“When my country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.”
– Thomas Paine
I land in Philly sweaty. My brother drives me to his house. Now my fate to be in cars.
Not my Cambridge bicycle in the rain.
Delaware has better birds than England and more- the bluebirds twitter blue the cardinals unseemly red, too bright against the lawns, the lawns too kept, drowned with sprinklers.
Hungry girls in Pakistan are hot. Fifty degrees centigrade.
I watch the neighbour work across Mute Swan Lane. Manicuring perhaps a future Gettysburg – Proud Boys strewn across the green. In his red hat redfaced over a tiny front lawn five hours straight. How incidental that patch of grass will be underwater or trodden bare in mass migrations.
How dumb I think and how dumb I am as well.
Hey Maga neighbour. I had an Eden project too. It blew apart.
How can I move back after twenty years to this burning binary, red and blue? The alacrity of fear, the swollen suburban stasis cold in the AC putting on a sweater. Making Greta Thunberg cry.
How can I stay with my daughter in England? Nostalgia meth, fentanyl costume dramas, Shakespeare poppers. Shakespeare is an excuse for not writing your own damn play, Shakespeare is an excuse to forget that your eyes are in front of your face like the predator that you are. That I am.
I am.
ready to fight the fire rising around my ears, but then I have to groceryshop online and verification undoes me. Passwords, checking captcha boxes, do not share this SafekeyOnetimecode. Proving I am not a robot is toxic living irony. A battery-operated babydoll with a tinny cry bleating next to a real dead girl on an orange shag carpet.
