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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 the 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?
Just before the “election, I sent out e-mails to everyone I know quoting this poem.
With very few exceptions (Sal being one) peop;le thought me an alarmist, melodramatic nut.
If anything, it understates the case.
“V”
Yeats said, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming".Laughing, ecstatic destruction seems to be an apt description of what Barry is up to.
Thanks! It’s been years since I’ve read that.I felt that it rang true even back in’79, the first time I read it.
For over twenty years my “friends” and relatives laughed at me, called me a conspiracy theorist,etc.Living in wisconsin,one of the deepest blue states, you can see my dilemma.I too am very angry,disappointed,and yes, a bit scared at whats happening now.But the really GREAT thing is,NONE of those people are laughing at me anymore,in fact many of them either refuse to speak to me, or they hang their heads in shame because thet are realizing what they’ve done.
Tom Cullen speaks of The Dark Man:
“He looks like anybody you see on the street.
But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines.
When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns.
The grass yellows up and dies where he spits.
He’s always outside.
He came out of time.
He doesn’t know himself.”
Flagg A.K.A.’s:
Ahaz, Astaroth (the devil of laziness), Nyarlahotep, R’yelah, Seti, The Dark Man, The Man with No Face, The Walkin Dude, John the Conqueror, Flagg the Hooded, The Midnight Rambler, the Boogeyman, the Wizard, the Magician, the Ageless Stranger. Legion. The king of nowhere.
Flagg aliases:
Ramsey Forrest, Raymond Fiegler, Robert Franq, Richard Fry, Robert Freemont, Richard Freemantle, Russell Faraday, Richard Fannin.
King on Flagg:
“I think he personifies a brand of evil we see a lot of in modern society. He’s the guy who always laughs as he does it, and he’s out there.”
M-O-O-N....that spells “we’re screwed”.