Bouts Rimes

A poem with the following rhyme scheme: starts, hearts, crust, dust, slit, wit, immense, sense, more, core, esteem, gleam, strikes, likes

There’s a chill in the church as the sad service starts

Where Fred’s to be buried – the bravest of hearts

Who’d suffered life’s lashes and earned each day’s crust

All for ‘ashes to ashes’, alas, ‘dust to dust’.

But a cough in the coffin is heard through a slit

So they lift up the lid and its contents, to wit

The dearly departed, loom large and immense

As he sits himself upright defying all sense.

Says Fred, ‘I’m not dead. I’m alive and, what’s more,

I’m not ready to rot in the bowels of earth’s core.’

Small wonder Fred’s held in the highest esteem,

So bright are his eyes with that posthumous gleam,

And everyone know that wherever death strikes

It might sometimes miss, as with Fred and his likes