Ray Bradbury:
Beware those beasts who, now and then,
Disguise themselves as mortal men,
Who walk upright, but sit to dine,
On your dear bones and your blood’s wine,
To sift your head and sieve your thought,
While one by one your beast-dreams, bought,
Are cooked like snails or eaten raw,
While they, in grand pretense of Law,
Do all the right utensils ply,
To smile, and, jolly, wink their eye,
And mocking take your life to task,
Because your face is not their mask,
Whose shadows, cast across the road
Betray the path, melt frog to toad;
Teetotaler cynics, brimmed with ruth
Who blanch at medicine of Truth,
If Good, well now, that’s not for them.
All bad? Now that’s their very phlegm,
They stare at noons time out of mind
And then file suit because stone blind!
While all about in storms of sun
The children of the Light Years run.
They box and slam and nail your lid
And hunchbacked go because their Id
Speaks broken-tongued and smothered sin
Armpit their soul, cold bile their gin.
They greet all wonders with a yawn
Then wonder where damned Fun has gone,
They’d all your Hopes in discard lay
If you should let them Rue your day,
They’d sell you trips in midnight rains
And mail you off in funeral trains
Totalitarians one and all,
They harvest large to crop it small,
And individual will and sport?
Deny it all, cut talent short.
Pure intuition? Down, dog. Die!
Your power to change? Lie dead! Don’t try!
Carbuncle-boils their very thing
They suffer most when world comes spring
The green of sap and song and psalm
But galls these sons of Doubting Tom.
So there’s their list, all cramp and hunch,
A bounteous bilious baleful bunch.
Yet in their poisoned, maliced glee
They walk like you to talk like me.
Beware those beasts who now and then,
Dressed up in flesh, are mortal men.
-Ray Bradbury
