Words To Consider

With the world tearing itself apart, and the nasty partisanship even turning American on American, I always remember my dad reading me Yeats:

The Second Coming

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 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?

"Son," he told me, closing the well dog-eared tome of poetry, "what I read you right there is what we call pussy-shit, and if I ever hear you talking that kind of faggity let's-just-get-along loser-talk I will take you out to the shed and split your fucking head wide-open sideways. Now go out there and win, win, win, you stupid Sally-ass pansy!"

He was a true inspiration. And he will be missed.

Not that he's gone. I just don't talk to him. You try dealing with that kind of fucking maniac on a daily basis.

One day I told him that I'd learned from physics class there might be more dimensions in physical space than we are capable of detecting by ordinary means, and he just screamed at me, "Great! More fuckin' dimensions! Just what I needed! Now get me a another damn-bastard Ballantine Ale, Nancyboy!"

Still, he's right. The poem sucks.

posted by Ace at 02:20 AM

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