An epithalamium is a bride’s poem written to celebrate the bridal chamber. The thalamus is the part of your brain that perceives pain. Epithelium includes the surface layer cells of your body, the layer that has contact with the outside world.
And with those definitions, I invite you to read my poem “Body Removal” in the fabulous Redivider 13.1, out of the Emerson College MFA. This poem is an elegy, a farewell, and it is decidedly not an epithalamium, though it is about bed chambers and chambers of the heart.