Has to be analyzed,

  BUT NOT spliced, right??!!

  People observed the fear in peoples's eyes. 

  One room of world monitoring was heavily guarded and NO TALKING read the sign.  Other rooms were just deposit boxes for writing and images. 

  A nation using chemical weapons against their own people turned from a human rights matter into more complicated matters when evidence got "stolen".  

  "There's no production here." 

  "So????" 

  "Splicing counts at production." 

  "At the time these photographs were taken," a person held up images before a robotic video-recorder, "The Commanders were topside as proof of life." 

  The ones that had scrapped over "flags" had various wounds.  World communications were weaponized.  "Those don't give a fuck about censors, meaning, ethics, rules, OR HUMAN LIFE." 

  "AND THOSE have hooked up with those." 

  "Move along.  Hallway's getting too crowded." 

  "Remember 

  "Remind me 

  "No congregating." 

  People had gotten shot at; not the SAFETY robots.  

  "Of course they do," a man "getting it", what could've possibly gone wrong, answered what seemed like two questions at once.  A child was asking his mother if the safety robots really cared about people safety and people thrust into positions of leadership were asking if different armies use different maps. 

  Whoa!  The child stepped on IV tubing as he clamored to see e-cars racing to a "finish line".  

  "Well, considering that one's turning purple," a non-medical person rated "the wagon" as UN-safe. 

  "Pick up your foot," a young man got on the bus and told the child. 

  "What's the hold up?" A woman followed the man on to the bus and asked. 

  "There is no place to go." 

"We're still ourselves! Even in these

  stiff suits." The tallest Dad was in a way overly starched shirt and boxers and dress socks with little steaps.  Nobody'd wanted to get dressed up except his wife.  "That's why we gotta do this."  He snagged the three-corner hat from the bed and put it on again.  Since hanging out with the writer of the Christmas poem he'd been coming up with "meaning" to the hat. 

  "What do you think it means?" He started asking other people as part of his assertion that he was not.  "Not what?" An older daughter asked.  The elevator stifled the echoey sound voices can have in big open spaces.  "Not too self-absorbed to be a journalist."  The daughter considered all that was being said.  And which woman in his life may have been too harsh.  He got out after pecking a cheek and looking in eyes to center in a lot of commotion. 

  "He seems less sad." 

  "Everybody thinks they know him." 

  "And, a lot of people rely on him to come up with ways to, I don't know, break through I guess the oppression of the grind." 

  "The oppression of the grind.  I like that.  Can I use it?" 

  "Poem or some other piece?" 

  "Maybe a song." 

  "Cool." 

  "Maybe not." 

  Some floor stops had people, some did not.  Stopping at each one dragged out free time from event-ing.

  "I want it to be like that."  The woman was drinking tea with honey and no alcohol.  She actually wanted to know about our experiences.  Another woman asked our friend from Jerusalem if the sore-throated woman had influenced peoples' hair color choices.  The man looked at all the blondes in the room and considered all the facts he knew about the people.  He put facts together with feeling the vibe.  After some kids explained in great detail the ways in which they'd managed to not lose their grownups even in the Crazy Crossings, the man said, "My feeling is that at least half of these blondes are PRETENDERS."  The words seemed to come out in slow motion the way dreadful things often seem to happen. 

  One girl gasped at the accusation-sounding determination.  Some little girls gasped too.  Head scarves were plucked and pulled from just put out inventory.  "Now they judging our hair."  A man took the cap off a flask, but smelled the coffee and smiled, and put the cap back on.  "It's pretty."  One boy popped up from behind a lot of hanging alligators on sticks and judged.  "They're coming!" Another boy reported of hearing heels on floor coming closer.

  "Where's..." The woman stopped herself short of automatically finding her husband.  She just made up or fibbed through the last of the sentence, a question word hung in the air until she finished.  "Where's the brochures gonna go?"  She walked her "million dollar legs" back to outside the doors of the shop.  "A friend" had lashed the box of brochures and inserts with a bunjee cord to a broken suitcase whose wheels still worked. 

