Dina and Dan Discuss How They Go About Their Days of Agony and Love

I go a few places, I meet people

Who I hope add up

My dear sir, I begin, almost solemnly

Something like the dream Jennifer had

Wearing a horse’s head, did you ever happen to

Happy birthday, and all worlds and all beneath their surfaces

Everyone in the kitchen singing

And I could not help bursting

Into prickly oft-repeated phrases, "patient and optimistic"

She smiled at me as if to say

Not an inch closer

The heap of the first source

Better than necessary, you say

I am passionate with a sort of greediness

Scheming for an ancestry that isn't so dull

A student then a former student

Always satisfy the strictest criteria

Scheming for a glass, do you understand sir

How much the better to fall before the lion than the wolf

Surveys and job applications

Regularly scheduled industrial movers and shakers

As a response to the inconsequence of their very being

We hold silence behind double locked doors

Without pauses an ethical form of scheming

This is to say nothing of the increasingly important

Forms for getting back brilliancy  

Now turn up the financial statements

What a sanctuary!

Where did you get all these stickers!

Would you want butter

Within the larger context of all vital problems

What kind of butter is that

Only some were immortal and free

And that's a spread o child

I sit in my spine like a hobgoblin

O pumpkin thrower O flaming for long stretches, writing letters

O to people who can’t possibly venture

They ask if yours is the same thing

Is there any point in this not being a sanctuary

O to claim what one!

The gym is full of crying children

O what a gymnasium

What applause that sputters like Hitler

The imagination and reality once seemed like interesting topics

The dressing is really good too. I like it. You will like it.

I tried to remember in what way I felt you liking it would mean that this is really good

Is it really good

Breaking in on us, catching us

Off guard. And somewhere else we are in an Arby's

Where a man cries for a little while

Waiting for his mom to pick him up.

The cars on the side of the road

The pornography on the side of the road

That emerald city distant

For months we held one another

We wanted babies of Hitler.

Because there are so few options

On the menu when the MENU IS LITERALLY A PIT OF FIRE

When you sometimes have to talk to people who act like Hitler

Who recommend you A REALLY GOOD BOOK TO READ

I HAVE A HARD TIME, Kim says

I will make you come so hard, she writes in a text

While something has to be done about the sleeping sickness

While something had to be given oral

Was it a whale a tree

Someone had to ask for mouth to mouth

Was it a child or a page from an old catalogue

Or nutrition facts or it should not survive you

WHO HAS BEEN FUCKING THIS CHILD

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Arbys

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Steak and Shake

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Hardys

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in In and Out Burger

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Fudruckers

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in McDonalds

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Hot n Now

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Get 'Em 'N Go

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Big Boys

Because the child was bleeding from the anus in Burger King

And to think too hotly of these knee-breaches

And to think of knees

The blackboots of going to Wendys

And to think of what will not survive this eating of you

The double melt

The albatross

A lover or a former lover

The salad bar

Excuse me

Faggot

Excuse me

Because his little paws fumbled for the cherries

Because nearly exclusive is an experience of what is known as out of doors

Excuse me honky

Also is the old idea of meeting people you know

Faggot

Corinne, Jerri, Rich, Rick, Ellen

Faggots

Phil McClurkin who is missing a lung

Faggot

For now, sayonara Randy Bird, Jerry Rednour, Jim Loder

Faggots

Austin and Christie Adams, Amy Hempel, Rick DeVos

Faggots

The upper west side, any stranger who touched you

Faggots

Cedar Point, Hershey Park

Who touched you

Faggots

Light on the lower east side

Faggots

I don't want to have to

I've well said this was all

Nothing of bodies stand in for other bodies of boys

Who lovingly are nothing for us tonight

Take in a sign of self-praise for them

In dim-lit bunkers, take in the sign

Is this love of

I'm my most afraid

I'm feeling

Dear sir, of experiences

Of former selves touching me. I’ve slept in

In a sign of the times, the TIMES!

Goddamnit I could give up too

See ever so far those hills are drags too

And her spindly dogs yellering

Engaged in some cockheaded pursuit

I know drunkenness is no virtue, O Hitler

It was exactly like the last time
I was wearing vestments

If it would please those who mildly go by induction

Their Sunday conversations gave my husband a rash

My eyes now are almost all the rashes

I fly upward O Hitler to impose one's fictions on the world

A flung off phrase most apt to wound me

We should surely bring up again the images of the towers collapsing

I could not make it without admiring 

In a warm overcoat walking toward the quadrillion cars

The images, nor the time for lunch, having a coke

Of dirty memories of peace with you

Between visions of tables set out in rain

The women and men who to high heaven rolled their eyes

With spoons poised above the chowders

The girl with the come in her braces who gurgles through her papi

I am going to write when I get home a round character

Having slept all night in a stable, I am going to ride a horse

Shitting myself with funnyman ideas, I am going to be the horse

The amative little pony coiled under my black top

The amative little pony who smells like vinegar

Hate, except there are others,

Who must talk, and buildings

Something like the movie I made with Danny

And Hayden and all the queers

I am hard of hearing women

So that we reveal ourselves to women

As women are, the boys search for significance

We invented of kindness of accidents

But this long ago stopped being about my day because my days long ago stopped being

Days I felt the old reckless brain stirring in the skull

I told my mom all this when I got out of work  Which all day sounded like my spine cracking

I told her I was going to put myself in a position of great stress My mind wasn't

And that meant that my sister was going to have to call and talk me through it

My mind wasn't Is this how you're going to spend the rest of your life

Your mind wasn't Your stack of books near your laptop Your poems handwritten on papertowels

You jerk it for hours on end in papertowels and gym socks

You're barely coming in gym class you're barely going in your dinner jacket

You wipe your beef steak on the mirror on your pants is this thing about yourself

You call me to say Youre not coming home There is this thing And it's not happening

Then you're going to the store Where you think everyone recognizes it might happen

Then you're going to the movies thinking your writing reveals your idiocy

Because it is asemantic and asyntactic But you meant it to mean something else

Then you're going out all grudging the snow

And drinking with Ian and telling him that for this scene He's going to be the one listening
As you Ring the false alarm Coming up with all the Ideas It's gonna be in LA All the ideas Growing in your beard You're gonna skateboard to the ocean You're going to drink a bottle of whiskey and grow a second beard from inside out

Your pussy While an even larger pussy The size of a stadium Begins causing All of this trouble

For the townsfolk The fire trucks and the wailing children Everyone outside shielding their eyes

Because it is bursting like The winter we made up

The time we missed one another making ghosts of the town where we grew up

All the kicks and pricks The thing was a rat Something like a wedding cake

Of methadone They found you your head leaned on the bathroom sink

Your boy was in the backyard staring through the fence slats at the golfers

His sister on the roof spreading her legs

Getting signals from the sky

Dina, this is Love Dan I'm telling you Dina They don't make them like they used to Dina

I'm eating the camouflage What are you saying Dan The men are appearing They're unskilled

They have weapons They're pretending they're not trying to Kill you Dina but they're trying

Really very hard to seem like they're not trying at all and this is killing you Dan it's killing you