The unbirthing

(epilogue to "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats)

The beast is born.
It has eaten nearly all the guideless
and now withered falcons in a day.
The stunted chicks
plump with sweet green bile
ignore their obsolescent kin.

The universal dream is rocked to sleep
as the unsated monster
coils and devours itself yet again:
the outside becomes another inside.

Tiny shamblers,
tender little nightmares,
vexed to waking by two hundred years
of punching clocks,
march toward the monster's womb
to be unborn.