Haiku

no damn hawks at all

Nobody comes here anymore, not since they stopped serving pie. Not lone men in suits, not sharp young couples. All the men wore hats, even the chef. Everyone. They used to come late. Now they don’t come at all.

Pittsburgh. So much more than just zombies.

To my friends in the diaspora, Happy Independence Day from beautiful Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

panacea

The Second Coming

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 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?

William Butler Yeats 1919.

I don’t know why this poem is on my mind today. It’s a powerful poem, reverberating in my mind. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. This nightmarish apocalypse built out of rough iambic pentameter haunts me. Control is hopelessly lost. God, sleeping for two-thousand years, must now be at hand. Spiritus Mundi, the mind of the world, this Sphinx, rises to life. What fresh hell is this?

Pittsburgh: Day of Service

When the G20 meets on September 25th in downtown Pittsburgh, heightened security, misguided protesters, street closings, media circuses, will likely all add up to a migraine clusterfudge.

But there's a great alternative, spending time beautifying our beautiful parks:


Represent Pittsburgh, and volunteer. All the cool kids are doing it.


Visit http://www.pittsburghdayofservice.com/

Black-eyed Susans