The forms of lions reported were false.
It was a body of men with no heads.
They were no one, but everyone was it.
A cannibalistic **** of Self.
Gaping yaws with no faces to give word,
Unable to hear their own glottal calls,
Guttered incoherence for none to see.
Their fire and power were unlike those stored
In our hundred buried years of Mundis.
Unbound viscera – black, boiled, and souring:
Replaceable parts via war and tea;
Served with flesh overdeveloped to taste;
Served to slouching tongues and beastly fingers
By those for whom labor is cause and curse.
Adrenaline and other chemicals
Oiling their blood, charging minds, taxing nerves,
Traumatically driving their will to serve
Their bottom-toothed anathematic maws.
Those best who remained born of conviction
Died with the worst unexceptionally.
We now ask not what is coming for us,
But how long we will allow it to feed.
A re-working of Yeats' 'The Second Coming'.