The "intervention" into

  the midst of mania had flatlined what at first seemed like the all. 

 

  Some people were in dumb shock.  Others, more tremors than whole human beings.  Incomprehensible sounds being uttered.  Rote gestures of bodies taken out of the context of routine. 

  "But they're alive," a short couple, young people, a guy and a girl, kept repeating.  This phrase caught on as a question amongst the warned: in rough shape.  That question predominated on one end of the park, while on the other; Who did this to you, him/her?  Where was this person found? 

  Teams of specialists mingled subtley.  Lists of chemicals and compounds circulated in special folders.  Biological characteristics of matter plied into charts. 

  "Could it have been in the air?"  Some scientists had been velcro'd into special seating that could be picked up and carried farther afield.  

  Let's stay together.  

  "We'll need to be the arch." 

  "Wah, wah WHAT you mean?" 

  "It's all disjointed.  All the threads of story here." 

  "We cannot lose our collective memory." 

  Into the actual, literal mist not yet fully lifted off the park's surface. 

She'd smuggled them in.

  Another person had cleared the place of students and activists. 

  "It's a big rift." Was listed as REASON FOR VISIT. 

  "There's no talking," a tiny woman in a simple cotton dress admonished.  And the booming voices hushed near the entrance while still booming at the back of the portico.  "Why?" A man demanded to know.  The tiny woman looked way up at him and blew air out and clicked a sound that implied, I can see why, rift.  Her own voice boomed in a female tone, "It's a Reading Room." 

  "BUT IT'S LUNCH TIME." 

  "You told me to be like the Hopping Fountain," the smuggler said to someone sitting on a bench.  The line of men in suits was filing in.  "Past a rather gaudy statue of a woman sweeping."  Gaudy because it had been covered in brass-colored paint, not actual metal.  And the very act of sweeping with a broom was an act of humility, here captured in majestic sculpturing.  The artist and the model had not argued but discussed method, style, and manner of message.  Students gawked at the happening.  Remarked on the privilege of witnessing such "profound" and "deep" deliberations.  Then it was temporarily covered in a trash bag.  The very trash bag that had been filled with INPUT. 

        Sherry Candy Lane in 

               Huntington, NY 

  Committed to the struggle of keeping it real.  Balancing family and creativity.  Success and humility.  The secular world and religion. 

  Some of her artwork visualized the ephemeral.  Some the precious in "still life".  And some tried to capture the "stuff" of spiritual. 

  Whatever she produced her family loved it though some of us not too afraid to ask, what were you smoking? 

  Mom wasn't into any of that.  Her creativity was a blend of special gift from God and not giving up.  Over the years of stepping into her "workshop" in between "making the meat" and being the fairness meter, sounding board, glue in our group of eight, she built up her talent.  If a piece wasn't coming out right or as good as it could, she didn't throw it out.  She'd sit with it and work with it.  The push and pull of love. 

  She did the same with just about all of the people in her life. 

"Every knee will bow to Jesus NOT YOU!!!!"

  "And yet, he was the very reason we were still existing." The shrink scrawled notes.  Seen on a computer video screen. "Real time, democracy in action, embodying the Republic, living legacy.  Most of the others were dead, but not all were really dead." 

  "And it came down to that?" 

  "Yes.  But only because we are America not the world.  And he couldn't not be himself." 

  "The truth will set you free?" 

  "The truth will set you free." 

  It was total chaos on every monitor in the room where the actress and director had come to observe a new kind of news.  The very notion of 24/7 had proven to be the revelations.  "Someone should get out there," one of the bosses said as if in prison on the moon.  "For what?" A person glued to a particular monitor with six screens on one asked.  The boss of the bosses held out a master remote and clicked the room dark.  His voice was still gravel from assuming the mantel of leadership/ownership.  "It's time.  For a meeting.  Bring the coffeepot." 

"He's my Dad."

  Each person in the room not only acknowledged who the legacy-keeper in the room was, but also bullet-pointed association.  

  This was after rigorous training in parallel career paths.  And it was while the Armed Forces performed their own sort of vetting. 

  And all this was after she'd decided not to leave her family including her husband.  "You've tarnished our re 

  "Legacy.  Is what we are meeting about in this room Hill, ary." 

  "Why?  What does it matter?" 

  "Well, the United States of America always leaves a legacy.  There, here 

  "And policy.  Also that." 

"Hell yeah, they rushed the room."

  The mother kept patting the baby's bottom. 

  "What's happening?" 

  "We need someone to interpret." 

