From my email inbox comes this little ditty. Here’s “Dead Man Walking” (in reference to soon-to-be recalled Gov. Scott Walker) by Los Angeles-based band Dirty Lows.
You can get this song on iTunes and you can check out the Dirty Lows on Facebook to learn more about the group.
The Dead Man Walking
~Thomas Hardy, 1909
They hail me as one living,
But don’t they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed, although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A Pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.
Not at a minute’s warning,
Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time’s enchantments
in hall and bower.
There was no tragic transit,
No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
On to this death…
A troubadour-youth I rambled
With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
In me like fire.
But when I practised eying
The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
A little then.
When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
I died yet more;
And when my Love’s heart kindled
in hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
One more degree.
And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,
Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.
The Dead Man Walking Revisited
~PJ, 2012
My soul is rent and so I rent it
To Hendricks, Koch, and Friess.
My soul is spent and so I spent it
To live a life of ease.
My failings earn me purchase power
For weakness is my strength.
I have no credit at this hour
But for debts accrued at length.
My word is gold if gold you wield,
Loyalty to purse.
My aegis for my patron, my patron is my shield,
Priorities inverse.
You see my fall but not my rise.
A penny bad alights.
Descent does not mean demise
But decline to greater heights.
Mock me not as I cavort,
Undead I walk, Undead I lunge,
For I will never lose support
From every hardhead sponge.
Inveracity. In vile morass
With subtle craft and cozenings
Shall I undo the purblind mass
Fiscal-scraped to corps-ed things.
Critics who condemn my vice
Who taunt with stick and taunt with stone
For my lying three times thrice
Do not you know?
My soul is not my own.