Dina and Dan Confront The Citizen

You sit there instead thinking of the food you haven't eaten. How rotten of you. Isn't the man in the corner also hungry and the boy who was in the courthouse backroom waiting and you saw him sitting on a keg of nails and his face was so full of it, the backroom smelling like cheese. He knew hunger.

You wake up in the morning and because you are awake you want to cry. There is nothing else really to say about it. The day is possibly yours to describe. Going out there and saying a few words coming back home in the night still hungry and what’s more, there's nothing more.

You knew there was a man in the room also with your wife and you were eating the skin from his foot because he had walked far and you admired him for coming and taking what he knew he could take, admired him for recognizing what no one else could recognize about you--that which people never recognize about themselves--. And you admired the way she moaned You could see the man quite clearly and the large yellow wheel of the moon rolled across the ceiling and she was stuffing into his mouth greedily yellow hunks of roughly hewed moon. Je je je He jawed and whined and in intermittent bites bits tumbled from the slack of his mouth gooey incoherently and laced amongst the curled hairs of his despairingly large beard

What is the anxiety which grips you? Tabulate it now. At this moment decide to write down the hurried thoughts. Your manuscript is the prescription. Tabulate. Hurry to write down an utter deed of love. I am bored you say. But you are an open door and on the porch a wolf is waiting and that wolf is you. With great uneasiness, each self you confront is you

Dina and Dan Wait With Bated Breath

A man should always take an interest in the end of the world. It should be his pain, but all he can think of is the ride. As the water is rising, as he recognizes its rising, as it’s up to his ankles. It is a matter of the world being an empty form, a shape. It had once been a system, perfectly balanced. He thinks of the zoo, full of the lost, desperate, and the drowning thoughts of an animal. It is a matter of sheer hope. To roll along, to be as like a thing as the thing itself. All he cares about is escaping. Is it hunger or the flood, the inevitable justice of the world, the rain or the collection of rain?

The rain reminds him of the boundary, the animals at the zoo, the subtlety of consuming freer space. The boundary between the inevitable and the dream, and the rain bursting on the pavement.

A car pulls over, finally. The way it comes to a stop. The way it seems like this has happened before. The way the lights shine in and through the rain, illuminating the rain. The way the rain is coming down so heavy it is like a sheet, a dense gray sheet. The way the man rolls down the window and the way the man blinks at the driver, through the rain, the rain falling down his face, down his face

The man driving the car reminds him that he is no position to barter. He has stopped for different men who had tried to barter, and these men did not get rides, were not saved. When he asks did you hear about what happened he must, he stresses, know what he means.

He is referring to the flood, and the flooded cages at the zoo, of animals, not yet things, between things, immediate and beyond our understanding of what is immediate, their bodies filling with water, their eyes through the bars, filling with the vision of a world filling with water. The man removes his clothes. The tamer brings his lion to the surface of a lake. He has come from deep within the jungle down to the lake where the women bathe before the day, and the day, like earth, seems to rise on chains of light in the water, wavering yellow chains, braided in the folds of the water, the not quite still water, and he believes that nature does not contend with itself, that it instead seeds into itself its own beginnings, to begin again, and again, because there is little to add to the present effort. The man had never been lost before. Rain falls through his body, mocking his skin. Slapping the pavement, mocking the pavement.  

He’d never been lost before. He repeats himself. He is soaking wet. He had waited for a ride. He had waited for hours. The rain is betraying the convex surface of the world of things, it is a pushing, pummeling into—progressively, and it will. No it will not. Let up.

When the car stops and the driver rolls down the window the man knows. The interval between collapses between. The rain rushes. The make of car makes a difference. He is middle-aged and white. Not particularly handsome, not particularly. He wants to help but he doesn’t know what to do. Let me help you, help you. It makes a difference to me. That it is white, expensive, that it is like his first conceptions of ancient animals, alone in a world of unrelenting darkness, these first animals, nosing through time. The man says yes, in time. He is saying yes the man says in his dream of the father. When the man removes his clothes he crumbles, but it is okay, the driver says. He removes his clothes too.

The radio estimates numbers, corrects itself, offers timidly, like some sort of hope, another number. And another, it is growing and shrinking in proportion to the extent that the tragedy of drowning animals is affective. The American bison is dead. Two men ride, near the other, unyielding and naked, and this we are to assume, is also affective. The blue-eyed lemur is dead. He had wanted a ride and he has a ride. “But my clothes are all wet, you don’t mind if I?”

“Why don’t you just take them off?” the man in the car says, again, in the past tense.

The red-bellied parrot is dead. “Take them off?” the man on the side of the road asks, in the flashback.

“I will take mine off too so it’s even,” the man in the car says. “So long as it’s even,” the hitchhiker says.

In the past tense, he is undressing on the side of the road. The reticulated giraffe is dead. But he does not undress hurriedly. From where he stands, he sees the road and the nature on the either side of the road, and that’s all that he can see. As he undresses he concentrates on the low beams of the car, on the rain hitting the hood of the car, the rhythmic swoosh of the windshield wipers. Naked, he sets his wet clothes at his feet and waits. He counts the time of the windshield wipers, the number of times he blinks the rain from his eyes. Not the number of raindrops. Not the number of heartbeats. The man in the car rolls down the window and beckons. He has wondered if there was ever another man like himself who had stopped to help a man escape the rain, reaching safety together before the inevitable flood.

