It's been something to check in on places discovered and learned about thirty years ago when I was in my early twenties.  When I got back to the Holston neighborhood in Knoxville, I was like

  Where is everyone?

  The flints of creativity like coal embers saved in a coal box overnight had us all in the throes.  Survival not of the fittest, but of gifts and talents sometimes ravaging, sometimes true gold, always demanding balance.

  It's a something something to grasp that genocide is group stuff but its all individuals in the camps, forcing survival (or not).  Some of us looked at each other with bleary eyes, so tired, some sick and tired.  Dug deep all.  Kernels to share, to carefully pry from personal.  A musical note, the right word, a leave me alone, coughing spitting fits and promises.  Dreams deferred reclamation.  The campfire in a barrel.  Independence from oppression.  Getting back to work.

  We acknowledged fleeting, this sturdy shelter of a friend.  And shug'd I'll knows and can't waits.  Vowing everlasting who I am.  It was clutching scattered pieces of dreams dashed for most of us.  And desperate to bridge divide, dam overflow streaming from disparity and the dual nature of Capitalist society, someone enunciated.  Like a porcupine, group senses radar'd and reared to new arrivals.

  "YEAH WELL YOU'RE CORNER OF THE WORLD STINKS" the Puerto Rican woman wasn't yelling, "Ooooo an expressive one," a dancer cited in the unofficial Holston Chronicles.  Some ladies who'd been funded to teach hygiene and personal care were still visiting as budgets were slashed and bareboned us wrestled with the finer points of that'll cost ya.  Lice-ridden clothing had to be burned.  What had been shovelsfull of needles and glass pipes was down to a dull roar in our nexus.  The Knoxville nexus.  D.C. was changing hands again.

  Kickin' it or getting crummy?  We all started saying it like the island royalty guy.  Would've been a lot of ships come in through the film industry but Oakland was on fire and L.A. drained itself with strikes and a smoggy complacency.  So here were actors and actresses from every neck of the woods.  "Naw man, this is Brooklyn," a Blinger taking a crap in an orange bucket said of his tent.  "You looking for Philly, that'll make ya giggle without the shits."

  " Whadda you?  The fucking fortune teller?" A wilderness medicine "student" asked, but was ready to bolt, gave me the sign, and quickly added, "You're shit smells like cardboard.  Take these laxatives."

  "What about profellatix?  Got any of those I can use on you?"

  Outside noonish.  The gaggle tickled the grapevine and we'd implored Whitney Houston to make an appearance.  In the accordian fan of territory and trial by fire (the way most human activity happens...we always want to say "organically" but the pouty scientists--all in the same boat with funding--remind and remind that's not correct, technically) miles of food pantry partakers and partiers alike were wagon wheeling urban centers.  "Drive bys" were mounting; lay lows were issued; pot smokers were giggling; and in the shadow space

  in the shadow space

  "Why that shadow move?"  A paranoid "motherfucker" was crouched in the corner of a cardboard box toddler-fenced off area.  "Because of the campfire."  Silence.  Plunge.  "Get some shade over here," a plain-clothed military nurse ordered.  Others went to scrounge.

  Pulling a strip of plastic kiddie pool up I saw slugs.  A naturalist who'd never been to the city knelt with magnifying glass and flashlight.  "Just slugs."  "No; it isn't."  The wet earth black and slimey.  The slimey oil slicked.  Oil slick rainbow in the light.  The top of my head hair-fry.  A pen knife to gently pull the slimey away and red clay pot hole ringed with sandy soil just beneath the peat moss.  "Wannah look?"  I did.  Pieces of mulch pressed into layer of dirt.  Tweezers to remove such splinters and shards.  Magnifying glass.  Teeny tiny larvae and such.  The wigglers and writhing.  "Don't touch.  Anything in this area could be parasitic."  I did not.

  Hobos with umbrellas, silky scarves and sea shell bells on belts and held on with clothespins and safety pins, moved from alley to alley somewhat standing apart but then would closer, closer.

  "How'd you get here?"  Someone would ask of way.  Is there a way to...

  Up in the topspots, round edges of the funnels, ridges bald and canopied, the same questions were being asked.  Highways littered with cars and trucks.  Some towns blocking traffic.  Other mountains poison darting STAY AWAY.  It was difficult to get around.  "Outstanding!"  A Raymond-ever-the-optimist would say to "news" like "just upstanding citizens".  An equality of American.  Internationals like ice cream sprinkles in a gold panning of Green Card.

  "THIS PLACE HASN'T changed a bit," A booming then hushing voice reported of the forest.

  "YES it has," I let my grumpy be known.  Cleaning by raking the trampled leaves campsite had revealed the odors of people like cattle in the woods.  Herding to distance from tragedy.  Urine and poo and burnt stuff.  The way cemeteries linger decomposition, nights spent were the next day's revelations in the nostrils.

  Up creeks, down creeks.  Not far from corridors.  Trickle spots and rapids.  Trash bags, rogue garbage.  Fevers beating us.

  U.S. determined and determining.

  "Just a few days rest," a pioneering natural doctor's hand was zipping her tent shut.  She turned to look at us and saw our mix of disappointment and orphaned baby bird.  "I promise," she said and finished zipping up her retreat from the inside.  We just stood there at first.  She penned a pair of eyes on her big toe and stuck that out of the bottom of the tent door.  We eyed each other.  Free time.  What are we going to learn?!

