That makes some sense without knowing you. Sunshine's the best disinfectant but then again there's that whole UV thing too...

Not to detract from your use here, which is funny, it reminded me of an opening to 30-Something. It was a phone machine going

"Beeep. We can't answer. Nancy has cancer."

This was written for Vanbrugh (sp?) after he designed Blenheim Palace:

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.

Ah Sam, but will you feel the same when you are old and foolish? Consider what Hamlet's gravedigger (not, I think, a reading man) misquoted. The lines really go:

For age with stealing steps
Hath clawed me with his crutch,
And lusty youth away he leaps
As there had been none such.

And this just occured to me. Not with reference to you, Sam.

An Epitaph For My Fallen Hair

What avails your manly torso.
I am bald but you are more so.

Of course Mozart had a pony tail. But it wasn't his own hair.

Here lies Postmistress Grady
Spinster of this Parish and Lady
of All Above Board.
Returned - unopened to the Lord.

Shall I take it that as a class, poets can write endlessly about their own demise, until asked to do so? Or is said exercise something of a ruse, akin to writing "you" when one means "I," and "they" when one means "you," a faux fear of eternity affected for the purpose of urging better enjoyment of the present? Do we mean to say that here we have this great mass of collected poets -- and of the stodgy, death-embracing formalist variety, no less -- without one thought to our own epitaphs among us, this particularly self-indulgent scribbler excepted?

Eh well. Live and learn, die and forget it all ;)

D

(Well, with just a few anyway, certainly outnumbered by epitaphs we have read or heard of rather than written...)

Here we go - four pages of them from a 2007 thread (and a surprising number are personal epitaphs -even facing death, we appear to be obsessed with ourselves.)

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...hlight=epitaph

Here lies this thread,
as Michael stated;
Though thought quite dead,
Reincarnated.

Here lies poor William Spooner,
Whose quirks ye long forgave;
The grass is always greener,
On the other side of the grave.

Thanks for the link to the earlier thread, Michael. There are a couple of mine I have no recollection writing. You could have posted them here and I wouldn't have known they were mine. Weird.