A piece of formless doggerel I dreamed up

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Tammy suffered from incurable taphophilia

In and out of crypts she went

Big tombs and small, barrows and tumuli

She savoured dark, long grottoes

Lined so bitterly with the bones of yore

Smelling the staleness of the charnel house

And there were elegies in every churchyard

Under gibbous moons and pale clouds

Why be lost and sundered in our world

When she can live in her own?

This is a world of statuary, weeds and loss

Where crosses form dark salients against the sky

What was the point of Tammy’s life?

Did not a husband and children beckon?

Can she share her life with such things

While her taphophilia remains so strong?

But in the cool recesses of the graveyard

She escapes the drudgery of existence

Ossuaries, family vaults and mausoleums

Call out to her with an architectural sigh

While death is an endless tale

Tammy will frolic among the gone and forgotten

Life will not diminish her need

And the stones and bricks remain as they were