  "Can I have it?" A tween asked the woman.  She barely made a face at sweaty-smelling teenager.  "Have what?" 

  "That."  The tween pointed with a sneakered foot at the bunjee cord.  "We'll see if you've been behaving yourself." 

  A teenage girl whispered an update of while you were gone into the woman's ear.  She narrowed an eye at a potential disturbing the peace and asked, "Just what are they pretending?" 

  "Wish I knew." 

  She started to rack brochures.  "Don't touch!" She smacked at a tween's hand.  "A job well done is money in the bank."  She took a step away from the rack to get perspective.  Then asked, "Straight?". Walked to a side of the rack and asked, "Maybe they are pretending not to be something, no?" 

 

The boy

  just laid there when they brought him in, someone had written on a "report". 

  "That guy's tweaking or something," a self-defined "frazzled Twinkie" told people who'd shown up at a County Jail looking for someone. 

  Within another forty-five minutes an ambulance was allowed access.  Gloves and swabs.  Packaged plastic tubing.  A chain of paperwork proving identity. 

  Neck braced.  Crying healthcare people. 

  It was one of the chemicals on a short list of stolen evidence.  "Get so-and-so on the phone.  Now please, and thank you."  

  "But how could that have happened?" The man re-cowered in a corner. 

  "Chemical warfare." 

  "Oh, they did?" On speaker phone so even a phone call could be witnessed and documented. 

  "Condition?" 

  "NanananaNOT good," the boy managed to say through clenched teeth. 

  "Is he conscious????" A Detective dropped the cellphone and bent over him.  "Squeeze my hand if you can hear me!!!!!" 

  The hand was frozen spastic.  "Doesn't count," a jail person said. 

  "Let's get him out of here!" 

  People with the stretcher noisely dropped the legs with wheels. 

  On the way to hospital, relay teams of people called out the names of people to locate.  Other teams of people analyzed "material":  unaccounted for; known to be missing; matches with symptoms of weapons used in "hot war" areas.  Medical people were also networking in secure conversations.  "Antidotes?" 

  "How long ago was it thrown at the person?" 

  The question pivoted some reporting to try and get the "backstory" on the case. 

"Get these people jobs!"

  Barked a hoarse up and coming leader of a newly minted Org.  "Yes Sir," responded an Assistant. 

  "It was a matter of National Security," the man told the other middle-agers. 

  "Someone" had been a-spying the dome on the mountain from satellite space and using it to mirror such buildings elsewhere in the world.  "You're shitting me?" 

  "Directing air traffic flow to accomodate druggies and terrorists!" The man's eyes misted.  "What is it?" The woman stepped closer.  "Breaks my heart." 

     "Little bites, little bites, little bites," a black woman who'd received weight loss suction was encouraging the roomful of eaters.  Some people eating had missed many meals.  Some had never had "meals".  One cried, overwhelmed at being given a toothbrush and soap.  "Like our National issues people," a Task Force person echoed the notion of little bites.  

  Then "too thin," but argumentative against being told what she was or wasn't, the little woman's skin had the scars of "having been fat".  Sometimes she raised her voice and asked to stares, "What you looking at?" Othertimes she surveyed the people inquiring with looks and started telling herstory again. 

  "All of 'em.  Come to us, America, with remarkable stories." 

  "Well, that's great.  But exactly who pays the bills here?" A postal worker held up the stack of mail and the neon colored sticker that had been on the post box telling Dead Mail.  

  Some people changed seats.  Most just looked absent-faced. 

  "So, I was thinking we could tackle the Story, I love saying that, from any of these angles," a young woman had drawn colorful circles of leads and sources of infomation.  She'd picked three or four areas of known factors in the story that were colored patches of what she called "overlap".  "Okay, I'll go but you gotta make clear to your boyfriend that 

  "Nobody's hitting on me." 

  "Gang warfare sucks!" 

  "Grew up in Orange.  I know." 

