"THEY DON'T want us too,"

  the man's voice was gone.  Like many allied civilians he'd stood for hours and hours at a "gateway" of culture and travel and spread the word, something has changed.  

  Our friend was dressed as a sultan but had his business suit on too.  As men with machine guns were coming to erect a gate across the cultural gateway, a "checkpoint", he ripped off the curtain that had been hastily sewn together in a robe-ish gown that had survived him getting across a territory.  A woman shoved the heap of good material into an oversized basket-purse.  He stood with his briefcase and spoke in just a raspy whisper to one of the guards in German.  He refused to move his feet from the chalked line where the gate must go.  

  Children streamed past the little knot of us.  "You used to be so nice," said a tiny woman in black garb.  "NOW I KNOW," the man said.  "Those blow up." 

  As we worked to get the explosives like plastic puddy off of them each quarter's children were given health checks, identity cards (dependent of which nation), and snacks which would be taken at gateways, so you better eat it up.  Some spit on us.  Others were vomiting.  Most were crying once they reached the field tents.  Terrorism experts swarmed twin tents to sort plastic explosives from explodable devices.  Children who'd been forced to swallow fuel and batteries and wires and a ticking device or two were brought to special care.  Attendants gave real-time updates on what people--mostly women and children--were being told to say, to live from checkpoint to checkpoint.  Stuff like, I just want to be loved.  Interpreters and translators strung themselves out between bunches of people and individuals making way.

The boy ran wild-eyed

  through the cobblestoned alleyway and then in between plaster buildings.  The woman could not keep up in the same way.  She long-legged her stride beneath the long skirts and rounded a corner thinking ahead about where he'd pop out. 

  Another woman had stayed behind.  She looked at her wristwatch.  "I'll give them seven minutes." 

  After four a man entered the room.  Both man and woman towered over a woman and girlchild slouching over sewing on a table close to the ground.  A basket of sewing on the floor between sofa pillows.  "Pepè, what are you doing here?"  

  The man lit a cigarette.  The woman in black garb and a shawl tsk'd.  The woman plucked the cigarette from his meaty hand and threw it out the door.  "I heard they found another head," the man "whispered" his booming voice.  The woman mocked a surprised look.  Then said in normal speaking voice, "It was a soccer ball." 

  The woman sewing said loudly, in plain English, "She's lying."  A hand moved the basket of sewing towards under the table.  "Was futbol."  

"Did she save your ass?!"

  "There's really something in the tone of your question that implies," a frustrated, tired plop on the sofa.  "Don't get used to that!"  I got up.  "The sofa?" 

  Huhs, little breaths drawn in at a bedroom door opening.  "You girls are up?!" 

  "Coffee?" 

  "Rich and black I would hope."  

  Big cups.  Fresh cream in a carton.  

  "I don't usually, but would it be okay to watch the news?"  

  "It would be, but," the musician woman picked up one end of a long strand of beads and tucked these into a fold of long sweater as she sat on the oversized brown leather sofa with a knee under her.  Competing thoughts took her voice drifting quiet.  The literary woman sipped the coffee, considered the apartment, "Buuuuut, 

  "I 

  "You 

  "Don't have a TV."  A guffaw. 

  "Like in that movie, we don't have a radio." 

  "I do have one of those." 

  "Can we listen?" 

  The radio was turned on and tuned to news.  "Do you mind if I ask 

  No 

  "What are you hoping to hear?" 

  She turned and gave me the evil eye.  "What the fah?" She sighed and sat back down. 

  After listening to what sounded like a regular day's news for a few minutes the literary woman stretched.  "Are you angry?" 

  "Me?  Angry?"  The musician woman picked up a magazine and licked a finger to turn the pages.  She folded the corners up on some pages.  "Can I see?" 

  "No." 

  "But I want to.  I want to know what interests people." 

  "I have no idea where you've been for the last however long, and now we're going to sit here like, like 

  "Like what honey?"  

  She shot the evil eye at the literary woman.  She did not look away. 

  "We ended up in Latin America for a time because, can I say why?" 

  "Oh.  Do you know?" 

  "Was it a revolution?" Heads shaking no while coffee to mouths.  "Drugs?!"  More noooos.  "What then?" 

  "Visiting." The literary woman finally said.  "Cha.  Visiting."  Everyone to the coffeepot for three-way-split refills.  

Locked behind walls of glass,

  by chance.  Many metropolises have such safeguards.  

  Pre-surveillance state-of-the-world, survivors of situation might find themselves harried, hurried, dragged along.  The carnage then smearing itself across the innocence of being born human in the modern world.  

  Tight together in little rooms.  Ramshackle, interior frame construction.  "Like we are in ovens?" A lady got it and melted into a mixture of hyper-ventilating and sobbing and as she looked whacked by the Holy Spirit and was about to scream, a Pastor's fat football hand stifled the tension into the sweat of situation.  A little knot of hallah bread then.  So says the goya.  "Get in the tank Helen." The machine guns paused.

