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Poor Pam Is Dead

by Pam Green, © 2025

POOR PAM IS DEAD

(to tune of Poor Jud is Daid, from Oklahoma)

Poor Pam is dead , at home in her own bed
In her sleep , feeling no distress or fright
A lifelong unbeliever , no religion to deceive her
"with Frans Kafka as my coach, I won't come back as a roach,
Just in case Pythagoras was right"

Poor Pam is slain, no thinking in her brain
The light from dying neurons has gone dark.
She is finally at peace, 'neath her blanket of fake fleece.
She'd been grieving just a smidge that there is no Rainbow Bridge
To rejoin Bouviers and Raiders of Lost Bark

Poor Pam has died, her adored dogs at her side.
Then they were taken off to safety by good friends.
They need not fear the Pound :
Great adopters will be found,
To give that loving care on which each life depends.

Poor Pam is dead, and as Will Rogers said
She'd have hoped to go where all her dogs have gone.
But if merit must be claimed , as the great Mark Twin proclaimed,
Perhaps she's gone with Bernard Shaw's Don Juan.

Poor Pam is dead, in sorrow or in rage,
Perhaps she was thinking "when Mozart was my age" ?
Or Byron's daughter Ada, the first programming ace,
Or Rosalind Franklin who proved the helix' space,
Satirized as "Rosie", should have shared that Nobel Prize.
or "Tom Lehrer was well aware Nicolai didn't plagiarize"
From such useless speculation, let us wisely disengage.

Envoi :

Prin-cess, I beg Death for one final boon
Though I'll go no more roving by pale light of moon :
"Stop for me later and not too soon
Though there's limited pleasures life still as to give
At least for the present, I might as well live,

I must die but my words can live
My web site humor and wisdom give.
While princes and poets, their final lot
Is to die and be buried in earth to rot,
I'll be cremated, my final joke
To rise forever in upwards smoke."

"Intimations of Mortality"

("Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth)

Once you have died died, you can't get Satisfied
you can have no Expectations to regain youth's strength and pride.
when into ashes youthful trust, and offered Diamonds gone to Rust
Sad words of pen or tongue : we can't stay Forever Young.
so take that Road Less Traveled , don't put it off too late,
or that option may get cancelled by a Simple Twist of Fate.
Go Sail Beyond the Sunset, and traverse Endless Night
Imagine-ing what lies beyond that third star to the right.

footnotes for Poor Pam Is Dead

• "cockroach" = Kafka's Metamorphosis
• Pythagoras taught reincarnation, including changes of sex, changes of species
• "light at end of tunnel" results from dying neurons
• Rainbow Bridge verse about after-death reunion with your dogs
• Raiders Of The Lost Bark = Basenji dogs.
• Will Rogers said "if dogs don't go to Heaven, I want to go wherever they do go"
• Mark Twain said that if admission to Heaven went by merit, most dogs would get in but very few humans would
• Shaw's Don Juan is the dream sequence in "Man And Superman" which discusses Heaven and Hell
• "When Mozart was my age" is famous line from the great Tom Lehrer. I'm not sure just how old Lehrer was when he first delivered that line. Mozart died at age 35, cause being debated . Lehrer live to be 97.
• Ada , Lady Lovelace was a math genius and the very first computer programmer. she died at age 36 from uterine cancer.
• Rosalind Franklin's work in crystallography proved the double helix structure of DNA and defined the measurements of the helix. James Watson calumnied her in his self-aggrandising book "The Double Helix". he made unauthorized use of her best crystallographic image to complete the model of what became known as the Watson-Crick structure of DNA. Franklin well deserved her share of the Nobel Prize for that and perhaps would have gotten it if she had still been alive.
• Nicolai is Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevski, the mathematician in Lehrer's well known song . Lehrer did know very well that he did not plagerize from Janos Bolyai nor vice versa. both mathematicians independantly worked out the same ideas of hyperbolic geometry at the same time. Lobachevsky published first.
• Tom Lehrer is my versifying inspiration. my literary ambition was to be half as good and become "the Lehrer of the Bouvier world"
• "go no more a-roving" is from Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving", which I first encountered as heading for one of the stories in Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles". Joan Baez later set this to music and sung it.
• "stop for me" is Dickenson's "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me"
• "I might as well live" is the final line of a verse by Dorothy Parker in which she finds fault with various methods of suicide.
• "to rise forever in upward smoke" is from the James Tiptree Jr collection "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever". I will never be able to pull off as good a joke as she played on the entire science fiction community.

foonotes for Intimations of Mortality

• "Satisfied" is from "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones
• "no Expectations" is also from the Rolling Stones
• "Diamonds And Rust" is a song by Joan Baez
• "Forever Young" is song by Bob Dylan
• Road Less Traveled is from Robert Frost
• "Simple Twist of Fate" is Dylan again
• "To Sail Beyond the Sunset" is a book title by Robert Heinlein, who took the phrase from "Ulysses" by Tennyson, in which the very elderly Odysseus sets out for one final attempt at adventure.
• "Endless Night" is a book title by Agatha Christie
• "third star" is not a mistake , I did not intend "second star". to find perhaps someplce better for me than the island of the Lost Boys.

Related topics :

• My Obituary , a response to a term paper assignment to write one's own obit and funeral. Rough drafted some months before my 73rd birthday.