They stop at a truckstop twenty-miles up the road. Forgotten children wait under the awnings protecting the gaspumps. The rain slaps the thick leaves of the black maples and the turkey oaks in the surrounding woods. It bubbles in potholed puddles and the mud in the ditch on the far side of the road, across from the pumps, the small neon lit food mart. The man in the front seat blames himself, there are so many like him. Who is it that answers? What is it that you need man? But there is not enough room. For your void and my void. Man would build it out of something. The man driving the car blames himself for not having a bigger car. A man should always plan for the worst. You never know when the earth will flood. The radio estimates the number of dead. The number.

While undressed to his pitiless nudity, a woman had once told him something that made him feel exposed. That conversation crossed his mind, but he persisted in becoming naked. The hitchhiker tossed his clothes and climbed in the car. “Do you know where we are,” he asked the driver. “Yes, buddy, I know these things well,” he said. 

Dina and Dan Visit a Museum of Historicity

Dina and Dan Excavate Erotics

If we were lovers, we would wreck each other,
fill each others voids with violence, destroy
what little is left of nothingness, unshapely
and sordid. Giants made children in Genesis,
giants and women having children, fornication,
what it means to drink vital fluid from the
hole, puckered as money, as money.

It takes the US mint 2 cents to make 1 cent,
as if that says something about who we are
as people, as freedom. What I want to say
is that if we were lovers, I would beg you
to stay constantly, that is if we were lovers
I would constantly be begging. As if an
incinerator was California, all hot and
sunny.

Come with me, skip this beat, this cent
on the high wind of nothing, the time
before we were created, the time before
such a beat, beat. Tell me, do you
think of me when you are lonely?
What does it mean to be alone and
still be so lonely? Can we imagine
a hell no greater than that.

Sometimes we look for love when
all we really want is to be heard,
to be seen. Sometimes we look for
parts to fit where force is nil. What
I am trying to say is that before
we give up, let's jump and hope
the net is there.

Dina and Dan Reveal To Us An Unknown Force

''I have desired the love of a man''

            -Helen Keller

We were standing in my apartment

For what was going to be a miracle

A few minutes later

When the man knocked and said

Would anyone care if I joined

And a few minutes after that

We would lose track of him

His crown and groaning

Nachmittag, one droolstrand of light

Soaked the hardwood floors.

We could've done our exercises.

The moon had demanded

Hardwood floors, the surfaces

The moon had languished into

In a vessel of doing

Adrift clouds as peoples are

The moon had not said though

It was right there, at the foot

The middle, the midden of the day

When a few minutes later

It was no longer apparent

We would not remain contemplative

I could get my fist in,

Nor the bigger thing, a parakeet

Would be a moon of parakeets.

Is it by any chance protoplasm?

When that was asked a few minutes later

We would not think

Parakeet and protoplasm

We would not say the words

A parakeet thinks about the loss of weather

It would only say so like it had

When it wanted a cracker

When it had been wanting a cracker it was given

Here, on a long ripple of protoplasmic moonlight

An instruction to mean what it said

It meant, you were not here

To greet us as liberators

The installers of wicket gates into garden walls

The lifters of latches

Though that was what we rashly fumbled for

The white linen sheets meant peace, they cried

At regular intervals in cathedrals converted people prayed

For people in beds spaced in regular intervals

In hospitals in which the power had gone out

Were in fact being powered by generators

That were failing, but when they fled the scene

No one would be there to record the fires they had stopped worshipping

Nor would anyone not tell you to stop worshipping

The rain drizzled through buttresses like hair

You were not slandered or made to seem so eager

And you were not like this

Or taken from the nest, to wriggle in the morning your things within her

But it does not redeem a moon

Nor is possibility rediscovered

We were waiting for chairs so we could play musical chairs

Yet nothing moved

When we opened the doors

The moon but itself

Or the gusts of cold air

When we fled a few minutes later and lost track of the number

Its outbursts, a variety of the old kind

Barely visible, but the hostile stars

Too, a point of reference, the stomachs

Which might have been empty

Were really empty and the cold water

Was moonwater, the room constrained by its room

will be empty,

unfriendly as these exercises

Dina and Dan Pontificate About The Audience

It’s what I do in the past tense that makes me a man.

It’s what I call a shriek, the sound of an oath, the wind, as she falls into

With Vronsky the habit of asking herself the question.

I suppose you didn’t ask when I said I am afraid of fine art

I don’t care if you don’t have a shadow

I like it when grandparents pass away

I prefer the young to the old but there are aspects of my person which are gothic

I stop being there for people when it comes time to say goodbye

I wait only for so long before I grow tired and fall asleep.

I applied for it on multiple occasions and the agency which was to see to it never responded

I came to understand that the documents must be handled carefully

There is no ease in grammar

To say to your loved one you need to listen for the dawn

I lied. Space does not, like time, give way to forgetfulness.

