Dear Friends and family members

Gathered here to celebrate

And rake over my life’s embers

So sorry that I’m late

 

I intended to be on time

For this, the concluding event

Commemorating in songs and rhyme

A life well spent

 

Only the traffic lights were down

And it just kept getting worse

With anxious mothers on the school run

Stuck behind the funeral hearse

 

Well, I’m here now in my casket

As we await what happens next

It’s like an eco-friendly basket

“Biodegradable” said the text

 

In the advertisement

You perused in that lilac painted room

Alongside glass pendants, brooches, ornaments

And bluebell woods in bloom

 

Afterwards I’d prefer not to be confined

Inside a printed tube of cardboard

Like some Pringle, to remind

You when you’re lonely, sad, or bored

 

Please don’t leave me on the shelf

Alongside your Snooker Cup

When alluding to my state of health

The only way is up

 

Neither scatter me in some glade

Of the Garden of Remembrance

Where I could clog a mower blade

One last gesture of resistance

 

Nor hurl me in the pounding sea

From some gale tossed little boat

To find you’ve got a part of me

On your double-breasted coat

 

I wish I could attend the wake

But my partying days are passed

I’ll be absent and for your sake

I just hope you have a blast

 

I’m thinking about veneered teeth

It seems a crying shame

That, along with your lovely wreath

They’ll be going up in flames

 

Please don’t play Moon River

As the velvet curtains glide

Andy Williams makes me quiver

And there’s nowhere I can hide

 

Lying here serenely

With all that lot around

Weeping over-keenly

Or gazing at the ground

 

It’s no time for hesitation

No time to curse and swear

But with all consideration

I’d rather be elsewhere

 

That’s me gone, just one last look

And now it’s getting hot

I suppose it’s too late to book

                     A woodland burial plot?