We’ve wondered for years whether man or the chicken came first.
We’ve pondered long and hard about who we are and where we’re drifting.
We’ve agonized over learning that we’ve only cultivated the least profitable passions, including bird watching and supposed astronomy.
We’ve been honored by the arbiters of all the cannoli in creation.
We’ve played the marranzano for every tribe across Madagascar.
We’ve even honored the humblest of jobs
and lifted enormous weights in three sets of one hundred and fifteen,
finally discovering where the sternocleidomastoid is,
just to experience strong emotions.
We don’t need any synthetic additives
nor do we need to perform extreme acts.
We simply follow our taste and indulge our sense of aesthetics.
We wanted to fold the t-shirts,
but it was the t-shirts that folded us.
A barking dog never sleeps.
Better the egg today than the ball tomorrow.
Don’t shoot a tamed horse in the mouth.
We don’t have a direction.
We’re just swaying.
Sicani, Sicilians, Phoenicians, Elimi,
Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians,
Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Aragonese,
Normans, Swabians, Angevins,
Bourbons, Piedmontese, Americans, cuckolds & traitors.
A lot of people have passed by without a bridge.
Siculamente.
History often repeats itself twice.
The South always gets the tragedy.
The South was created by the North
to plunder its riches without punishment
and deposit the waste, garbage, and blame for all the wrongdoings.
It doesn’t depend on race.
There’s a North and a South in every continent,
in every state, region, neighborhood, and family.
Geography has nothing to do with it; it’s all in our heads.
This awareness is what makes
a northern people Nordic instead of filthy.
Synthesize, welcome, and reinterpret.
We were born on an island
where peoples made love and fought each other.
Opposite and different lovers,
they hated, attracted, contaminated, and fell in love.
They proliferated, they procreated.
Blondes, brunettes, redheads, blues.
Sicily is the center of everything.
With open arms, we’ve been a refuge
for invaders, wanderers, fugitives & pilgrims.
We’ve welcomed strangers literally as kings.
Diversity is a richness.
Nationalism is a sweetened form of racism.
We don’t believe
in the southern tendency for vice and crime.
We believe
in the pedagogical function of example and the education of beauty.
We know
how to conquer the world without firing a shot,
because love is at the center of everything, and hospitality is the center of love.
We know
how to satisfy taste and indulge the aesthetic sense.
We know
that you’ll want to come to Sicily,
because once you come,
you’ll keep coming again, and again, and again.
We know
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without a single comma and only this period.