The title, "High-value assets," sets the tone: it's the cold language of strategy, and the poem speaks in the same detached voice. The speaker seems to describe a system that decides who is worth keeping safe. Honest talk about suffering is called "dangerous," and "unprepared heads" must be spared, because they make the best fighters. The idea, as I read it, is that people who haven't been made to think or question are the most useful in war.
The third stanza stretches this logic across society. The rich shouldn't be shaken by doubt, and the poor shouldn't be given conviction, so neither group threatens the order of things. The last stanza turns grim. The "death grin" suggests a skull, and the people in it flee into fight rather than laughter, curses, "the things of life."
The speaker never raises their voice. That flat, bureaucratic calm makes the mood chilling, and it leaves the reader to feel the anger the speaker withholds.