  Expensive and souped up vehicles went round and round in the disrupted traffic.  "Why is the clinic closed?" A person hanging out asked.  The question was repeated through a Community channel line of Communications.  "Who wants to know?" A self-identifying "mentor" sent a question back.  The younger person huffed, "NOBODY." 

  Something like 28 fires had been started for various "personal reasons".  Businesses were splitting shifts and hiring security teams to guard property and personhood.  CEO's temporarily hired extra assistants.

  Whole neighborhoods turned on lights for twenty-four hour days.  The smells of food filled the air.  People who knew about a people'd history of the United States stayed in the streets and on porches telling and telling about real life in America (as opposed to "textbooks", many of which were being burnt in grills and little piles on lawns).

"DEFENSE! DEFENSE! DEFENSE!" The

  political coach yelled through a megaphone.  The crush of people voluntarily leaving the rally dissolved into knowing someone.  

  "Not a DINKy, but I'm glad to listen," said a fellow traveler to an older lady. 

  "This is how we do it," people sang about getting safe from the wilds and fringes. 

  "A whole block is shut down because, that one," a mug shot in a cheese wrapper "dry sack" was pointed at, "Is taking pot shots at any movement." 

  "Maybe he's blind and scared," an advocate for We the People said stepping off the bus on the way to a housecleaning job. 

  "We didn't know." 

  "Know what?" 

  "Anything really." 

  "Let alone that there was a building up there that stupid people who mess everything up have been using to," the young girl fell quiet when the Policepeople came near. 

  "Do drugs????" A middle-age woman asked loudly. 

  "Not at that site.  Is that what you guys call places?" 

  "There's no more us guys."  The middle-ager explained that who the girls had been following around and trying to get in with were people involved in Corporations and Organizations.  "And not giving up their real jobs anytime soon." 

  "Fine." 

  "Figures." 

  The "third wheel" of the "girl gang" sighed.  Said, "I hate conflict." 

  "Yeah, everybody's got their panties on a little too tight around here." 

  "You're quoting!" 

  "Right," she said it again and accidentally scratched someone's face with a sparkly fingernail as she overkill'd on airquoting.  

  A guy in an anklebracelet hopped over to play up wounded with his Perscription partner. 

  "I would like to know." Said a trim physically man who everybody knew from Local TV.  The middle-age woman stepped in front of the girls.  "You could pay us for our information," she said.  "How much do you charge?" 

  "We've been traveling around the Country and taking photographs and writing blurbs for food." 

  "Still hungry?" 

  She looked back at the younger girls.  "They probably are.  This cultural twisting is making me want to puke." 

  "Like vertigo," the man said.

They'd looked like

  people in sporty clothing.  Out ahead of even the most vampirical papirazzi and died-in-the-wool war correspondents.  "Let's just call it a day and hike back to the "Last Chance Texaco" and, I dunno, get a burrito." 

  Warriors came up out of the sand.  

  "You think the dust storm went this way and blew like, some people out this way?" 

  "Did someone say burritos?" 

  Quickly children.  A busload of children was hurried towards us.  

  "Start vahlking," a gun was pointed at "Secret Service" people who'd been stripped of their shoes.  One old timer communications person took a local U.S. newspaper out of his rain/trenchcoat.  "Maybe it has to do with the prison riots on this side and that side of this strip of sand." 

  "Really Jim, I could care less right now." Angry to have had personal firearm taken away and then needed, a man stopped walking, grabbed the newspaper, crumpled it up, and then mashed it into the quarter of an inch of sanddrift on the tar road. 

  "Okay, okay, keep walking at this pace.  Minimize talking." 

  Bulldozers and backhoes and chains and straps pulled at containers trapped in sand.  Grown wealthy men pitched silent movie fits as machine guns trailed the "path to stay on" beside them.  Figures in black swarmed.  Motorcycle'd people corral'd the down flight'd that got up off the ground.  Black Knights on horses grabbed heads with hair and dragged them.  Helicopters commandeered were divvied up like pirate's treasure.  Orders issued in multiple languages. 

  

  "How many?" A tanker climbed out and asked.  "See those Town water tanks moving behind us?" The person looked in binoculars.  "Thought it was a mirage." Those are just picked up and carried.  "By who?" 

