Dead Men

Dead are the sleeping men,

Dead by their marching drone.

Awakened bare by a bare word--

As a bare Fruit of a seasonal branch

Bare of it's yellow leaves--

Bare is the shrilling word

Of Death, frozen silent on the wind;

(Lucid men sing of dreams,

Sleepers dream of singing;

Lo, Dead Men do not dream at all,

Nor sing within dreams for it cuts their tongue.)

Wild-eyed, bare sabres, land

On bosoms made from Lust,

Glint Silver in a wistful hand:

"Make ready the cannon!"

Cries the Noblest of Muck,

Scrounge to face'em when rest'him dies:

A trial gun and the saving crumbs pluck,

And the naked ape sighs

On the World's crank, "Yo! Ho!"

As the call of Death wakes the cock.

Economic cannons

Blast brigades of Dead Men,

As a sabre splays reddened mead

From a grayish globe spurting steam, laying

Dreamers beneath as seed;

Scythed weeds for a crooning plot,

Though, Dead Mean sing no Songs:

…And the dead men are the lost men;

The working men of Nature's slumber;

These irate men with pirate gin

Grow cold in their waste and plunder.

But with a wistful grin and wishful eye

They throe and take for Pride,

And the wistful cringe is a fleeting Sin

Upon the beggar who's ready to die...

But dead are the sleeping

Men; heaving more debt for bread.

Their scaly yearns as sorrow's clash

Dismay; lost by lows of a deeper rung,

And with a croaking lung

On an awkward bier,

They speak, "Silence," and no one hears.

With a dying tongue they speak their greatest word;

Of Dead Men dying, no one's ever heard.