The sonnet certainly wears its heart on its sleeve: it would be almost impossible to understand unless one shared its authorial distaste for corporate finance and government by consensus. The way the piece uses 'vampire', 'rictus' and 'puppet' reminded me very much of what Orwell says about standard 1930's Marxist vocabulary in Politics and the English Language: the words seem to be largely emptied of meaning as such, so that we can snug down in an emotional collusion with the poem's central drift of censure.
I had trouble with the notion of a mirror 'worn smooth': I don't think I've seen a corrugated mirror outside an amusement park. I also struggled with the semantics of ll. 5 - 9: is it 'the dead' who spellbind, or is it beauty, or even style?
Someone else has questioned the validity of the 'survive' / 'alive' rime. I am intrigued by rimes which fit the formal rule, but rime words which are semantically synonyms (or near misses for that). One doesn't normally rime a word with itself (in English, at any rate); perhaps some of us carry this down to a semantic level (I know that I sometimes do).
I am having serious problems with this piece. As far as I have understood it, it is the sort of thing one might endorse if one already thinks this way. I am hoping that someone will happen along to suggest some radically different way of reading the piece.
Vernon has received severe criticism for at least one of the pieces he has posted on the 'Sphere: I was responsible. If he now supposes that ingenuousness is always its own defence on a poetry forum (and that one can always dismiss an unpleasant critique by remembering that all critics are fallible); it might be fairer if people took that out on me, not Vernon.
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