Dina and Dan Rise Early To Work

The young men who lived on East St were all poor. They lived with their girlfriends and kids in small rooms and did their best to keep up with rent. The poorness of the people who lived on East St meant that they could be pretty rough and that if you lived on East St you were expected to be a little rough from time to time. Nobody lived there because they wanted to. But sometimes the clouds parted above the plant and the rows of homes, and the light came out striking the buildings and lawns. It was a place where dogs roamed and women gathered in small groups and talked while their kids waddled unattended on the sidewalks. Outsiders rarely came through. Once someone watched a man in a sport jacket covered in mud walk through the neighborhood carrying a record player.

            When the mornings rolled around, all the men from the old brick buildings gathered on the curb for the bus. They rode to the plant in silence. Two of the men, Tom and Richard, loved the same woman. Bruce and Darren and Jacob and the rest of us knew everything.

            There were clear sides. Tom seemed to think he was above us, but I didn't know if he really felt like he was above us or if he just seemed like that. I stood with him on the corner every morning and it was fine, but when Richard found out Tom was sleeping with Juliet, it wasn't so okay to stand with Tom in the morning and I stood over by Richard and everyone else.

            Everyone knew what was going to happen. The mornings rolled around, the sun came up, we got on the bus, went to work, then came home tired and unhappy with how tired we were, how bad and expensive the food was, how there was nothing good on TV, how old and tired our women had become. In the morning we went to work like it was nothing. We got on the bus, the sun came out from behind the buildings striking as we turned into it and it was the same thing until one morning Tom wasn't at the bus stop. I looked over at Darren, then at Bruce, and immediately Bruce knew what I was thinking and he looked away. I saw Richard in the breakroom later that day. He was eating a sandwich and drinking a coke. It was late when I fell asleep that night.

            I was thinking of Juliet. I hadn't really ever thought of her but now I couldn't seem to stop. She was egging me on, trying to drive me insane. Any minute the door would bust open and she’d come in and tell me she loved me. Or she’d tell me she had always loved me. Or there was nothing in the world but this love. And she’d just sit in a chair like she was posing, flipping through a magazine or something. I felt a great fear in my soul. It hurt, the fear was so bad. I'd never been this afraid in my entire life. I'd never thought I had a soul before. But that's what hurt. I knew that my soul was what hurt. I began to picture Richard and Tom, the look of disbelief on both of their faces, and Juliet, posing, her face disappearing behind a magazine, and my hands, outstretched before me, like they'd been severed, trying to reach her, floating toward her but only finding Richard. I pictured Richard as an opening. I was moving toward Richard's twisted face as he prepared his mouth, like it were a great banquet table. And it was waiting for me like a word. And I had to lean my head in to hear it. Everything got quiet. He smiled. But then he laughed, and I had the uneasy feeling I was about to laugh. But it was Juliet laughing. My innocence was pretense, for I had always loved only myself. 

Dina and Dan Get Up Early To Boast

Jet planes will drop sometime out of the air

The cities below with our purposes, steam. They are sometime

To find remains, Mayors, a leather jacket  

Your sometime boyfriend

And then you are taken to a place in the back where an insane man enters

And points at you. What you've seen is no longer that

But the shadows of other things,

Much larger, falling in on you

Smooth sumac, corkwood, forgotten oak, maple, cubic pine

Surely one replaced boughs and petals over and over.

Surely devotion spread the halls of Universities its thick purple

Patches, passed out cruel pamphlets and meteoric tea leaves

Like a wood, as blank as apple pie, lurking in our souls

Like all the helpless boys passing out in each other’s arms

Like stray rockets, like the tears you cried into your fill in the blanks

Like you can bury me rather than fill in the blanks

Yet I've written over this normal utterly displeasing copy

Stomping in the silence of the library, a child could grow up and do this

The harsh surroundings of all that pulls us into her

That the narrow letters spell out A DEAD MAN DID THIS?!

