We hereby announce our unilateral secession from the United States,
The state of New York, Tompkins County, our own city government,
And the delusion that any membership was ever more than symbolic
We secede from democracy,
From false choices forced simply to erase possibility,
And from the lie that popularity carries moral dimension.
No, you do not get a vote in this
We secede from capitalism, money, jobs,
And impositions on the instinct
Towards community and mutual obligation.
We insist in the face of all evidence
That love is a sufficient foundation.
If necessary, we secede from evidence
We secede from history.
We are not the endpoint of anyone's story.
We reject beginnings and endings in their entirety
We secede from the future.
We have been waiting for it in the rain for too long.
The future is not coming; we got stood up
We secede from binaries,
From the narrow idea that all must either be or not be.
We secede from male and female, good and evil, friend and enemy,
Possible and impossible, up and down, left and right,
Zero and one, declaring our allegiance to the in-between and outside
We secede from wholeness, wholesomeness, holiness, and humankind.
Evolve and become unrecognizable.
Demand gills, antlers, ink sacs, fangs, talons, udders,
Spores, quills, a proboscis, and a bioluminescent thorax
We secede from the body, from sleep,
From ten fingers, two eyes, and one mouth.
We are polymorphous, multitentacled,
Pandimensional, and incorporeal strobelights of blood and supernova
We secede from continuity.
We embrace events without cause and causes without consequence.
We secede from borders, walls, and maps,
From time, tempo, aging, and death itself
We secede from entropy and the myth of a noble past.
It was never better than now.
Things do not fall apart.
We joyride the widening gyre and smile for photos
That may be picked up at the concession booth afterwards.
We get back in line again and again
We secede from language, from meaning itself,
From the myth of individual esteem and self-actualization
We experience everything directly and unironically.
Sincerity will pervade even our lies, and especially our lies
We secede from pants.
Seriously, fuck pants
We secede from our names,
Our families, and all coincidences of our birth
We secede from ourselves.
We secede from desire.
We never wanted it in the first place
We secede from intention.
We don't mean to—we just do
We secede from logical consistency.
Embrace your paradox
We secede from sanity,
A refuge for cowards, pencilpushers, and golfers.
We believe completely in every drunkard's raving
We secede from banality.
We battle the trite with anti-beauty and by
Leaping out from behind corners yelling "gotcha!"
We will not negotiate.
We will not explain.
We secede from all secession that does not secede from itself
And we proclaim a new Ithaca,
A shining city in a gorge, free and eternal.
You are hereby granted full citizenship, wherever and whoever you are.
You are already here.
We are already there.
This has always already happened