I like it wild, when there is a chance for tension, between the two of us, to be normal.

I plan ahead

The seating arrangements were by color

Someone may have been allergic to the lighting

Beyond the chair, various means of state approved execution.

I am a doctor.

In another dimension, there is another me

The universe is multivalent and it yearns for an accurate typology

I like that other option, when shown the film about the assassination of the president.

I use instruments, sometimes the sun, or a page turned in a notebook

A leaf as well as a hiccup.

It’s what I do to keep the little I have left from being nothing at all

A bright void filling the screen

I use tools

Whose laughter was not meant for my eyes

But since I came to a halt, her ringing ears

Full of the capture of space negated, time turned back

Dina and Dan Parlay

When the eunuchs cast Jezebel out
what happened to the eggs inside
her? Perish, perish, tell me
of the toe-headed face under ice,
the curls curls
brown eyes, brown eyes, how
are you so brown

Inside the cast, such line is pronounced,
can you figure a hero's stance,
how you puff a chest, pronounce again,
how your chest is wide and masculine.

When the eunuchs lay their heads
on your chest, you weep.

I live inside this because I cannot live
any other way, unpack these eggs
this travel, and then, this deep road,
my mouth full of dust through
exaltation.

We are dead, our eggs in shell
black, cast, black, cast, our eggs
immeasurable historicity,
our cast out of curls on the street,
Jezebel, how can you walk
when you can't even speak?

Baby, I can leave you here
and never look back. I can leave,
fall, the way we are masculine
the way you were never my hero,
even on your best day.

Dina and Dan Cannot Retain Anything

Or it’s its being in the past

On a January evening

A man standing by himself

Though there was talk of a place to go, somewhere in the distance

A state formed in geologic gouge marks, carried into the present, the activity,

If it can be called that, of one in recollection

Which should compete

When I start to go after it, the distinction between analysis and critique

The imperative it became You have what I want

Finger pointing, now you stomp it

Now the whole light changes

A sexless person rises up between them to negate

The old people who wanted things to stay the same.

They wanted to bury the dead upside down

They liked the inconvenience of having to hire a man to "to turn up the earth"

I’m sorry for your loss. The door is open. Condolence is

The question is open. Who are these new people coming to town?

On a January evening

A man was appropriating the grief of a family

Turned out of their house. He left her. She left him.

Things had taken a turn

Eh? You are left with the task of sorting out the ideas of yourself

You had never had. What was it you were saying?

These are of a higher order

He waved his hand.

They posit an asterisk, a mark, they contain more depth of spirit and height of imagination.

They suggest I don’t have an understanding of the relationship between form and content.

It’s hard because it doesn’t feel true, to say, I can’t say.

I think I mean by true the coming into being of the notion of grief

Or its splendor and costliness that I greeted

On a day in February

There was a man standing

On the ice of the lake where the children went with faces of evening

Ashamed to have undone their sense of the unexpectedness of daylight

Standing on the ice over the girl trapped under it

Though there was talk of a place to go being made

In the distance, it was under the ice

Where they would seek themselves and without warning

Say into the microphone in your head you should compete with the old places to go

The people were still content to go to the old places

But I can't say that

For its having been said is the very fact of your survival

Yet you will not save me

I walked into the kitchen, he said

The refrigerator was not on top of the counter. The walls were not

He apologized he could not save her

From himself. But I was the one who made an error of his appearance.

It is not the dress I am wearing

That the foundation on which one offers their condolence is

Wearing thin

No I can’t say that because I don’t know. It is not a woman. He said. It’s mom. It is not such an easy thing to say. The place where we put Mom is in so and so. A place. And we put.

You put people in places.

I have been put in my place.

On a January evening

A man was standing

He had decided to put her somewhere, taking into account various externalities.

How far is Holland from Grand Rapids he said. How far is New York from Grand Rapids he said how far is Düsseldorf from New York and New York from Denver and the doldrums in Denver how far is it to Detroit from Brussels and the train where they read Clepsydra together and he promised himself he would marry this girl who looked unlike anyone he had ever seen while they watched a mother read to her child in English so that his mind could grow he pointed it at the sun. He said I should know distances, routes. They are easy to look up. I could find a specific answer, write a specific answer. Would he know now how to dip back into the past for a sense of that which about them was always pre-existing? It returns now to him, full of the people he had known. He said how far is it to the subway. I can’t fly directly anywhere anymore he said I suffer he said the tickets are too expensive. I don’t have any money. He said I have tons of money. I have some money. But I’d like to keep it for when I want something. What I’m thinking of this as always I love you he said.

Dina and Dan, Remember Us to Them

The time it takes rain to leave place
move to another vessel, fill another boat
on its side, people scratching up
perpendicular vertical hallways
filled with water

O holy ghost, holy body, haunt as in o holy

weight holy weight outline like a killing,
outline like a death                       Dear holy ghost, dear murder

The time it takes this sweet spirit
to infest as insects, infest as four headed cherubim,
on which you begin, again

            O holy ghost, holy body, haunt haunt

The time it takes for you to believe
you lived this long, you lived this long
you are surprised you lived this long
I am glad you lived this long, outline       Dear ghost, in your outline

I forgot what color your eyes are
When did you get as tall as me
I remember now the dark, you are so dark

Dina and Dan Climb Abroad An Alligator

Today she is dead. I think I dozed off for a while. It breaks me to write this. I write. Only a little at a time. I have no purpose in setting out at sunset except to later say to someone, I set out at sunset. I greet a man. He cries at me, my sister who wrote me the email is in the process of

She said it breaks me. The man who broke me. For everything to be consummated.

