“If I pretend that nothing ever went wrong…”

Diego clapped his hand on his twin’s knee and the echo of it happened to the city like a stone slab being rolled away form the entrance to an ancient, royal tomb. Their twin profiles turned to each other (twin, excepting their noses, since Diego had broken his in a rugby match two years earlier, which had actually left it straighter) and something transpired between them, something unspoken. Even though I would see it, believe it, and one day know of it, I wouldn’t ever understand it, not the way it deserved to be understood. It was as if they breathed the same air back and forth; one exhaled what the other inhaled, and when the other exhaled he returned it just the same.
― Alessio Mineo, As We Were
[t]he public and private worlds are inseparably connected; […] the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
― Virgina Woolf, Three Guineas

Just say that I’m your America
You are my states and my
Privileged white male.

Never secede, never bleed, never.
Let me sing your star-spangles and give small pox to all your native savages.
Let me invent you a new jazz
A new hollyvegasyork.A.

Breathe the new brine, sailor.
Need; a new kind.
Heed a new time:
Mine.

God, His good and His holy wood.

The milky pap of the new world is on your neck

the shoulder I nibbled at until

your star-map revealed itself

your Milky-Way in the Appalachian clear

the crisp

the wild

the pioneer.

Settle here, Irish. Settle me.

Teach the new ways, plow ahead, plow on, plow ahead

Westward the course of Empire makes us come.

The lapping tides of the shores of the new world ebb and flow on your lap I

[sand] will be here to lap up

The gulf

The spill

Come here.