  "I will ask you again.  What the FUCK were you ALL doing in Turkey?" 

  "It is complicated," a woman changed into uniform palm-slapped in slow motion the bathroom key back onto a desk top.  "I guess.  Am I correct?" 

  "Zzzzzzashaaa.  Zeep it." A woman's scalp was literally zipped back into place.  Some curious looks brought a shoulder shug inside perfectly quaffed lips, "They started to hack me into pieces.  I figure'd to keep the purse up there."  The gold d'bloom, not bloody.  The pair of earrings, pure fake diamonds.  "They put us on a train in, of all places," she air-lit a cigarette, "Mongolia." She stood to stretch her thighs, smoothed layers of long skirt over "legs to die for", "since World War One; she's too old." The woman growled.  "Ah, the curse of the prince, I'm doomed." 

  "Like the world wasn't doomed since Adam and Eve."  A man lit only by yellowing 'lectric lights in the backroom of a cocktail lounge groaned.  His belly jiggled as he dry-sobbed.  Then dry-heaved.  "He's gonna puke!" Someone called out.  

  "SHUT UP!  SHUT THE FUCH UP!" The long legged man crossed the tiles to the movie set.  "What's this?  You gonna sit in the corner and blubber Bible verses now?" The man almost choked.  His body writhed a bit and he produced a boiled egg from down below his throat.  "'Snack for later,' was the last," he panted, "Thing I was," panting, "Seen on tape telling them." The man rolled his head on his neck and cracked the bones in there.  Steadied himself with an arm outstretched on a table for four.  "At," he stood and made air-quotes, 'the cultural thing,' what was it?" 

  A woman walked to the table and put a revolver down.  Dug through a messenger bag/sachel, "I have the brochure."  

  "We gottah go," a thin man in a long john shirt and leather suspenders had poked his arm first and then his head through hanging beads in a doorway.  "Anyway, some sort of World Heritage event."  

  That was how they got us.

     "My friend, why are you crying?"  The lady went over and almost kneeled at the legs of a slumping over with grief man on a bench.  The man could not stop.  

     People gathered about him but said nothing.  Someone did say, "I'm so stupid.  I should've spent the travel money on my kid's education." Then the man's sobbing slowed.  And slowed again.  He seemed very far away.  When he did stand, he seemed neither here, nor really going anywhere.  Someone remarked that we should think of sustenance, food.  "I don't know if I can." People streamed out of a museum exhibit.  "Not very hungry."  The woman with a bag for sneakers and a purse looked at her feet.  "Where are my shoes?  Where are my shoes?" Another woman looked her up and down and pointed to the sneaker bag and mimed, maybe in there.  

     The man's shirt front was drenched with sobbing.  He went toward the Wailing Wall.  But then stopped and just stood there.

  For a long time. 

     Yelling prayers at the moon?  

     Don't come any closer.  

  The ranting went on and on, pouring from the man.  Several days later someone asked him, showered and groomed, "Were you angry?"  He sat himself on the edge of a lobby chair.  "Not anger.  Outrage."  

  "We had just seen lunatics with swords and chair legs beheading and beating each other to death.  And, we're told this is quite common.  It made me upset.  So upset, I could not pray in the old way.  The ways of the old ways are not working."  The man looked at but did not touch a magazine on a table beside the chair.  World's Sexiest People.  

  "So what's next?"  A woman with one sneaker and one shoe stood beside the chair.  "You don't match," the man said without looking up.  "Nothing's matching up," she said.  "But this way, I'm ready for anything.  The familiar old shoe world, or into the future."  The man gently nodded I understand, then shook his head nooooo.  "I'm not ready."  The woman knelt on one knee and re-tied the sneaker.  A businesscard was perched in the laces.  "Call me when you're ready," she plucked it and handed it to the man.

"Take it off the coat, take it off."

  What seemed like far below, a shallow valley.  

  Bird killing bird.  

  Four-leggeds packing and proving--lead and follow, follow and lead. 

  Armor from land, land to sky. 

   "How would you protect me?" The woman a wisp in brutal clime.  The tent flap a wall between in or out.  "Did you tell her there was a plan?"  The men fell silent.  "There is a plan, isn't there?" A woman taller than the men asked.  

  "So what we do is, would be 

  "When we get back to the city?"  

  "If...that's where this thing is at now.  I'm sorry.  I can't not tell you."  

  The brown haired woman studied the postcards.  "It's quite honestly hard to tell with the sand dust covering those hills."  Hand dropped to side and postcard fell plumb.  "It's the devil's hair kind of windstorm.  We'll have to wait it out," said a sherpa wrapped head to toe in cloths and leathers.  The wild turkey feather "gift" attached to a belt from time to time seemed to stand on its own accord.