  "But they were speaking Englush." 

  The photographic facts were hauling in behind narrative which had almost jeopardized "saving the world". 

  Oh man. 

  Is this the fiasco? 

  "Cut the tape.  Cut the 

  "DO NOT." 

  "Just gimme the low down." 

  "I will.  I will show you to the elevator." And they walked that way while the young man sent to git the info confessed that he had not come up that way.  The elevator doors opened.  "There's more coming up the stairs!" An impeccable professional beamed a permasmile unless. 

  "Okay.  Okay.  Now I know what's going on." The mama recounted in brief style the salient points of the thread of news having to do with "the blue dress" and the anger and outrage forming around:  Then I was kind of afraid.  To apply. 

  "Pretend there's a glass box around you, uh, us."  And, it wasn't all that hard to do since the people enacting "the drama" in front of us weren't us.  We knew who they were, and we knew about their different "masks" as "actors", and we knew that most of us had been putting our best foot forward!  

  But like a spool of thread on a sewing machine and us getting settled into "roles" and possibly "careers" as the point of "the truth" the automation/animation of group took over.

A crowd had gathered.

 The mix of peacekeepers and people in plain clothes had devolved in "its middle" from its crisp line at one end, near the ships, and at the other end, a garden of wildflowers into a noisy, bubbly, mix.  

  "Was it on orders?????" 

  As the smoke and dust began to settle into the same sort of mix as the all-around desert oasis mirage-like quality, it was little people, some walking on thighs, one walking on hands, that manipulated the blown off arm and attached machine gun away from the road.  The soldier in front of the tanks coming had walked over a landmined spot.  And just kept walking.  Without the arm and the attached machine gun.  Blood splattered onto the seated and lying about and clapping and yawning alike. 

  Mouths yelling but no sound in the sound of all sounds put together. 

Voting nightmares.

  See God. 

  Showed me Matthew 20. 

  And it feels like parents sending kids to college.  Us aging people often overworry.  That may not be the most helpful. 

  Grad school '97

  As just white Christians we were at a loss to re-program the programming that seemed pretty much literally bulldozed. 

  Hate the Corporations NOT the people, a funky sweatered more artistic Academic from one type of degree's residency had stayed to pass the torch of occupying campus to the M.A. people. 

  One of the first incidents of strong whole school umbrella safety needed happened outside the only meeting room with table, chairs, and "a sofa".  Quite overlooked as an item of value somehow indicating preferential treatment.

Already old.

  Even the little kids who'd been used as bloodbags.  

  People were propped up on folding wooden chairs, not awake, not asleep.  "There's nothing left of them," a Red Cross nurse assured. 

  A pillow feather literally Elmer glued to a man's upper lip indicated still breathing.  

  Stop it.  The nurse harshed at a hysterical woman.  The woman did.  She visibly smoothed the turmoil of having lost everything but breath, the stuff of life itself, deeper and deeper into her body.  Past the hole in her midriff where the baby had been growing. 

  We'd been served our values, principles, points, and appendages in some cases on the fine dining luxury wares hoarded onto stranded at sea.  This after being thrown from planes, routed from cities, dragged from farmlands, gathered by the unmistakable and growing swirl of had enough.  The crucible of warfare.  We'd been fed the Constitution and enjoyed it.  Spat out broken bloody teeth and through eyes swollen shut with bruise and pus, renewed vows. 

  To life and liberty. 

  To each other. 

  To being AMERICA. 

  "Act dead," other nurses with a world of accents but little cupcake toothpick American flags in buttonholes giggled at our performance.  Snap, snap went the cameras.  Snap, snap went the hypnotist's fingers.  Snap, snap went the twigs under the foot of the enemy who dared to board.  Bullets in the shoulder curled the man's body like a parchment scroll as our own flag was unfurled from its umbrella stand rest.

The man did not want to hear

  about "the birth of autonomous warfare".  He ducked into a sunfilled room.  Window glass so thin the birds outside heralding the end of winter may as well have been inside. 

  An involuntary grunt-chuckle escaped his chest when people brought the happening to his attention.  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" He asked and his thinning lips curled into a snarl and a smile.  He looked at family and organization photographs around the room.  "I'll need to talk to some of my Army buddies before I have much to say."  It was a dismissed, but no one left. 

"I cannot tell you

  what to say.  Or, what you will see."  The in-charge admitting we are at that point.  

  The cubicled server rooms.  A faint hum buried in the projection of cool air. 

  Monitors and screens blipping and imaging.  

  Vehicle after vehicle exploded.