"He's not making a new earth."

   The man said it out loud by swallowing his wife's spit and diving into the part of his mind normally in control of stuff like making noise with vocal chords.  

  A little boy exploded into hysterical but silent tears.  Yes.  HE is.  Someone with hands still tied behind back said slowly and with as much determination as he'd walked in metal-coated boots, pulling a line of children behind one foot first.  Gun shots flying.  Statues.  Vehicle tires squealing, peeling out.  Another target down.  One foot first.  In the slime and the muck and the booze and blood we looked like a catepillar had been there.  Not far enough, a cracked hoarse croaked.  More far, more far an African drum in the slime with us whispered a bass.  More far, more far some whisper cried, some sucked up like water and sacked us all a few feet farther.

  As we barely survived some one days at a time and the mainstream kept getting blitzed....as the weight of dangers and evil became more real towards the 1980's....people developed new ways of thinking about this "America" that was at once granting freedom and liberty to all and desperately clinging to remnants of being "the greatest generation".

  A traveling mom whacked her husband in the chest with her purse, "Hold this." The poor guy was knocked backwards by the blow and the purse contents scattered all over the airport floor.  Generic hoodlum teens rushed over in expensive sneakers and grabbed what they could.  The woman rose from scrambling to find the man's wallet and jammed a high heel onto a hand stealing her stuff.  She straightened her long flowy skirt and dug her foot into the hand pinned.  "You guys don't just get to assume the mantel." 

  The husband rubbed his chest.  And his temples.  "We don't?"  He blubbered.  The woman put all her body weight on the one foot.  The teen winced loudly.  She removed her foot as she pulled the hairy head up to look at her.  The teen clutched the wounded hand and she kicked the compact over to her husband like it was a hockey puck.  "Porter!  Porter!" She yelled at a resting porter near a suitcase spin.  He looked her up and down, heaved his weight out of a lean, and came right over.  The husband stepped closer.  The porter shooed the crying child abuse teen away from what was left of the purse contents.  He moved his whole head over the floor to see.  Got right in the husband's face and said, "I'll call the Authority." Then he went to a cement pole and talked into a white phone. 

  A little brother stopped our mom and dad and they helped pick stuff up off the floor.  The men heavily shook heads at the pace of the day.  A littler brother yelled at the shuffling porter, "Don't just leave." The porter had to get off the clock.  The littler brother stalked over and declared, "Mother, that slave is revolting!" She dropped what she'd collected in her skirt at the woman stolen from, got behind the three foot boy and cupped her hand over his mouth.  He tried to squirm away, oh, she pinched down on his shoulder and covered up his nose holes too.

  As red as Mullugan's steam shovel.  Both of them.