Cutting
through
the side of
the cemetery
where Sartre and
Simone lay sleeping,
trees line an alley, swaddled
in sunshine, testifying to today’s
teeming tenements, tiny tents pitched
by penniless people on pavements echoing
existentialisms very essence of existence,
regardless of which came first, existence
or essence, life or death, rich or poor,
the tragic truth of man condemned to be free,
were they not their very words, weighed down
on a world without creator? Shadowing their situation,
on either side, money in multitudes is burnt and buried
in plots beyond the walls, honouring and housing the dead,
long since departed. On a tree lined alley, on a sun filled day,
the poor in Paris are populating tents, with less rights than corpses
in coffins, confirming the causes of those left behind, left condemned to be free.