America was an open wound—throbbing beneath the starched collars and stitched flags, pulsing beneath the skin of parades and proclamations. It bled in silence while brass bands marched on, oblivious, as if melody could cauterize. White gauze wrapped the body—New York to California—and still the fever never broke. Beneath the cologne and the paneling, under the weight of speeches when men leaned too far into power.
He spoke not of systems but of fate. Of invisible lines binding the nation—not veins grown within, but grafts imposed, cold and rigid, drawing lifeblood toward profit. Not a machine of progress, but a furnace of hunger. He conjured pyramids, dragged ancient stones into newspapers so that greed might masquerade as courage. He called upon old walls and new wonders, but what I heard—what I felt—was not wonder, but want. The ancient thirst in a new bottle.
And yet his eyes, those calculating instruments, saw not a country but a mechanism. Each man a cog, each nod a piston, each handclap another gear. No heartbeats here. Only motion.
They stirred—the high men of the nation—with the eagerness of those long trained to equate vision with value. They imagined deeds, stocks, maps carved with their names. Futures passed down like silver. But in truth, their hearts had calcified. Only their hunger remained, sharpened by inheritance.
And I—I drifted at the edge of it, neither inside nor far enough away. I watched and I wondered.
Is this how it begins again? Not with a cry, but with a claim? Not with chains, but with contracts? I have seen empires wrap themselves in reason and rot from the inside out. I have seen systems that do not lead home, only deeper into forgetting.
He proclaimed that money would bind the nation—an unbreakable thread, a silver seam through fractured flesh. But beneath those words, the truth revealed itself like bruises blooming beneath fragile skin—black, swollen, unyielding. Iron, cold and merciless, driven through bone not grown with it, a violence disguised as, and in, progress. Children, wide-eyed and silent, taught to whisper its name as promise, even as it fed ravenously—on their silence, their sweat, their fruitful soil turned dust.
Yet beyond this fevered delirium, beyond the towering walls of gold and glass that gleamed with hollow pride, another world stirred—a world where the lifeblood was no grafted vein but a pulsing heart; where this nation did not bleed out, but bloomed as the first wildflowers do after the long winter; where hands raised not cold towers of conquest but warm bridges of kinship; where joy was not the scattered residue of surplus, but the very air that stirred the soul.
Could there be a society less shackled to hunger’s cruel yoke? Less cleaved by shadows cast by insatiable profit? Could peace root itself in fields long ravaged by greed’s relentless plow? Could equality, long whispered as a fragile dream, rise anew—bold and blazing like the dawn?
Perhaps the lesson of this empire is not its ruin alone, but its warning—a solemn reminder that civilization must be more than a general ledger weighed by assets and liabilities. That hope, fragile yet fierce, is a thread as strong as iron, if only it is chosen, woven, and held fast—built into railways that simply, and beautifully, stay.
And so, in the stillness that followed the speech, the wound pulsed—raw and unhealed—the fever burned on, relentless. But beneath the noise: the faint, steady heartbeat of what might be.