Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and Dave Bonta's "Funeral plan" still manages to hold a whole small drama about money, death and the gap between what we say and what gets done. The speaker has put a complaint about money into a will, the very document that decides where money goes. Next comes the grim joke: once he is dead, someone will be spending a good deal on dressing him for the occasion. His principles are on the record, but the funeral will go ahead without him.
The first line sets the tone with its pun. "In my will I mutter against money" uses "will" as a legal document, but the word comes back a line later as a plain future tense: "I will be dead." The same word covers the paperwork and the speaker's power to decide anything, and the poem quietly shows that power running out. "Mutter" is just as well chosen. A mutter is private and half-heard, the grumbling of someone who expects nobody to act on it. It also fits the form, because the poem has no full stops or capitals and reads like a murmur that never gets round to being a speech. The alliteration of "mutter" and "money" is itself a bit of muttering, with the m-sounds rolling around the mouth.
The second line turns on "but," and "dead and clean from top to toe" has two meanings working at once. On the surface, it is the washed and tidied body. Elsewhere in the poem a body is "laid out," and the line's easy, almost cheerful rhythm makes the corpse sound freshly scrubbed. But "clean" also lingers near a second idea: being clean of money, rid of the stuff he mutters against. Money has a long reputation as something dirty, and death here becomes a kind of purification. The speaker is finally free of money, yet the line's last stretch, "top to toe," is an inventory of the body, which anticipates the shopping list of the second stanza.
That stanza is where the joke lands. "And laying out so much / on clothes for my close" is one unfinished phrase with no main verb, as if the spending were still going on at the end of the poem. "Laying out" is another double meaning: to lay out money, and to lay out a body. The funeral industry's phrase and the shopper's phrase turn out to be the same, which suggests that mourning and spending are hard to separate. "So much" is pleasingly vague. The speaker doesn't name a sum, only a sense of waste, and the waste is the point: grand clothes for a body that can't wear them.
The poem's closing rhyme is subtle. "Clothes" and "close" sound almost identical in many accents, so the stanza ends on a chime that links what is worn to what is ending. "Close" means the end of life, and since "my close" is also the last words of the poem, the word closes the poem as well. The line lengths follow the same path. The first two lines are long and loose (about nine and eleven syllables), while the last two shrink to about six each, so the poem tightens like a coffin lid being lowered. There is no neat rhyme at the ends of lines one and two (money, toe), which keeps the opening conversational and a little grumpy, and the soft near-rhyme is saved for the finish.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. It could have been a rant against funeral costs or a solemn meditation on mortality, and it is neither. The tone is dry and deadpan. Its humor depends on the speaker's helplessness: he can state his wishes but can't enforce them, and he can scorn money but can't stop being a customer. The final dryness is that a person's last act of independence, the will, ends up as a place to mutter. The poem sets out a funeral plan and quietly admits the plan is not his to carry out.