When you get there. At the frontier.

It is very dangerous. Invisible precipices.

Water sharp as knives.

There are children playing between rocks.

Many guns scan the bodies of the children.

Suitcases tear open. A play of hands

taking out papers. Be careful.

Vultures abound. Claws abound.

Errors of all sorts

(typographical, factual,

neurophysical, splintering

threads marked past and future,

all the ruptured codes).

There is a film playing

on small screens visible only

to those who know how to read

emptiness. Beheadings. You will see

many beheadings. And rocks that looked

innocent become pits of blood

at the back of the head. Hands

open papers that say

Go back into emptiness.

They will give you a small stone they call bread.

It has eyes that know how to search

every one of your veins. Evidence

against you always exists. Even

when you do not.

Be prepared to wait. Many years.

It will come to that.

It is what we are here for.

If you have anything to give

they will tell you its value

in centimetres of ground dust.

They will weigh it out

and place a seal on the scrap of paper

that tells what you must suffer. What

you must permit.

To be made of you. All the

white shirts of the school children,

their pressed blue

pants and dresses. Dust

will become of them. Voices

gone into a machine to shred and recolour.

Waste products. The cracked

letters of all your names

gone into waste products.

Realigned. Reapportioned.

Among the constellations of random fate.

The shining scatter. Do you know

where you were born. Inwardly. In

the millennia before and after

birth. Suckled by the frozen

waterwheel of moonlight. Interstellar

exposure. A hundred

kilometres to every side

of you the dead are

sleeping on the stones. Eaten away

by all the faces worn in a lifetime. The hills

are strong with the

bones of whispering. All the

earth languages forever

closed to you. There is

no translation. At the

frontier they will tell you

your options. Which are

not options. They will spell it out to you

in death words.  Like

momentarily, visual confirmation,

initiatory phase, facilitation

procedural, inspection of

orifices. So it is

you will pass your life.

Pass on.

Be processed.

Enter perhaps. Return perhaps.

Mr Miss Mrs Señor Senõra

Nada Nadie No one

Niemandsname Outis.

In all the glitter of your

sweat-stained trembling.

At the frontier where

everything must be opened,

laid bare. All

the intimate histories. Your nakedness

laid out, ready for erasure.

Perfected nobody

transiting to nowhere.