  "Volunteers I guess.  That gas station still open?" 

  "It was stripped and set ablaze about forty minutes ago." 

"Downing needs more fluff."

  The editors of "the sun papers" maintained a "calm and cool" even whilst they were realizing the enormity of challenges inherent to geopolitics calving this and that way. 

  "And if that weren't nasty enough," someone with a Church fan representing "the pond" so not having to say which side of the Atlantic people had been working on was peppering the ire at both notions of republic and democracy.  "Fact is," some fell silent to hear, "A religious group thinks that by claiming a king of the mountain 'stance' that group can force the others to pay their debts." The typewriters clucked and changed through a working "brunch".  "Not to mention control the eastern seaboard ports!  The people hunting criminals are

  "Look at what this team did!" 

  People gathered around a table on a piece of flooring some eight inches above the commotion of pre-production.  "They actually took on the costs of staying with the popstars of disreputable orgs and the world's criminals with freedom to roam.  Look how many have been 'round the world more than once during this interim or whatever the big wigs are calling it." People marveled out loud.  Some fell silent and turned pale at the implications. 

  "It's what they had to do in Italy at that point in the war." A WWII Veteran said it matter of factly.  "There'da been no survivors had the Axis ran over that island.  So the Allies allied with the few that weren't cronies of Mussolini and, and..." 

  "Sorry to interrupt Pops," 

  "Daphne!  What are you doin' in our broom closet?" 

  "We've brought your spot of tea on the mail cart Sir." 

  "Have ya now?!" 

  "Can we stay?" 

"Is that the Pope's people?"

  One man rifled through a tabletop of current magazines and newspapers looking for his eyewear.  While several people kept eyes glued to a wire-frought Tellie.  "Not unless they're into worshipping some sort of "X" flag these days." 

  "Might be," a teacup clattered against a saucer. 

  A hand took the saucer away.  "World has gone crazy." 

  Keep filming!  These people are waking up to the 21st Century.

Little ledges sometimes led

  to inextricable.  

  "The leg was quite broken," a woman stepped from a gathering crowd of mostly men and seemed to reveal about the then-missing body. 

  "What she said," a squirrly man with matted hair and knobby hands fighting the urge the cover his face almost yelled.  A Bobby took his photograph for the record.  "What record?" An actor asked.  "Who is saying what."  

  The actor told to "improv" his way across the courtyard inquired of someone looking like a director-type if this was being taped.  A person near the tripod and videocamera pointed to the open tape deck.  "And yet it says recording," other men had rushed steps over the the thing just passed the chalk outline of dead body.  One determined.  Another looked for a wire.  No feed that I can see. 

"An ambitious project,"

  the man's voice sounded as if he was far away and monotone.  Repeating what a younger man was not saying as succinctly.  The younger people took in the view from the cliff.  Someone unrolled a whiteboard map of the USA.  "How about your New Year's resolutions?" A helicopter mom trying not to sound too New Jersey, threw out only the heel of the baguette.  "I mean, aren't those so-called goals?" She rubbed her hands together feeling guilty.  "Why do you feel that way?" The young man son asked.  "What way?" 

  "Whatever that's expressing," eyebrows raised to not point at the handwringing.  "I threw away a crust of bread."  The man went to the grocery bag and swiped out the crumb and ate it.  "Don't be a waster," had been passed down like Scripture in their tribe.  "We should find a village and settle down," the boyman swallowed as young girls filed out of a tentshelter.  "Oh really Montésque?  That sounds kind of funny coming from a man in tights under a kilt wanting to ride horses."  The mother took up the tongs and stood like a worthy servant to see what might be decided.  "Dining in or dining out mum?" 

  The barely adult in the Western world girls attacked the little food spread. 

  "Didn't say much," the mom reported to other crampy women in the deemed "unclean" bunch of women.  "This has been a shitty transition." One griped.  "Politically?" 

  "Naw, between Continents." 

