<h2> Mental Cases </h2>
<p>Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?<br/>
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,<br/>
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,<br/>
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?<br/>
Stroke on stroke of pain,—but what slow panic,<br/>
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?<br/>
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms<br/>
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished<br/>
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?<br/>
<br/>
—These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.<br/>
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,<br/>
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.<br/>
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,<br/>
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.<br/>
Always they must see these things and hear them,<br/>
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,<br/>
Carnage incomparable and human squander<br/>
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.<br/>
<br/>
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented<br/>
Back into their brains, because on their sense<br/>
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;<br/>
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh<br/>
—Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,<br/>
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.<br/>
—Thus their hands are plucking at each other;<br/>
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;<br/>
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,<br/>
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.<br/></p>
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