Sestina - First Half

I didn't get where I am today by promising to write poems based on the most complex forms imaginable.

In chaos, dreaming of an epidemic,
passed across the seas and skies,
we wait for dawn and mechanism,
in daily rags and lists of panic,
how the world will end this cycle,
how we missed the signs of Armageddon.

Which madman listed Armageddon,
as the glimmering end of epidemics?
Which historian foresees this cycle
of rain and fire from the skies?
I request whole nations panic,
at the oiling of the mechanism.

We manufacture inefficient mechanism,
from the cooling fires of Armageddon,
with our heuristic joy at panic,
and our seeking out of epidemic.
How they mock our eyes to skies,
the single exit from the cycle.