Within a fiction,
set in Samurai Japan,
there are a hundred men,
on a beach, neat, dead.

They were betrayed, neither by their leader,
who let an enemy ooze behind their lines,
nor by their simple suicidal honour;
no, they were betrayed by their author.

"So what?", you might say,
"they're only characters in a cheap novel",
"if that", you might add,
"hardly worth their sentence."

But had any one of them,
dead to sharp that moment's plot,
lived beyond their author's laziness;
they could be: what?
A snark of colour in a shriek of motown?

Perhaps these non-born,
having snatched creation
for such an callous blink,
deserved their self-assassination;
they could have chosen better.

The film was, of course, successful.