Have you heard the latest? Mrs Malaprop is dead!
She snuffled off her moral coil with interstitial pains.
Crinoline and morphine simply couldn’t shift the problem
and the quinsy in the gin and tonic failed to clean her drains.

Mind you, her vines and archeries had given up the ghost;
all that bad collateral was furring her iota.
A periscope inserted in her spectrum was the best
the sturgeon at the hospital suggested might unbloat ‘er.

A year ago last August she caught an insurrection
so boiling fermentations were applied without delay.
The department of horology analysed her water
and confusion of the bladderwort was diagnosed that day.

She nearly died three years ago. Her cardiac perpetrations
suggested a trombonist might be clogging up her flue.
Furthermore her rheumatoids were causing agitation,
a result no doubt from too much silent reading on the loo.

She got so thin, lost so much weight; it looked as if she might
have Bolivia nervosa. (This afflicted both her nieces.)
What, with all those Maastricht juices up and down her poor asparagus,
it’s no wonder her digressive system all but went to pieces.

She later went the other way and blew up all balloon-like.
Gossip blamed her husband, both exotic and repugnant,
but then the groin ecologist found she’d fallen in the duck-pond;
he pronounced that Mrs Malaprop was twenty-nine days stagnant.

Have you heard the latest? Mrs Malaprop has gone!
She’d contracted all known melodies ever featured in “The Lancer,”
Canker of the nymph glands, nostalgia in the knee,
the compliance that she suffered served in no way to enhance her.

A post-mortise is inevitable, even ex-humiliation
will examine her interstice and core pustules, white and red.
The corona won’t be satisfied with any explanation
‘til he’s positive he knows why Mrs Malaprop is dead.

Paul Sherman is a teacher, author, and director of youth theatre. His writing credits include the horror stories “The Jokers of Sarzuz,” “Daemon Page,” and “Missed!” His plays have been performed at various locations in the UK. He is working on a collection of short stories, Tales out of Herm, all set on the eponymous location inside the Channel Islands.