I'm a Facile Fossil

La Brea Tar Pits: Full of mammoths,
saber-toothed tigers and other
cherished skulls:

Spines of out-of-print species.

Please teach your children to survive
and to remember our poems
so that we don't have to
write them all over again.
____________________

Note: The transition from lost species to lost poems is "spines" -- possessed by fossils and books. But the real burden of the poem is to suggest that nothing is lost, if, in fact, we survive to rewrite, as needed, our poems.

Since my full name is Maurice Dean Blehert (I've never used the first name for much), and since a skull used to be called placed on a desk or shelf as a "memento mori" (reminder of death -- to encourage profound contemplation), and since a Maurice usually becomes a Morry on the tongues of pals, I suppose this poem is a memento Morry. (People who make such puns, however, seldom have pals.) Well, in the immortal words of that other Dean (Dean Martin), "That's a Morry." (For those born too late, Martin's sung words were "That's amore.")