The Rat MenPocked with glowing embers, windows out on fear, Stretched the stranger's courage to near loss As walking shadowed realms he listened hard To bleats and cries, and saw the winged forms Soar twixt square mountains, so unreal and cold, Toward destinations strange to him and high. Air fused with silent death molasses-thick Flowed massive down the avenues of night As shadows came to real, and real to nought, A smothering of joy, dead frozen light At corners luminating without warmth The shuffling passage of bent men in rags. The dregs of life embattled, rattled near In desperate complaint of end of fear They hugged the walls and cast the furtive glance, October's men with stained and dirtied pants, Grey skinned, bent forms, the citizens of Hell. Rat men who work the sewers of the birds And do not leave the rank until the night To shadow tap at stores for waste to eat In holes where light of day shall never reach And childless, homeless, loveless sleep away Their rat lives, hopeless misery their pay And watching this the stranger's blood ran cold As memories of other times came seeping forth When men of dirty class, untouchable Did pass across the Earth in hopeless, seething mass. In mouldy dank dissolved their ratmen bones, Their ratmen muscles mixing with their eyes, They died at last with plaintive gasps and sighs Below the eyries of the eagles in the skies. -- Larry Leonard This poem is located here. Back to Main Fantasy Mutants |