The pen in the poem had been a bureaucrat. The alligator had been the current tyrant. These are historical examples. Everyone knew he meant Tito. And a dead man may have more authority or power than a live man.
Grownups also remember.
In the spring of 1983, I left a literary banquet in Sarajevo to go to a nearby bar frequented by young poets. The woman assigned to act as my translator introduced me, telling them in Serbo-Croation that I was an American poet. Then he asked her in his own language to inquire as to whether I was a Democrat or a Republican. In dead man poems, the line and the sentence are identical. Still, one must be willing to make an exception when it truly proves the rule.