Our Subsidiary Arrival (Or A Poem Without MEN)

after WB Yeats

Twist twofold caught by our full spiral
Our hawk without hawk-coach
Stuff falls apart; hubs fail
Paltry chaos struts about our world
Our blood-dull drift flows, plus ubiquitously
Our ritual of purity is sub-thalassic
Our first class lack all ardour, as our worst
hold avid sway.

Without doubt a shock is local;
Without doubt our Subsidiary Arrival is local.
Our Subsidiary Arrival!  Hardly do such words fall out
but a vast copy of our Spirit of this World
disturbs our sight: a spoil of arid grit;
A spook with big cat body plus this skull of a lad,
A look void plus callous as our vital star,
drags its slow thighs, as all about it
gusty shadows of our furious dust bowl birds.

Our apophasis drops but today I grasp
that colossal shifts of oblivious sprawl
brought us to toxic stupor cast by a shaky cot,
What rough virus, its hour brought high at last,
sags towards this holy parish for its birth?

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