That was then. This is when I threw myself on the floor. I sobbed. Dear sister, I felt you had been happy. I was wrong. She is dead, that is what the man had told me.

We exchanged kisses, he liked the shoes I was wearing. He told me, she is pure, and I was always happy, do not think I would let you touch her. There is no man in this world save one who you don’t know

you who I would not let touch my sister.

 She knew I wouldn’t be able to take it over the phone

Mother, I took everything over the phone, up to the last minute

The pale-blue bungalow  

The renunciation of

Formalities is crucial to the modern project.

Mom was at Holland Home  

I stand with a man whom I don’t know. We are charged with the task of getting to know

Uncommonly long paths, which until now

We have avoided following, preferring, as if around it, tracks that squeeze between the walls of buildings

But cities are no longer indifferent, they grow out of the feelings attendant to our idea of them, we stop. I feel like this is a neighborhood. But I am uprising, like steam, indifferent to condolence. I do not trust those who say they have mixed feelings. One grows out of loathing into something ambivalent. When it comes to Mom, my sister said.

They washed her at dawn,

Rage had made her the dawn, or the evening. In Michigan is where Holland Home is

Although sharp

It’s difficult to think of what to say. Because of its being true because I don’t quite know where it is anymore, though I think I could, given enough time, find what it is I would like to say, were it included on some list of possible things to say presented to me. 

Dina and Dan Expect Without Expecting

Extraction is not always in lineation, uncertainty,
as in see this tooth, to gaze upon, as it really is
to pull it as it as actually is, to excavate the
uncertainty. How much to bear is too much

What I mean is infancy, in all of its flaws,
adolescence and now adulthood. To be in adult
is to mock the past, but why. This tooth
is rotted, pull, baby, pull, please baby baby
please.

As in declaration can mean something
other, something other than a certain statement

Gaining minutes by the day, months by the week,
years, years and now you are old you say
to me conductor, I commend you on your
bravery but it is time you retire.
Conductor, you say, you have fallen asleep
at the post, on the job. Conductor, you say
you are sleepy no wonder you are sleepy
you are so sleepy, rest. I am old you say,
older by the day, older by the molecules
that are also uncertain.

I have tried to tell you once of these bones
that never grow right, leave me stagnant
and broken, how your hands feel around my
neck (in my fantasy, in my fantasy) as
you push the muscles into my bones,
until the white retina of sorrow is red, red.

I have tried to tell you of distance, faulty
and impotent, of a prerequisite on fire in
this drawer, here pull it out and remember
on record you said you would never leave
me and you did and came back and now

here is your parade, golden chalice, red
carpet Midwest love of soy beans and
corn fields and industry gone and soured,
roots down into your bowels, the devil
lives in your bowels, the devil's sequel.

This tooth, smelling foul, this tooth please
stay for the extraction, please be there for
the excavation, I couldn't possibly do it
without, you. No, you say and leave, no
muscles contract and disease contracts,
I stand, fall, stand fall. What part of you
don't you understand, what part of me
don't you understand without failing,
what part of anything can we even
believe has not rotted, is not drifting.

Dina and Dan Avoid Infancy of Love

His wife was now pregnant. The night she told him he had just bought a television for the party. His friends had come over, not to watch the TV, but to get him—they had been planning to drink booze, fuck sluts, have children, wives, homes, mortgages, it had been the big idea, some going to war, to blow up Times Square, shoot themselves in the head, build a shelf in the garage, take an introduction to oils workshop at Kendall School of Art and Design. We protect ourselves. The phenomenal shape of America, or else we've forgotten everything about ourselves. But all the Arab could think of had been the television. What were their injunctions? He had felt like he could see himself, could see himself in it, a swamp of a thousand flags, his heroes riding pink horses with flames painted onto their flanks, the children in handcuffs, the taxi in the orange light of its own going forwards, his vanity, his beard mocked. He had resolved then to shave. This upset his friends and they left feeling not only defeated at not having accomplished what they had wanted to but seriously confused and somewhat offended. He stood in the front hall, guiding them out of the home while rudely peeking back over his shoulder, at the TV, which had been left on throughout their visit. It was time to go to bed, he said without much interest in it seeming like the truth, though it was. It was time to go to bed. His wife closed the door after him when he went upstairs to their room, and they found themselves holding one another at the foot of the bed, having a deep and meaningful conversation, that went this and that way, each speaking of things they had long kept secret, but now speaking seriously and honestly, out of love and faith in one another. After she told him that he was going to be a father he put his head in her lap and wept for happiness.   

Dina and Dan Might Make It Rain Roughly

And I did not get along with myself.

Then hi.

The train was talking about my mother.

