Classic Poem

So the Back-to-the-engine image is impressed! —
Are there not men convinced they are at rest
Because their breasts are where their backs should be,
Poor ostriches of Temporality! —
Occulted backwards , where the bird occults
Downwards his stupid head? The same results —
To be neck-deep in Nothing, abolish sight,
Is just the same whichever way you hide!
Whether you get behind your back, or sink
Beneath a horizontal covering,
That is all one: your Front is the Frontier
Of two dimensions, as it were earth and air.
The headlong flux is frontal and reverseless:
It has direction — the earth has surfaces .
Back-to-the-engine travellers are those
Who wish out of their spines to sprout a nose —
Our tri-classed life-express carries oh far more
Back-to-the-engine fares than those face-fore.
Gazing at yesterdays, they squat back-first —
Blindfolded into brand-new futures burst!
Time throws them its spent landscapes — their foreground
Is just-left places — not earth-bound but time-bound!
Back-to-the-engine travelling men are hence
The most proper wax-works to our arguments —
Appropriate dummies, stolidly to endorse
Our premises with a buffoonish force. —
And Sex, why that is of the same clay as Time —
To play both Tim and Tom is without sense or rhyme.