The scripted response
The crispy colonel
Never food for worms
Only the sooty residue
Dioxin and PCBs

A lucid nightmare
Acutely detailed
Destination evermore ahead
Repeated reversals
Waken to another nightmare

The crisis authority
Professes its overload
Holding responsible
The granular populace
The many dispersed

The deputized servants
Continue to stoke
The compressed reaction
Ancient apparatus
Barely functional but effective

The force of tradition
The moribund regalia
The decrypting manuals
The familiar insistence
Immemorial mechanisms