He chewed the gum and the road the train

It all fell in on her

And she died.

He thought of the occasion of his occasion

How close in spirit they were, as increasing distresses

Sundered them. They lived in a partial age.

How everyone is always talking about themselves.

The hamstrung teens. Hamstrung by their parents

Now I fly inside myself.

He was alone when I was a father

He says this thing when I was a boy

The way things talk about themselves, they're talking about everything that's not themselves.

For I am not ready to go, says the mother

Big as the world it heaves itself into, her death goes to advance the
What has done better than any of us, in this world

Strung drunk along the street in lights

This sense of being alive

I take the wing of a car and tuck into my mouth

A bit of light. Lights now on in the apartment

Across from his. Some girl

A promise of deep and important conversation

Readying her bed. What book is it she copies?

The words I live by exist. And that’s enough

There are a thousand children

We are a thousand children.

There is business, after the war, and then the war

Grows up into middle age, there is a PhD program

And now, up, the war is finally understandable

In terms of its distance to those who

With a stone in your head, you encounter in the harshness of their injuries.

I lack the weariness of enough injuries. Today I read

And did not understand what I continued to do to myself

Of this gesture toward the misery of a scrap pile

Piling up

Boxes wrapped in plastic which contained the notes she'd left me

You are such a dreamboat

I will love you forever amid all earthly things it is my intention to transcend earthly beauty

To read not for any sense but for the sheer joy of going forward into your own divorce

Of going forward, and into this idea we have projected mountains

Of great preparation, to meet ourselves and have people who care

They built the house you are going to with their hands

It is humbler than the one you are used to

Go there now, meet him at the dock

Where ships of no import enter

Take him into the living room where she waits in her final gown

Note the tension and the jewels

The stench of liquor

Ask him if he'd like anything to drink

He declines he refuses

He refuses to go home with you

Before you even ask

It is the summer

It’s what I want to own now in the middle of the night

Around a maypole. And my peace goes to pieces

When I hear the drunken laugh of a confident girl

Rush then down onto the street

You tired people

Go sharing your head full of dust

Go dust covered boy drunkard try to snag

Some to call you handsome. There are so few.

Your sister is sleeping with a nigger.

The money is tight. Oh to be sad and lonely

Just enough get up to move

What a horrible thing to say.

They looked like priests with their books

From the desks you could tell they were reading

They opened the window to spy

On the girls in the courtyard. To be sad

And high and not one of the slimmer ones

With the pleasures of boyfriends who know

To brace themselves against the sturdy phrase

I do not consider. I have not considered.

What a horrible thing to say.

You think of the way it began

Men in the country

They who you would reach for when it was getting dark

With a name and all the referents to which that single named branched out to

And the lighthouse with whom you shared yourself with

Reminded you of Andromeda

The way you gave yourself up

Your mother who gave you even money

No it's not to be eulogized

That no one won the pennant this year

The elegy you wrote for the last five years of struggling to recount

The time prior to the moment of this speaking

Ministers staying up into the night with you

Hold me, talk of improvements to this abode

The humble form of my corner

From which I gather a fine dust

Cobwebs, toenail clippings Let there be

The wings of dead flies growing from my back

They were gone until the middle part of the century and came circling back

To get what they'd left behind

Their eggs and nests from my ear

Which began sprouting infinite trees

Katie Jean the authority

Randy Lee the tunnel ahead

It will be in the ditch in five years

The wall is cracked the bells are cracked

The tower is broken it is raving

The night screams

Today your head has conceived of itself as coming full circle

Then it was a blue balloon

Then it was roasting

Someday they will say you'd cracked

You needed fifty years to repair the damage you'd caused to the structure

The form went in the trial of the spirit

It's seventy five hundred for a used Pontiac

It's a damned idea to never drive

The train was talking of her

Rising sharply He bowed as his father entered then stood by the table on which she lay

And began crying

Because he would never see her again

I can handle this

No I can't handle this

And they begin burying her again Only this time

They will want you to get in beside her

It's a good way out of the air These few thoughts

Switch to long loops The bridge is speaking

Of a species of fumes, the curve of time is supple

All curves are supple

The curve in her hands folded over the curve of her chest

This way where you see anything it is through curvature

And that's sad isn't it

To have built recklessly on a sinking coast

But you are too foolish to know what they feel

When they enter the room and you're too old to keep pretending that you know

Admit you have no idea

They don't suffer the ways you think they do

They keep coming an coming and nothing can be undone

He couldn't have been more than a teenager when he decided that it was pointless

To have a family

A house and a home

And he left us

When he came back broke he didn't tell anyone he just sat in the backyard

Counting the flowers that had already come up

Then there was a late frost and most of them died

I'd never seen him so upset

I tried to say something to him

But then I realized I couldn't say anything

And it was too bad that after that it took

He began talking to himself

It's his grief you said He was always leaving us

Then she went away and it became his privilege

His duty to follow her He would follow her

Through the backyard up into the mist

Where she had found her hair

I feel that now

The wing that had broken cast into perfect shape

For flight through, and flight through the irrelevant

Glass the empty glasses the flight through her irrelevant worry

There was nothing more to worry about

It would be taking her

It would be it would be it would be it would

Dina and Dan Fight For It

Consolidate, & then drink,
to immasculate,
to fish inside a creek tombstone,
down wire
down X, our noses
against the lamp shop,
to be here & then
to not, a series of here is,
here is, a series of tombstone
to drink, consolidate
fish scale, fish spine, spine
of wire down to X,
you say I sound southern sometimes
and I say you've never been to
the south, clearly.