  A pry bar creaked open a crated field hospital.  Bins and bins of latex gloves.  I thought of us in the woods.  It took four days to get a hiker off a slab of rock jutting out some twenty feet or so beneath a picnic area.  And the wilderness medical people with some clueless civilian-types, myself included, had had to improvise.  Flattened, air-sucked out bags of hypodermic needles with tubing in the field hospital shipment.  I thought of us in the woods, learning.

  "GIVE ME THAT," the forest fairy in a tutu said as he grabbed the drinking straw out of the cup.  "But I gave at the office," the other guy said if donating items for a rescue.

  Way before a boot stepped on a broken lens....

  That particular election year was like the Game of Thrones gathering on D.C.'s horizons.  As with the Dust Bowl D.C. didn't seem to notice.  And there was a terrible loss of life to competitive infighting.  Just as soon as someone planted a r,w,&b pinwheel it'd get stolen and used, or stolen and sold, or just gone.  A lot of middle roaders brushed it off as kids and psychopaths.

  Others found it in our faces at every turn.  Or would try and stay out of thr way and get attacked for doing so.

  "War's ON," differently heighted punk haired pukes loping back into designated-a-park parking lot chomped on gum and tobacco and lollipop sticks saying.

  Some teenieboppers literally repeated every word those cats said, so down the alley between cardboard boxes and tents and carpart "homes" the grapevine echoed the two words.

  "Just sayin'" a girl said to a guy.  He punched her in the face.

  "What he do dat fer?" A knitter seeing asked nobody in particular.  Asking the meaning of anything at the time rarely brought quick answer.  This time though, after the girl reeled back and cradled face, she aksed him, "Can I aks you sumpin'?" The guy pulled down a tank too over his chest tattoo and rolled up his tightie whities and didn't say yes or no.  After a few minutes of shoving things into a kid's school backpack, black, he asked, "You wanna know if I'm leaving?"

  While it was corporate spying and stealing science samples up in the timberline, whole days were spent in city "underground" so that music-in-the-making may or may not transpire in surviving a night.  One partner even painted a partner to look like the bricks lining the grate of an impromptu speakeasy so that even if he actually fell asleep during audition week she could kick the sidewalk from where she would. Not. Budge.

  Some of the naturalists even had a darker side.  Whole chunks of alleyways were nasty mean girl territory.  You'd be like tested for amount of cause.  You may or may not have made it any further "in" or "out" over hours worth of lifetime.  'Course, some of the incremental wasting of life in no movement possible had more to do with the broader demographics, marketing, and "gang stuff".

  While most Americans did/do not care to see, bag cheaters hurled off cliff to chain pen, a Hitler mounting stone fortress to rally, gang rape, glossy magazine hollowgrams of product-to-be parties, there are pursuers of such lifestyles/worlds/thrones.  Like a harvest of fresh energy for particular windmills and grind machines the United States seemed more ending Civil War than contemporary decade.  Because it all trailed together in the trapsing abouts, shut out ofs, and general lack of cure for chaos and unable to gain control.  For all the ganging up, sneaking around, fuck offs and fine, fines America was still America.

  One night by the campfire by myself frustrated that the talking sticks, the most beautiful, naturally ornate and seemed tailored to be awesome talking sticks werw not making just be a storyteller.  It just so happened that as I sat there feeling miserable two trees came out of the forest shadows and I looked at my cigarette to make sure I wasn't smoking anyone's last one stash.  And I saw that the trees were wearing leaf-covered sneakers.  I sighed.  "How can I help?"

  Long story short the People were ready.  Or as ready as each individual was going to get.  And many, many people needed to use as much space as the Mainstream was making in order to go off and be really creative; get back to scholarship and science and math; follow up witg nutritionists and psychologists; pay car insurance, re-up on Green Cards, and all that jazz.

  "Soooo, would this be criminal or in any way illegal?  Me helping you forest of trees?"

  The trees shook their heads no.

  The ingenious ethers had allowed enough time for scrimmages over trail direction in regards flow of traffic and exactly where and which lines on maps were "sanctuary".  In the time of cities realizing that by nature of their organization could not possibly be truly "sanctuary cities" and in the passionate outpourings that were/are developing language and action pertaining to human rights people came to life-saving conclusions.  There had been points along the process when even some world leaders had been "ferried" through a territory by others picking up and putting down a length of board.  Whole weeks of silence or only nonsense talk.  No shortage of escaping enemy.  Likewise, no small amount of failures, some overcome and some not.  And at that point liaisons and leaders and the people had hacked out enough framework to move forward.

  Fairies and tigers and trees, Oh my.

  Others were ready to take a step back.

  At "transfer stations" some people were reconnected with documents they may have otherwise have been permanently parted with, and were relieved of their burdens...like, sadly, a bunch of junk they'd been made to cary.  Rangers helped people orient where they'd made entry on maps.  And like at borders, asked people to declare what they might be most interested in in terms of camping.

  Still others were miles and miles from the mountains when they made pacts to "time share" forest time.  A break from urban homelessness!  Some people had even set their homes aling the way up as like lighthouses and way stations.

  Day and night people let go of the weary to the bones and re-energized.  And at night it was considered very lucky to find a fallen star.  Fallen stars had a lot of wisdom.