DYSFUNCTIONAL MUTATIONS

THE SECOND COMING
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And why, you ask am I reproducing Yeat’s The Second Coming, this Friday morn. Well, neighbors, apart from being one of my favorite poems, I have been reading up on all the speculation on how the last episode of The Sopranos will turn out on Sunday. I have the hard job, you see. On Sunday, I get to watch the last episode and the sit up all night writing the post-game summation for LA CityBeat. Please read it when it’s published Thursday.
Yeah, you say, but what the fuck does this have to do with Yeats? Well nothing, except one writer in The San Francisco Chronicle cited the poem as a metaphor for big Tony. I didn’t really agree with the thesis, but I was glad to see the poem, except, watching the news of the day – the Turks moving on Iraq, Paris fucking Hilton, Bush in a pissing contest with Putin and a new Cold War – would that I could identify the slouching beast now born and growing, but how can I can I spot it, and know which one it is, in this vast crowd of dysfunctional mutations.

Statutory Bob Dylan quote – “In Jersey’s everything’s legal, as long as you don’t get caught.”

The secret world is Stable