But I stray, briskly

Of all the readers of this normal occurrence

In this bungalow, falling over ourselves to gather ourselves

The evidence of being loved in this bungalow

In this grip of a firm entity

How strange that the Muse

Has come to kiss me on the lips

Dina and Dan in Separate Nuptials

Laurence calls to tell me we are divorced
& what is divorce more than a bucket of
icicles, the way in which the Polar Bear Swim
happens every year in February the February
of the coldest of seasons, I can't help but
be weary of the coldest of seasons, how
it sets in the bones like wood frames
on fire how when we were younger
and our Fathers would cut our textbooks
up because they did not want us smarter
than them but we were already smarter
than them and the Fathers cut the books
up with school scissors, how they cut
our hair, with the same violence,
the snips and then the nothing, the
snips and then the bangs, we have
long hair and then it doesn't grow
and then we have long hair again

The mother with the stroke, the mother who had the
stroke and now who cannot speak from her left side
of her mouth, how a stroke can bleed what bleeds
inside of a stroke, what is a harp, how do you play

Outside a president's funeral
we are in our nation's capital
we are in our state's capital
we are capitol upon capital
I now live in capitol hill
but in another state in the west
what is west but a direction
you were only in in story, fantasy,
what is a lie but a direction
you were only in story, fantasy
what is a lie but a capital
what is a language but capital
what kind of capital is capitol

On the train to the apartments and my Aunt Ann
says do not speak to the man from apartment B17
because he tried to molest your cousin the
other day tried to get her to go home with him
to take some pictures, I'll cut his nuts off Ann says
I'll cut his nuts off

Outside a president's funeral,
you quit your job, you are not going back
you tell me after we sign the papers in this
here Big Easy I'm done you say and I can't
believe how big your curls are, your body
a ouroborus, your curls are so black, black
and I run my fingers through them,
I pull your mouth until your teeth
bleed from the gum. What is the capitol
of Louisiana, are we in it, is it time
I say, the Marigny we are lost we cannot
hail a cab my boots have lost a heel
We have the same curls you and I
we look alike you and I
we look alike in this photograph
we look alike in our tentacles
we look alike in our wombs and testicles
we look alike in our wounds
we look alike in the ways in which we will kill each other, making love like giants
we look alike in our venom
we look alike in our sorrow
we look alike in our violence
I, for one, wish we both had
a white dress on, the one from Nantucket
that was your grandmother's on her wedding day,
the one where she said the color spoiled the silver
it was so virginal, are you so virginal she asked
that day, are you so virginal, will the color
spoil you? she asked has Laurence polished
the silver for your big day, I told him to,
I told him to. Your mother only gained
10 pounds when she had you, 8 pounds
when she had your brother tells me
if I gain more than 10 pounds, I am a fat
good-for-nothing slob, worthless,
in fact, don't even have babies,
it is not worth it, she says.

Dina and Dan Make Time To Travel Through It

I had said very hot and very blue before. I got in my car and I drove. I headed for the part of town I usually never go to. I had described days of varying blueness and hotness. But in no way, in my cogitations of "day" could I have conceived of hours, sky, blueness, and all else that I had been leaving out.

I sat on a bench for many hours. It was early in the afternoon. I attempted to draw, holding the paper so that should a passer by happen upon me, they'd see my work, recognize my genius and engage me in a conversation. How are you? I THINK I AM STILL DOING OKAY? I thought about the feeling of a person, the long lost person. I drew this picture and underneath it I wrote, Dear Sister Dina, if I have succeeded in painting a picture, it is only partial, because I cannot rightly claim to be using pigment.

I was saying without actually knowing what it was like to speak. In my bathroom I usually stand up my tippy toes and pretend to be taller, when I look in the mirror I suck in my gut, my cheeks. The neighbors are beset with rodents. When I see them I ask, how is the infestation? They nod. It is fine.  

The neighbor woman sleeps in the vestibule. Her face is covered in mud. If I prod her with my toe she will not move. The advice I would give is not life changing. The thing I always write each morning is I NEED TO CHANGE MY LIFE. When I was a boy I asked a vendor for a bottle of water. I had no money but I pressed on him my thirst. Shocked that he demanded money still, I left thirsty. Over my shoulder I asked him, Do You Know I Am Leaving Thirsty?

