From: Cory A. Weber [blue_bottle@mindspring.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2000 10:32 PM
To: goodbye@goreyography.com
Subject: farewell

R.I.P. 1925-2000

What, indeed, caused to expire
the master of the doleful and the dire?

Was he trampled by mad giraffes,
or consumed by fits of laughs?

Maybe he was slice head-to-toe by a lengthy saber,
or bored out of existence by an incessant neighbor.

Quite possibly he was over-intoxicated by sweet mountain laurels,
or swam too close to deadly poisonous fire corals.

Might he have incurred a brick to the cerebellum,
or drowned in a snifter of absinthe sipped in Deep Ellum?

Perhaps he was spanked once too oft by a randy harlot,
or taken with an intense fever of scarlet.

Did he meet the end in painful crucifiction,
or was the end simply brought about by personal dereliction?

Or was it, in fact, the rug,
the thug,
the lake,
or the lye taken by mistake?

No, it was none of these 
that forever put his life at ease.

Instead the story
of one Edward Gorey
(or Ogdred Weary
as he was known to the truly leery)
ends quite bland, I doth attest,
extinguished, as he was, by a truly tasteless cardiac arrest!