I am afraid to die. Ten years older than my father was, when his miseries drained out through tubes in arms and nostrils. A coffin for two had then slid down. Thousands of sunsets, and another's pipe tobacco sweetened, but all too soon, that heart beat too strongly on a late-night kitchen floor, where his coffee cup shattered. An entire childhood, an entire adulthood fled the Void. Purposeful amnesia, overwork, overwrought laughter buried the terror. A small feline death tore a large rent in the curtain, slowly repaired by friendship, then love. The passing of that love was another dying for me, anguish reaping cries, drawn up from the depths, bringing Death's Head back. I must look and accept. I am still afraid.

Blue and bright skies cool this March afternoon. Men and women walk together along glassed paths to wooded lanes. The rumble of trucks and buses, the squeals of six-year-olds have displaced police sirens and low-flying helicopters searching for phantoms who bring down buildings. Just as the ghosts have turned the corner into another's world, we feel the tanks rumbling in the desert, we smell the squeals of small jets with immense metal cylinders to be given from above to Allah's faithful, a gift from the tolerant, from oilmen in Texas to oilmen in robes. New men in black with holsters on subway platforms are joined by an unseen many who won't be here in a few hours. Our days are becoming more crowded, wave less from sea to shining sea. Our nights will darken with the last murmurs of six-year-olds in the wrong place, receiving oily celestials made in the USA. Into the vein flows the poison of mindless rectitude. The track marks will survive and mar the world. The narrow overcomes the open, the knife the bread. Millions with hand-lettered signs on a cold cold day, in hundreds of streets, cannot hold back the fever of the few. Out of a twelve-year-old’s bright eyes a concrete wall falls, covering suddenly still bodies near a Baghdad checkpoint.