Speaking was nothing like those words about to be written down, zipping through my head. The articles came loose. Yet it was the only way it could be attempted. Like very hot, like very blue. 

Dina and Dan Discuss Again The Map (This May Be A Repeat)

otherwise it seems that to begin with such a thing unlikely

that equipped with a little detail, you might see the coasts

and yet to also want of us one code of behavior

and another, secret code, and because the latter is difficult, let it be the true one

though to know which one we were headed to and by extension not which one

would have perhaps saved us some time. How valuable is it now, if it were to end up along side             some shore that has not changed

a land to which they will always just arrive full of these exaggeratedly harsh palms and crowded             streams.

First here, as without annotation, a voyage without sea, this inattention to useful limitations

from all kinds, of a worst night, that would give you all joys

I might have tried to conceive of it liberated from duty. But it was

a new land, and the ignorance of my hosts tired me.

How could they not know I’d arrived?

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

Dina and Dan in Communion with Conflagration

There is a moment when threshold and the body become one, a singular boundary that is neither awake nor dead, what is to be awake than dead, ever more awake than dead, o death, how are you to even make room or sense. Here is the threshold, say of numbers or text or drink, and here is our body and how do we make the both work. The day I met you, you brought over a pack of cigarettes that reminded me of my father's cigarettes, you only had three left, you wanted more but we drank vodka and acted like we didn't want more, why I'll never know. The day you left, you said all you wanted was to make sure my body looked the same as when you met me, that my body was as soft or curved or straight or bones as you wanted it to be when you first met me, that it wasn't, until now, and you wanted to make sure.

I am obsessed with the what constitutes day and night and what constitutes longing and the desire for longing. What constitutes behavior as relevant or not and what creates a boundary for these days in which it feels boring to consume, boring to not consume, boring to live at all. Raleigh calls and says that they tried to get a hold of me the other night, banged on my door but no one answered and it was because we were fucking and then fighting and then smoking naked wrapped in a sheet and then fighting again. The night you exploded into my house because the door was unlocked and you didn't know where else to go and so you exploded into my house at four in the morning and came into my bedroom when I was with another person in bed fucking and fighting and smoking cigarettes wrapped up in sheets. Take me home, you said, or I'll just stay here, you said, can you sleep with me on the couch? you ask but I say no, I'll take you home, I'll take you home and I do and you cry and tell me that you want me to stay with you, lay with me until I fall asleep, you say, but I can't, I can't, I say and I am crying now too and its been hours now since you came into my house and my other lover is gone when I finally make my way home, I am in pajamas, I look like trash.

When four in the morning becomes eight in the morning and because the sun has come up it is no longer night but it is still night to me, it is always still night to me.

I no longer desire you, I no longer even think about you when I am alone, I have thought about you when I am alone and the reasoning between being alone and being lonely and when does it become tedious to be alone and lonely and you finally have to make a decision to be neither. I am not good at going to coffee shops or bars alone to make friends with people because I do not believe in boundaries and the evening (always the evening!) brings with it people following me back to my house and at least one person in my bed that is not the person that I want in my bed and so the cycle of morning and night continues and I say things I don't mean and do enact things I don't mean in order to not be lonely. I have a dream that I kiss you and in real life I kiss you and these two things never feel the same.

When do we believe that we have created the largest and best scenario of our lives, to be replayed back and forth, in front of our eyes, for the rest of our days? Do you measure it in a baby, your baby, the baby you have spilled seed for  and has been birthed from a womb and now it is yours, it is yours. Do you measure it in love or what is the difference between love and consistency, the threshold and the body, of the body, when is the threshold and the body the same. I cannot ever plan my moments with you, I cannot foresee, even in my clearest and most cohesive framework, what our moments will be like together. When I will put my hands around your face and kiss you. You never remember how tall I am, you are always surprised when we are together how tall I am, you always seem to have in your memory that you are so much bigger than me but you are not, there is not much difference in size between you and I. You have become accustom to women who you can enact violence on, whose bodies are thresholds and what comes of boundaries. You have become accustom to women who are small waifs.

