The ashen gray 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 heart string 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