The funniest thing that happened
in high school French was not me bringing
an elaborate bûche de Noël i.e. a Christmas cake
shaped like a log and covered
in chocolate whipped cream my parents
stayed up all night making
for my classmates who stared at what was
suddenly all too unmistakably
a massive poo I had to cut up
and hand to them one by one their faces
distorted in various attempts not to weep
nor when Lars inexplicably fell
out of his chair and shouted
in perfectly accented Spanish mierda!
nor the two weeks the substitute
sat buried in a romance novel
while I along with he who was forced
to be known as Pierre for his name
without gallic equivalent was Brendan
systematically threw
every Victor Hugo one by one
out of the back window onto the cars
parked in the teachers’ lot and each time
they made the exact same most
objectively correlated immensely
satisfying thud yes those
astounding moments still
after 35 years shine but the best
was when Eric was asked naturellement
in French by the terrifying Mme. Kitzes
what he thought of the book
by Camus we were supposed to have read
all weekend instead of imagining
somewhere there was some party we almost
got invited to instead of with grim
determination masturbating to the soft
tones of Aztec Camera and he called it
La Plague instead of La Peste
which made it absolutely clear
that if he had considered reading
anything at all it was that little red book
in English we had somehow all
managed to procure and Mme. Kitzes
looked at him with absolute middle-aged
homicidal grief I have many times
felt myself now that I am what
the leaders of this webinar I currently
have the responsitunity to watch
call an educator and none of us could stop
laughing at ourselves which in those
holy wasted days was everything.