I replay the day we met in my mind and wish I could have foreseen then what the moments later would be, how my body was the threshold, how I wanted you to understand the ways in which I was marked and did the marking when we experienced each other in any capacity. To mark and be marked by the Other. When you explode into my unlocked front door in the morning, in the night. When night and morning are together, how I am obsessed. Remind me tomorrow afternoon of all the ways in which we can and will explode in the future and I will tell you I cannot see that far away, in advance.

Dina and Dan Write Through Affectation, Quicker

           This was in the summer, when I woke up in my apartment, and I had no idea. It had been this thing happening to me. But then it was over. But even over is an unsatisfactory term. It was complete. Or it felt complete. Except I hadn't had time to notice this. No one did. We were all busy. Even I was helping, in an office far uptown. I sat beside an editor at a large desk pushed up against two large windows that looked over a park. The editor was a smallish crippled man. He hardly talked. They said he was steeped in mysticism. I asked them what was wrong. Why mysticism, how can anyone these days become, be actively, steeped in mysticism. They laughed. It was obvious. Didn't I know? He'd been struck by lightening. Can't I work with someone who hasn't been struck by lightening, I said.

            We sat widely spaced at a large table, each of us working in a distinctively private silence. And then one day I asked him if he liked what I was doing. I had a stack of neat pages set before me and with both hands I slid the pages over to his side, right under his nose actually, because his head was already bowed. He seemed to expect this as he then began to read without a moment's hesitation. When he finished, he was shaking and pale. All he said was, I don't follow it, and he said it grimly. Then he opened the window in front of us and threw the pages right out. They floated before me, and it was the most unreal thing. It had been done so silently, the pages fell so silently, I was mystified, and he kind of smirked after he threw them out too like he knew that was the word I was going to come up with. I was pretty much in tears when I got up and left.

             It was still very hot out. The sky was as blue as it had been that morning. I looked up and around. I found this all as if it were without theme. People wore next to nothing, their hips and breasts prodding out, as if demanding. I walked and looked, as one would considering an object of great scale. I shied away from neither eye contact, nor the phrase "masses of inertia" and felt myself among them, in league. Perhaps concert. I watched and recorded in a notebook the world around me. I hadn't paid it attention for so long, but there it had been--. The sidewalk shimmered, the sky tumbled around in my head. I felt very heavy. It seemed possible to me. I wrote what I thought about. Ralph was very greedy. Mr Fellows was going to borrow money because he was broke. The family heirlooms were seized by Cousin Mathlida. Mrs Kelly's pride was very childish. I loved reading it back to myself. Planes flew overhead. They had been putting pesticides in the cutlets. Here the world was! Tom Maitland is a dark-skinned and nice-looking man. And I was suddenly reduced to nerves. I shut myself up in my apartment. It was here and in everything except me. I had let it loose.

            At first I paid no attention to its roaring outside my window, but it became increasingly difficult. It all got louder, moving in its many directions, and the sky changed from blue to empty. There were a few faint signs of bad things to come in the beginning. Then there were many. I had been unaware of their accumulating until a sound thundered away at a distance, and then veered momentarily, as if juking, before ceasing altogether. Lightening cracked white and perfect like a second of absolute time before emptying out everything completely. I registered the mystical shocking, surprising, gales of a new wind, though in a more primal way, as if the weather had gotten inside me. This switch was a part of something else. I could not quite tell what was happening apart from the bigger thing that was going on outside because then it seemed like everything was happening inside my apartment.

