracks in our
makeshift floor. I don’t know.
All I know is – when I
snapped back into it
you had evaporated,
leaving nothing but
some of your sarcasm
behind. I wonder if
you found your way
to the angels or if
they got lost and stumbled
upon you, bitter and
resigned. Either way,
it must have been
quite something: I can imagine
the dangerous curiosity their
faces betrayed and the
devilish glint in the corner
of your eye. Quite plainly,
I see you have taken
your leave forever, and yet
I carry on breathing,
in the hope that
when you get bored in heaven
you will send some of that
nectar my way – preferably
in a tin-plated steel can.
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 