DRESS REHEARSAL

And when I die

don't leave me supine, even in renewable timber

occupying space supplied by some overweening undertaker

at the price of an arm and a leg

after all I'm dead, deceased, carked it, brown bread, finis

only my corporeal remains remain

The grim reaper has reaped what was sown years before

and its dust to dusty ashes

for me a fire, a pyre but ... I don't want to add to the hole in the ozone layer

that inexplicably, intractably occurs in this hemisphere

when the majority of the culprits (us humans) who sully and defoliate

live in the other half of the planet

But for me, eschew the fancy trappings, the mock gilt

the blandishments of the unctuous funeral person

funereal by mien and insincere visage dissembling

the cortege, the dirge, to inter me with a knell

the obsequies appropriate (and pecuniary) to the dead.

Don't weaken or bother yourself on my account

for when I'm in a terminal state of narcolepsy

it's unlikely that I will attempt a Lazarus

to judge the parsimony or opulence exercised by you at my demise

In the shucking of my mortal coil, remember my proclivity ....

for the odd glass of wine or seven

and have a decent wake to remind you of me

and quote the lines of that prescient poet in my memory .... 

"Sound , sound the trumpet, fill the fife

throughout the earthly world proclaim

one crowded hour of glorious life

is worth an age without a name"