Remember when you said,
lets go to the south, lets go
& make due in the avenue
maples of last lynching, come
home come
home come back to the borough,
come back in a seaboard
east, east, I see this star
I'm sorry, take me back, no
don't, I can't.

Our noses cold against
glass, our noses glass
upon glass, our here &
not here & to fish
a tombstone, to fish
an accent, to fish in
panty, o panty as in
tonight when your hands
are down somewhere,
can we safely say
a cut in time, two bits,
muscle quake/retract,
quake/retract, spasm
as in moisture being
suckled. Here, take
my bosom, my bust,
here take home

as in me, as take me
home and speak me into
consolidation,
X please X, hole
& then I own you
& then I don't
& now you are fishspine
& now a pickle bucket
upside down, our line
cast, water, water, o.

Dina and Dan Consider the Selfish Gene As In Amazement

Birds take off from behind buildings.

I walk into the store and buy razors

I pay with a debit card.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for being lovely

Thank you for putting what I wanted into a plastic bag

For giving it to me

I felt much too

The pressure this morning was putting your hand out

The cuckoo begins to speak in a Russian man's voice

I know your time is valuable.

I leave without saying anything.

It is time to put on your jacket

The afternoon is quickly turning into winter.

The grocery boy autopsies the broccoli.

It has been for a long time now a feeling of bending

The cashier has one hundred tongues

Thank you so much for your one hundred tongues

Tomorrow is the day I was going to go laughing

Black sedans drive through the darkening street

The waves are lapping up children, cleaning them like kittens

The woods in Manhattan are burning right now.

Thank you, please do not go to hell.
The birds are gleaming

Tomorrow true birds flow from us

Like water, in courteous fountains

The razors cut a hole in my pocket

This is their silent escape

I chase after everyone. 

Dina and Dan Do Not Understand Loss

What is heartbreak and how is your heartbroken and in what ways can it break and is your heartbroken and why am I so heartbroken and what is there to be heartbroken about and we are all heartbroken and my heart is breaking and why is my heartbreaking but my heart is broken, broken.

Dina and Dan Find You in the Rubble

To speak of a finger. To find the finger and dislocate it from the heart. To point the dislocated finger and make everything disjunctive, more than other Times.

The bomb, and the nothing.

The bomb and then we're asked about who we were sitting next to: a "muslim" (but how would we know how others feel, what they believe, can you tell by looking? to tell one another's faith by looking. Do we see the signs through Dress? What does a Dress say?
What does your holiness say? Outer signs)

The bomb and then we are asked who we were sitting next to: "muslim" or a "white person" and we know what is about to happen, to speak of fingers and they way they thread or cup, depending on relationship.

The bomb, to gender "white person"  and "muslim" and now we are sitting next to a female "muslim" and a male "white person." The bomb and finger and things are going Down.

Who do we blame? (What is blame and how do we navigate blame and who is to blame and is Holiness to blame or White person or bomb)

The bomb, and then the blame.

What is a mushroom and how to grows on Trees. Or not. What is or is not a mushroom and  how do we give it validity in Nature?

On an island in black-and-white, in a Tree within a Tree within a Tree, how the mushroom is a fungus of violence, what does it say to blame your own fingers.

The bomb, and then to understand how metal expands and retracts.

Who is your Holiness and how is it to be holy. What tells you you are holy.

Who is your White and in what ways do you benefit from White and how does your privilege ram the holy into fingers, into bombs.

Dina and Dan Consider The CasaPoundians

At the walnut table in the wood paneled dining room sitting, standing when the Miss comes in Bearing Their Dinner on a Tray Quickly and silently section their fruit and with urgent fork manage the bite to their working teeth May I be excused from the Table That speaker is too Steamy from the shower they Ask, are you Willing to Go all the Way, they Make room and Silence Their Loved Ones in their Editing Rooms because the day’s Footage, most days, Is not worth Using

If we’re talking about the Pointing Finger and not the expedition of the Sign, the expediency of Co-option, getting a Person to speak to a Person, If we’re then in the cold of the Great North & The seals have surfaced to the black water's surface their Heads as black as the surface He said After having observed the water for a long time The presence of its animals Without having to see them Were beneath him, and Rising like a flame Because of new non-restrictive regimens of diet and exercise And rain And changing women into a utility for forgetting oneself To meet demands We enjoyed the evening music Parts played slowly with pigeon feathers Chattering figures in the station Obscured by boughs Petal’ing the evening music in leaves of Music It’s like Reaching for Music

Dina and Dan Invite in a Third

Beat, beat, inside a definitive beat, inside. All that is aching, and then. All that is aching, too sure of oneself.


