I first noticed this on my train ride home last night, but as has recently been reaffirmed in our commentary I was a little inebriated last night and would have forgotten about it if I hadn't seen the same thing on my ride in this morning. The MTA has this "Poetry In Motion" project where they put short poems up in the trains, which are generally pretty good and much more interesting to read and think about than a Bud Light ad. But this most recent one seems way more apocalyptic than you'd think they'd choose for NYC these days, as it's an excerpt from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. In case you are unfamiliar with the poem and haven't seen it on a train yet, I'll reprint it here (unlike that Salon article this should be in the public domain by now, I think) and you can wonder along with me how this timely verse managed to get itself officially posted all over our subway system:

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 convictions, 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?