A Song for the Dead

The ashen grey muse commissions a new verse A song to while away the long sojourn in the hearse Yet all of us who danse macabre to these dour, dismal tunes Become cold, grim and hard as the dirt upon the tomb In darkened dirges death's knell peals out it's toll As another cadaver is consigned six feet down to its hole But ere the last shovel of dirt falls on the wall of the box We gravely offer a salute to those about to rot So lift up your severed heads, in a song for the dead Life's course ever runs red, so let no lyric remain unsaid As from our mouths the melody is bled, in a symphony scripted in red Like rats by the piper we're led, to join in this song for the dead The humor of the gallons never fails to ring true In this dead, bleak, sick world that we're hung, drawn and quartered though As each internecine instrument plays its own bloody part The hammering of coffin nails outpaces the beating of our hearts Symphonic surgery orchestrated, a cleaver conducts The execrable epiphany comes too late, just to reduce us to chunks Rising up from the sod heaves a gross, putrid breath As the chorus is joined in this song for the dead So lift up your severed heads, in a song for the dead Life's course ever runs red, so let no lyric remain unsaid As from our mouths the melody is bled, in a symphony scripted in red Like rats by the piper we're led, to join in this song for the dead Truncated toccatas deranged, raked across barbed strings and hacked Eviscerated etudes for the de-brained, plucked upon heartstring stretched On the rack Medicinal movements decomposed Regurgitating oratorios obscene Forensic fugues and de-boned Mutilating the melody's method and means The crepitated coda dies in mid-refrain As the sheet-music is obscured by a sanguine scarlet stain Shattered stave lodged in your split-open splattered brain The ruptured meter falters as the bow is fretted once again Acrid arias are screeched The bloated thorax is breached Abrading viscera with bleach Grotesquely gavage the deceased Cleaving the clef Broken notes bleed into a mess Falling on ears so deaf So it ever is in death Carbonized cantatas corrupt, ringing out, sewing seeds of dischord and Dismay Suppurated sonatas erupt, Purulent pizzicatos slicing every which way The truncated cadence is sundered, Bloody scraps of sheet music Unintellibly scrawled Threnodies resonate six feet under, To where all life's fractured melodies Will finally resolve The symphonic slaughter's swells without restraint As the cacophonous cadenza splits your eardrums clean in twain The repugnant orchestra pit an abattoir of death and pain The hatchet falls in sharp staccato until everyone is slain