In order to remember things as they were we have to go back to a time when we didn’t understand what it was like to have things die, when death was no more an eye on wood where we scare ourselves by imagining they are ghosts that will come out of the pattern,

an eye into anything: a dinosaur, a man with a hatchet, what the stars look like in the pitch black. I am holding your hand and we are running through the creek and over the small thatched bridge and up inside the pines’ guts and we are pushing forward until we plop down, we plop down and now we are all stacked together like books side-by-side-by-side-by-side and our hands starfish and webbed and barely touching,

we can see our breath, it is so cold,
we can make shapes through the tops of the pines and we cannot see the houses the line the creek it is cold but not silent, but we are unafraid, we sit and we are unafraid.

No one speaks.

It is not time for speaking. Hands-to-hands-to-hands-to-hands, to feet, sole side to sole side.

Two days later

Two days later we are in your mother’s bedroom and we are taking off our clothes in your parents bed and we are hurrying because we are worried about them coming home even though we know they are not coming home for many hours and we are hurrying and outside the walls she listens to music loud and reads a magazine and waits. You were with her last week, you said she was “very energetic” and she said your dick was

upside down, she’d never seen such a thing.

Dina and Dan Wrote This Poem On Cocaine

It involves a lot of shouting

For it seems we have long worshipped the rounded bottoms of children

Not at the expense of the day ahead of us

It involves youngsters and very intense personal opinions

The war, also. It involves

Images of pumping fists

It seems long we have had our fists pumping

Or would get so worked up there was little we could do to calm ourselves

Then it involves clenching

But not without thinking

This might look handsome in your neck your jaw muscles

Thinking there is a way out is not uncommon

But it is foolish, always being the most foolish among us. We must

When there is little for them to eat, find them little to eat

Or they will take it all.

Via drugs, yes I work now

Via drugs, a little like I used to

Except that I don't know how to work anymore

Or birds!

They came from everywhere and digested everything

When I was a child

No one mentioned the attacks against the nice stories

What I'd like now is to not like anything

Or in my opinion, we did not happen in Nature, say my goodbyes

Dina and Dan Treat Each Other Accordingly

Hair standing straight out on end, even in pictures at weddings, even in a wedding your hair stands straight out on end, not up, out.

Rainy in January, then a snow. Snow, and then a sun. Sun, and then a rain.

How many flat tires can lead to other flat tires?  The Motivational Moment, in that the speaker says this and you nod, look out your window to the street. A Saint Bernard is shitting the most glorious shit, its owner a red head dressed head-to-toe in Helly Hansen, you know the type, on her phone. This Motivational Moment. All of those flat tires. Flat tire everything.

Today or tomorrow is our anniversary of being born, not a birthday, but a wash cycle. Hello, today is the day we broke up so many years ago. Untangle. Cut some umbilical, height and then some. Good morning, together, good morning.

In the picture of our father on the internet, I can see who he used to be in his eyes. The eyes are always the dead give away. Periphery as in the television is off but I still see shadows, flickers and gone. I see this picture and I know. I see us in his eyes, those brown sag, this cheek cheek.

Today I am inside my Motivational Moment. I turn the I to an A in the first spelling, what does that say. No I in Motivational. Separate. I cannot be me without you, look to this photograph, you could be so lucky.

Dina and Dan Write After The Apocalypse However Vague

There is not the invention of zero and I wept

Or winter and if there is air I wept

It is not here—this the eye breathes and I wept
As if it were its axis it turns as it sees what it breathes and I wept

Gets in the way of the wind I wept.

But it’s not what we want we want it beside the bathroom

When we say wind we want it to break

Like a figure emerges, but we aren’t sure

If it’s through thirst for figures and I wept

Or it's the maker's faultless doing and I wept

We access the slack, then through your gaunt placards

Her narrow placards on the plains of dust and I wept

A misery of weeping though the wind wakes

Its head in someone else's hands and we see through it

The man who treads here takes repose and I wept

The perpetual stream of the streamless air and I wept

Air. I guess this means a cyclical current

And I would never write a word that turned into breath

Into glass into axes of light, air and winter and I wept

The time is for coming close

Dina and Dan Consider the Big Picture

Can't I address the you directly with a pointed finger and say you explicit is what I seek fantasy in heartbreak as in clavicle being pushed sideways and oops you choked until you pissed your pants and then collapse on sidewalk melt away as in what does it mean to be puritanical.

I have but this one clavicle, I will give it to you if you want it.

I have but this very one sternum and you can beyond consent caress it.

Another city far away a world away in another far away did you remember seizure Augustus as in
you know a leader or emperor of some instance I kiss you I miss you.

What is that to say to a sibiling of such high order, do you mean, if I can't see the connection how can the bigger picture be apparent.

It is winter and it is mathematics. I forgot how to be inside both. 

Dina and Dan Consider the Greeks

Of course we are going to get nowhere. The name in the hat method of selecting a lover has been unlucky. They wanted us to rid ourselves of the lovers we had had; many are said to no longer satisfy us, and there are those who could not be found when the wheels had fallen off. How long we walked on the roads going from there to here!

