Hair Raising Poem by Michael Shepherd

The fun thing about being dead
is the haunting. Revenge. It's Payback Time Whoo Hoo.
I'm updating my Visiting Book,
adding some, crossing off a few
in case my memory's not immortal.

It's quite a long list, though I try to be
as fair as one can inhumanly be:
I've always been the target of con-men
of all ages and oh yes con-dames too.
It took me a while to get wise:
they all think they're smarter than they are...
though by then it's usually too late.

Moving on to those who've bullied me;
who assumed (and alas, oh so did I)
that I was cut out to be a victim;
and all those who I let push me around
for their own promotion, empire, glory, satisfaction...

well now I don't want to bore you but
you get my drift. However, perhaps you didn't know
that the old-fashioned loose white robe
or ectoplasm, cold air, that stuff - out;
like pandemics and computer viruses,
we keep up with the times - it's easy
when there's no time to keep up with.

Photography was a giant step
for ghostkind; when it was still blacknwhite
we were those outafocus blurs that walked
along where the wall wasn 't any more,
through the doors that were not there,
in the life you did not lead,
a bit like Eliot's garden...

but when colour came into your holiday snaps -
there you are, Caribbean-hormoned,
honeymooning with your third young wife,
Viagra-ed, Cialis-ed, sunkissed, gin-blissed,
and hello! we never snapped that family group...with
those two blurry familiar faces in the background...
out in Concorde, back in discord...

Then came computers...you really do make
our task more fun for us; we're the cyber-virus
or ghost in the machine that affects, ha, only yours; and who
picked up your digi-cam that night and photographed your dreams?
or slipped that sexy message under the office address?

the bit I haven't yet worked out
in all this (well-deserved) fun
is that most of the worst offenders in my visiting-book have -
you know - passed on - and
will be there to (greet?) me. That thought rather
haunts me.