  "To the Lands of Spring To Come," the most strikingly chiseled features man-warrior was on a big horse.  "For the maidens, I'm sure," a middle-aged woman yawled.  "Well, I'm NOT gay," the hansome man was mumbling in between photographic shots meant to portray iconic.  "That's too much pressure," a person holding the bridle of the horse conveyed of a saddle tightening by another person.  The horse's breath smelled of apples and hay.  "They'll be eating dry salty fish way up north," someone remarked.  Some people on foot turned south.  "Anyone allergic to seafood?" 

  "Does seaweed count?" 

  "Allergic to seaweed are ya?" 

  "Is it seafood?" 

  Someone on another horse smelled a clump of dried but not washed yet sold at a market.  "Smells like the Sea." 

Came the day.

  Ripshit. 

  Mad? 

  Ripshit mad. 

  Each artist took no more than three potato chips from the bag.  "Did you sleep?" A sip of the coffee.  An uh-huh nod and admission, "Sort of."  A photographer came down the Subway stairs and straight to the pile of rucksacks and dufflebags.  "I was 'the guard'," the woman said.  "Did it pay?" Someone asked.  "That I would not have to tell you." 

  "Why mad?" 

  "Apparently accreditation hung in the balance when some, and I quote, 'obnoxious motherfuckers' rallied to bulldoze the arguments about what is okay, and what is not with ART IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART.  I mean, I get hungry and all that, but it was a last straw." 

  "So she felt like the world's gone insane and those people are taking advantage."  She took the coffee. 

  "Not me." 

  "Of course not." The photographer had changed lenses and was offered the coffee as she came over.  "No tanks, I had tea." We milled about as the peak commuter hour waned.  "What's on the agenda for today?" A couple guys had joined us.  "Stillshots of movie sets." 

  "Broadway?" 

  "These are all over the place." 

  An office building.  Elevator to a top floor.  "The investors pulled out."  Elevator doors opening. 

  One guy.  Jumpsuit half off.  White tee shirt.  Introductions. 

  "So this is it?" 

  A whole water bottle drank in a sip of water.  "Not judging." 

  A four foot 2x4, 2x6 platform and gymnasium mat.  Had been practicing since, no stunt doubles. 

  "Give it a whirl." 

  The man stood and dove in perfectly slow motion.  The digital camera took 492 pics in the twenty-three second "scene".  

  I put the stopwatch back on top of the clipboard and handed it back.  The actor wanted to know, "Can I see?" 

  "Of course." 

  "Amazing."  Absolute quiet of a busy city outside of glass.  "The capacity." Another water.  "Amazing." 

  Back into the elevator.  "Can I ask a question?" 

  "Okay, shoot, but I like to think 

  "Not judging what? 

  "To myself in between 

  "I can't go with you to another. 

  "Weight.  Why not?" 

  "I've a temp job to get to." 

  Floors and floors of stories flicking by in numbers and lights. 

  "What is it?" 

  "Okay, supposed to have an elevator speech prepared, but I'll ask another question." 

  "He's shinny, why is he worried about his weight?" 

  "I'll ask him sometime." 

  "What's the job?" 

  "Medical coding." 

  A rooftop.  Cheek "kisses" just a brush up close of a hug.  "How's Texas suiting ya?" The man paused for a second to stop and smell the roses, then said something like, Texas is Texas.  

  A tiny herd of suits peered out at the roof.  "Time to eat," someone said gleefully.  "Why don't you two do lunch.  I brought mine," a walkie talkie announced, She's reaching into her pocket, and, pulling something out.  "Peanut butter and jelly." 

  "Now that's refreshing." 

 

  "What's the name of it?" 

  "Ocean's Eleven if they stick with that 

  Working Title 

  "I want you to see it when it comes out." 

  "Like I can afford to see a movie nowadays." 

  "Just rent it on one of these." A man shirked the discs from his hand like they were germs.  "What is it?" Others wanted to understand.  "A technology called Blu-Ray.  I think I will go to lunch.  Haven't eaten since dinner." 

  "Can you grab us a couple Reubens?" 

  "Can.  Will do."