Making a Mark: Selected Epitaphs
He
may not have kept on his feet in life’s rolling maul,but he was always calm under the high dropping ball.
Epitaph 17
There’s no need for readers of poetry.
Everyone writes their own, including me.
And we won’t stop until our RIP
last words in invisible ink will be….
Rimbaud gave up the poems to make money.
Epitaph for the Pure Poet
Red rose on one eye.
The other is closed.
The poet doesn’t die.
Merely decomposed
to rest words in peace.
No need for a knell.
The poems won’t cease
being immortal
on paper, at least…
*Epitaph for Everybody
You grow Get to know
Make friends Friends end
Fall in Fall out
Live with Live without
That’s life none the wiser
Get sick Turn sere
Serious End near
Remember What’s sweet
Dismember Six feet
That’s death none the wiser
Here lies a scribbler who always lied.
The world’s a better place since he died.
His talents were buried in the dirt
throughout a life of dishonest worth.
Reality was played with - to mock it
and slant the facts to makes sales rocket.
His lifetime’s work is small print, fading fast.
Two lines in the back page spell his last.
New hacks concoct the front-page story
to feed the Powers-that-be their glory.
The legend on his tombstone hence is
“Friends say he cheated on expenses”.
* Boris Johnson (1999). Published in The Honest Ulsterman (2000).
He had been fired by the Daily Telegraph for fake news.
Towards an Epitaph for Myself
I’ll miss me when I’m extinct,
and I cannot feel or think,
my flesh rotting on the bone.
When I will be only known
as the one who went away,
leaving behind DNA.
Though not to detect a crime.
I merely lost out on time,
like the horse that also ran.
‘He was some sort of a man’
(Frau Dietrich on Orson Welles)
would be true for what it tells.
Last Wish
I am living in a bubble which will rescind
not with a pin I hope but with a gust of wind