  Barely "a voice" left, "Follow the path through the bit of jungle to the cave." The person passed out cold.  Then days of feverish jibberish.  But when the knights of a different order had appeared through the mists of sandstorm and the message had come, akin to alas, a worthy opponent, the most fit in the pack of us carried the worst wounded to the cave.  We could not stay.  Those who'd been "tethered" ripped patch and piece from was alive when we had to go.  

  Helicopter blades had stirred the pot, the cauldron, the peering at an origami arrangement of "peace".  Orders were such that one had no choice but to.  Follow the reindeer.  Migrate with the cranes.  Bulldoze the yerts.  Do not destroy ANYTHING.  The lilt in her voice competing with the swift-and-suddenly-still mezmorizing of the devil's hair winds.

  It was the same tendrils of octopus ink, pixel'd, streamed that had witnessed tipping points on balance sheets and scales of justice all through the 20th century.  Whooshes of culture colliding and sheering off chance of survival.  Roars ripping into sanity and madness.  Plummets from alofts almost but never quite reaching "heaven".  Minds reel and still frame senses into even while senses dour and dull, atrophy, and split. 

  It had been a terrible year for doll makers.  By the time the last porcelin-faced beauty was crated with some other museum quality archeology remnants there were guerillas aboard "air planes".  Asians the world over were being called.  People of very few words.  Reasons supercomplicated by world travel around the Continents.  

  "From a village, out west," translator and Japanese man spoke as one.  "Put this on," a crouched and kneeling gaggle of women and elderly ordered while digging through boxes of clothing.  The clothing sorted and re-sorted after being dumped on a shut down by chaos highway running in and out of New York.  As the man put a bulky pleather coat over a slim waist coat, a gang of hooligans rushed past the line of people being dressed.  Knocking into Macy's shoppers.  "When you get past that table," talking to eyes brimming with confusion, eyes looking at the ground, eyes being lifted by cold hand on chin, "Listen to me.  You can do it." A wobbly voice and belly-driven throat clear, "I candoit shelly."  The translator given papers.  The papers into pouch.  "We'll only be five feet apart while we get picture taken.  You understand?" Deep head bows as yes.  

  It was then train rail screeching.  Screaming.  A look at the end of the "tunnel to safety" at the juncture of platform.  An Asian priest.  A woman with a baby carriage.  Baby in arms.  Shopping bags.

  The men or people dressed in worn black clothing like a moving sculpture.  One up, one diwn, one behind the back of another.  Pointing saw'd off shotgun and big barrel revolver at anyone who looked.  People gasped and looked away.  One woman pulled at a man's face to make him look away.  Look away, someone rasped and the croak took as advice.  Life suddenly frozen around cardboard boxes and papers.  Actions pantomimed.  Orders followed.  

  Pouch handed over revealing rosary beads on belt.  Forehead of priest ahead dripping blood of barbed wire crown of thorns.  No running, a clown with a bullet through the neck gurgled blood and barely pointed the way down tracks when the lights went out.

Pixeled

The editor looked at the inside pages.  A moment of suspension; even the drool stayed inside his mouth.  "It just looks like, like

  "McLewloo said infinity, or souls parting, a Samurai added."  

  An empty room.  Screen like a field hospital, divisions. 

  Sort of me, me sort of talking to a chair.  Multiplied by perhaps a dozen, perhaps a thousand, maybe millions.  

     How can this be happening? 

     That comes up especially in disaster and amidst violence.  

     Human nature? 

     Humans at play, played upon, forces. 

     Evil

     "They are not good people."  

     "But I voted for them."  

     Also humans, humans in relationship with God and gods.  

     The intellectual struggle to keep "Nature" with God, as God

     Moaning and wailing, screaming and whipping

     Warrior          warriors 

  "in a classic sense" 

  "in cultural sense" 

                           loving life 

  "In the movie Munich a man is told your tribe needs you, you are doing this for your tribe""Like call of duty" 

  "Like the times of Geronimo" 

  as jesus counseled in that situation, watch, and war, and you will hear rumors of war  tribes don't always choose to respond to violence with violence war as temptation someone somewhere asked why, then, are we slaughtering the indiansthisledtoanelementofautonomouswarfareandprecision strike 

     STRIKE

               STRIKE

  Strikes have begun

We were futzing with cords.

  "I cannot change the shape of my eyes." 

  "How can this be happening?" 

  "Our own children know nothing of history." 

  "I think it's a combination of factors."  

  "What would she mean?  Renounce Renounce" 

  "A little like Saint Peter loafing around on a roof in the Med." 

  "After Christ died?" 

  "Was killed." 

  "We might be if we don't get our collective shit together." 

  "Ixnay onde metaphorays." 

  "Has the whole world gone mad?" 

  "No.  Just some people." 

  "Let's go sit with them."

  Grainy video