But look at the scene. The houses have at one time or another stood on cliffs above the sea, the colonies that sprung up around, say for instance, Massachusetts Bay. We have not remembered adequately, and that our best bets are off is no indicator of a soon to be launched desperate counterattack.

We were asked to burn our favorite books. With what relish we burned our favorite books! There should be one among us who comes forward and ruffles the feathers of this great bird, Mrs. Barot, with her gold-tipped teeth, how everything she says seems like a sunset. There are stacks of paper in a warehouse in Ohio catching fire, there is snowfall in South Africa, a woman asleep in the arms of her lover, whose name she has temporarily forgotten.

At noon we were at the bar. It was empty. Then it was crowded. And we drank and drank. 

Dina and Dan Are Americans (Today)

Freedom as in what is it to understand freedom as in what is to understand a pattern of

HOP (S)COT)CH   no. i said. no. i said.

Clemency in the ancient way we seek sodomy. Puritans didn't believe in sexuality sin as act sin as in the act of sodomy means you are not American and you are not from New England and now you are going to hell.

(T(oe)S(t)e(p)

(T(oe)P(i)c(k)

Dina and Dan In The Western Night

Dina and Dan Do Not Love Each Other Anymore

Host of disease, crack of knuckle
when finger extends out not in,
extends a region wide state, country, world,
this is you, a place made of mane, cattle,
salamander, two shakes  this is your life
and two shakes   this is whiskey shakes   you are branded
and we are morning into morning this is morning,
beard of marker and beard of bristle,
we have beards and two shakes, we're done for,
something to hold, something for longer.

When you left as virus you returned as heel,
I begged you to stop but you listen, convex.

Dina and Dan Do Not Know How to Live

Starting line: garden where fathers and grandfathers die
Garden: weeding
Start: the front yard a garden. All the yards, gardens. What is a garden?

Pansy, here is where we start. Spiral around a tree as if a tree could save. Across the street the tree that turns colors you want to see when you want to see them. You are in control. Red, no yellow, no orange, no green.

Violet, Rose, you die. Ride or die.

Pine tree in the front yard, 50 feet high where kissing happens. My grandfather had a naked woman tattooed on his arm from the war. If you kidnap me, drive me past my grandfather's house one last time so I can see him inside Deuteronomy's metonymy.



In Neolia, Iowa, two meth-heads on stolen BMX bikes pedal as fast as they can on the side of the highway divide. They are high and riding to the next town over 25 miles away. When there is nothing there, they go even farther. They will go until they are dead.

Dina and Dan Don't Eat Since The Cyclone

I have stopped trying to say things

But now there are neuter grays

Where there were expected other colors.

And someone was expecting

But what were they expecting?

Many figures arriving here almost all the time are that weary of speaking

What were you doing in Germany?

Who were those friends of yours?

And you, holding a ghastly expression

Was expecting intelligence of them

Blue and red mostly.

A square. A few trees among parks

Maybe a fountain and the people around the fountain sitting.

Mainly girls, wearing a different sort of clothing

Who thought they were thinking

The even later period of men, who found Socrates

With a poem as a point of departure.

And to where were they going? To the ends of things, as such,

As they had proposed doing some night, a long time ago, the end of the river and the             

                buildings, in a predictable drama

They had built around the river, so that the people in the buildings could look on the river

On which they would put their many ships carrying their many goods they had built

For further towns, up and downstream. To the ends of their furniture as well and their walls

And the pictures they had hung on their walls in moments of great need for virtual space.

They had theirs secured in the innermost good of their seeking, but you get the sense

This is not okay, for something is else coming up, that challenges the quiet of the few

Basic continuities. For the goods and services had the look of people

But not as full. Many more were posed to look apt, but there were shadows

Mocking perhaps the extended hand of the sitting model and that which she was reaching for

Perhaps doubling another hand under which its contact was buried.

A room was likewise being made all this time  

For a few pronouncements also,

Men ceasing with their vagaries,

For the simplest speech

Seeking its torments

We called ecstatic

Well-being. And those, the rest of us, who said I am not unready

To cut my heart with pledges

On that moment, predicated  

About the time dusk communes with its lights and county fairs

And tells no more truth, everyone begins to call forth

The truth, with its poetry, its beaten canvas

And this we can't follow any longer, and we must go there

Into the abandoned fields of Ionia, for it is our fate the words we might mean

Are the other aspects of this deferential project

Of not speaking aloud their names, the colors. When they seem to escape us,  

That inarticulateness they leave behind crowds your tongue

And the grunting noise you make

In defense of yourself, is the only cry worth noting

Regardless of its being overheated.

Because that's all there is, when one doesn't have a settled position 

Dina and Dan Don't Eat Malware Attacks

What brings you here after all these years?

Moths. Output of lights.

And this flight from yet comes to mind.

Not an experiment of an excuse and escape.

After all those horizons come to mind

The lush ones and the not so lush ones.

I know the holidays. There's the gas

Of a grownup's kiss. It is to be practiced. This

Shyness for the rest of it is snowfall.

He raised his eyes to the grocer on a Sunday

But only the one who falls among the glare

Pronounces his innocence his spirit's harmony

They used to fall on us in immediate and precise

Locations. I am not ready to repent.