Geoffrey Manough, day after 18th birthday, Poet visiting New York from College Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pasta salad on 1st ave. "I feel like I could Walk / into a forest / and start a fire with every footprint / ...I have found a me long buried / beneath sludge, gripe, and scabs / beneath discrimination and self-hate. / All devices aside, / I can now say that the race is won. / I'm over the line." From _Mystic's Fists_ pamphlet. March 21, 1995.