The Band's Marching Tune

These haphazard minstrels off Portland and Maine
Don’t sing like the poets
They quote in refrain
Now I don’t claim to be one
But I honestly say
That I sing for the love of it
And not for the pay
The pace of your heat-strings is slower than mine
But they sing twice as sweetly
So everything’s fine
The time is for rich men in green grass so tall
To wonder why our love is
So far beyond the fall
Now you take me out softly
To the bands marching tune
The one about the thin man
Who lived out a tune