"Why are all these semen here?"

  "Oh honey, that's not good English." The ultraviolet wand and scope revealed the organisms.  "Oh honey, you know how the boys are at that age."  The two men exchanged porthole views.  The women froze in place to be photographed.  "Start talking!" A senior military man garbled. 

  Questions were being met with questions.  Questions like, why did all those people take up/leave position?  

  Most of us floated like flotsam amongst a convergence of navies mired in the legal lingo of offshore.  

  A calm had quelled potential "civil war" to sides behind cement barriers.  National Guard chalk-powdered the fluid frontlines based on reconn and captured infiltrator info-mation.  Monitors displayed what once were red and blue dominated images of Country as black space with fire hazard spots.

Filmed from behind like;

  The simile and metaphor was getting co-opted.  So instead of like bulldogs in a poker game, that iconic painting, the persons "in the round" were also filmed from behind as "mobsters" or "gangstahs". 

  An actor wanted to know "if the take took" the next morning so he might be allowed to travel to his other appointments.  When word of "socked in" came, he cried.  "The master is reduced to tears," an ornry "town crier" told the village of condo mates. 

  "All my life," he gasped to pull himself back from the asthma attack ledge.  All his life he'd been training and strategically experiencing.  In another room, a person was having an allergic reaction to pineapple juice. 

  "Now what?" A wife wanted an answer to how in the hell can I pay the bills.  "I guess," the man sipped slow on one of the last four inhalers, held his breathing still until he almost choked, "I guess I'll just," he took another intake of the medicine, "Stay here and be just another dough-dough bird in the big pile of doo-doo."  

  "He seems calm now," a medical technician reported back down the line of communications.  The actor traced the top of a salt shaker round and round with his dyed finger.  He laughed, funny-sounding because of his chest muscle constrictions.  "Yep.  Dough-dough bird.  Doo-doo pile," he picked up and wailed the salt shaker at a revel rouser, "Because of him and him and," his finger pointed as fierce as a sword in Saratoga during the Revolutionary War days.

A wall of Native Floridians had

  been breached by dismissed Cubans.  This was at a Disney property.  One "first lady" associated with POTUS people hollered, "Follow that nose!" Another "first lady" didn't holler.  But her English in the megaphone was impeccable; "Focus on the tricorner hat." 

  Waves of people voluntarily defended the Homeland by walking to and fro.

'My question Sir or M'am...'

  "Is ICE the Military?" Came the question into the vacuum silence of ceasefire.  

  In our own Country.

"I had no idea we'd pop out here!"

  As soon as we'd crossed the tarmac the pilot asked, "Where in the hell are we?" 

  MinNEso TAH 

  "Okay, Don't get mad," the young, fresh pilot started to tell the passengers...not Chicago.

 

"They've caught up." The

  woman put the satellite phone back into a leather filing cabinet on wheels.  She's shooshed away the real people on the bus saying stuff like, "This is getting really weird.". And she was seemingly talking to herself in the conversation. 

  "Want in?" She asked out loud. 

  Us younger people thought, this is it!  The FBI or something wants us.  One of us sort of instantly glowed at crossing some personal milestone of knew it.  Another checked the swelling legs of the older person we were trying to get to a clinic.  "Hang in there Mabe." Mabe nodded.  "Will do, will do." We felt relief at that.  Then her voice swung low and dired us, "Lord willing, Lord willing." 

  "Do you think there are other Academics at the," the woman looked at the brochure, "Cultural Center?" The fake people didn't answer.  "Not in what script?" The woman asked herself. 

  There was a building further on up the smashed white gravel driveway.  We could see the roof. 

  That's it, the woman compared a photograph to the building when we got close enough to just get out.  The woman asked why the bus bosses took our little cameras.  Someone bit the inside of a lip. 

  Approaching the building we noticed cultural center signs had been put over the lettering that had previously been describing the building's use.  Some Asian people were indicating where a man with a slouchy briefcase should get on another bus.  They'd say Stormin' Norman and smack him on the back making ooooos and ahs.  One took a picture of two posing with the guy.  "Turn, turn," the one with the camera said.  The guy with the briefcase turned around bodily.  With the camera went round to face him, almost smiling, and held the camera out to him.  The person pointed at the three of them.  "Oh, oh," he guffawed. 

  "Where are you going?" One of us asked the woman who'd come to the entrance with us.  "For my luggage!  I'll go on that bus with him." 

"It just so happens, I can go."

  "As if things weren't weird enough, right?!" 

  Silence but for the sounds of liquid guts and bus wheels on white sand. 

  "Is it this brochure?" 

  Someone had cut out and pasted a DVD artwork to the front, Trading Places. 

  "Anywho, as if we weren't thrilled our socks off enough by a gigantic 

  "Size of Babylon 

  "Oasis in the desert of so-called Arizona," 

  "Read the script." A Korean body guard poked a finger almost through a sweater pocket at disobeying. 

  "The Cultural Center of cultural centers.  The Shaquiel O'Neil of hosts," the reader speaking into the walkie talkie blaring the information out the top of the bus tried to make enough spit to keep talking, "Welcomes you." 

  "Wait.  You're going with us, right, Ellen?" 

  "Who's Ellen?" 

  A person at the back of the tour bus frantically rubbed and rubbed sweat-dripping fingers against Hydrating Space Foodstuffs.  "Use this," an older Greek tourist person handed a pocketknife, about two inches long, across the aisle.  People-looking-people started to rise from the backseats.  "It's a kah-nife!" One spoke without moving its mouth.  "Stop the bus.  It's my stop."  The other's "voice" was so loud it hurt eardrums. 

  The bus stopped.

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).