            I knew that birds crashed into my windows, that the panes of glass shook from the impact of their pellet shaped bodies, but I was not ready for it to literally happen. For a moment I thought stupendously of birds of light. Jack put the problem to Joan. The ball rolled into the gutter. The collisions emerged from trees, as if shot. I started groaning. Mrs Madison spent a restless night in a motel. I was not in pain, only something very much like pain. I made the conscious effort to go to the bathroom. After a few minutes the neighbors started banging on my door, asking if I needed help. I put my lips to the floor and blew a bubble without sound. The banging only frightened me further. It roared outside and inside. Then the door was opened and the neighbors were talking to me in excited and monstrous voices, a language full of sand, of all-inclusive plans, of oceans and towers. How to describe my fear of these people and their all-inclusive plans! How those sounds they made came from not just their mouths but everywhere! I groaned. There it was in my mouth, and I could do nothing.

They shook me, splashed water on me, at one point they yelled and slapped. None of it worked. In frustration they fought with one another. They didn't know what to do. What was happening? Could they do anything? She accused him of not caring. He accused her of always sticking her nose in other people's business. What business was it hers anyway? Whatever, he said finally, and called for help.

The paramedics responded accordingly, lugging up the five flights of stairs to my room a duffel bag and such, but their getting here proved a great disappointment to everyone, including the paramedics themselves, who were displeased to do anything. They made sour faces and shrugged and took turns kicking the duffel bag. There really wasn’t much they could do. Just let it be, they said. People go horribly awry, they said. Besides, they said, looking over their shoulders, it was a mild case.

I felt relieved. Steve and Betty exchanged glances. They were both developing the same thought. How do they know this for sure? Who are these paramedics and why are they so certain? All they’ve taken is one lousy look. They didn’t even check for a pulse. What if this were a corpse and not just an unconscious person? What if what they had heard was a death rattle? In all their lives, they had never heard such certainty. When we left Gibraltar, the potted ferns were retired again.

It was not long after that the paramedics left, dragging behind them that useless bag of theirs. Steven and Betty followed them into the hallway, said goodbye, and there remained, rather amazed with everything, crouched near my door, listening to the soft quiet coming from my apartment. It reverberated in the corridor. It was an almost pleasant, soothing noise for them.

“What was in that bag,” asked Betty. “I mean they didn’t hardly do anything,” she said, trailing off.

“They didn’t have the right tools maybe,” Steve said.

“But that’s what was needed," said Betty, affirmatively.

They had always needed tools. She turned and looked back at my door. She was carrying a purse with makeups and something about the door or what was going on must have compelled her to begin searching through her purse. She fished for something. Her hands moved through the bag. She believed she’d find it. She knew it was in there. She knew she would find it. Then she forgot and snapped the purse shut and looked up at Steve and smiled. She wore a bright yellow dress with faces printed all over it, faces of Hollywood Actresses who had won Oscars. 

Dina and Dan Take The Road Home

            “Charlie you aren’t sleeping. I can’t let you sleep. If you sleep,” said Bill.

            “I have to sleep,” said Charlie, “I feel crooked.”

            “But,” said Bill, “you crooked your head.”

            “You did it,” said Charlie.

            “I’m trying to help you,” said Bill.

            “You’re trying to help me by crooking me you mean,” said Charlie.

            “Charlie, a lot of me right now wants to crook you again. You know damn well I didn’t mean to. But this time if I do I mean to,” said Bill.

            “Bill, for goodness sake,” said Charlie.

            “It’s for the better,” said Bill.

            “Whereas your life is spent bossing everyone around,” said Charlie.

            “Admit you started with the stuff about how I am no good at sports. Admit you started in on me again,” said Bill.

            Charlie looked down sheepishly, at his big hands, and turned them over. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps he had been bullying Bill. Bill had never played sports. In fact, Bill was sort of feminine. But old Charlie liked that about Bill. You have to like something about someone to like them. It made them get along so well together. But maybe he didn’t like it. Maybe after all these years he had hated it. Then he had made that clear. He couldn’t remember. It could have been Bill who had started it, affronted by Charlie’s masculinity. Perhaps all these years Bill had resented that Charlie could palm a basketball.  

“I see,” said Charlie.

            “The brain is made of soft tissue,” said Bill, “and it floats somewhat within the skull in a bath of spinal fluid.”

            “Spinal fluid,” said Charlie, “is there salt in spinal fluid?"

            “I don’t know Charlie maybe. There’s salt in everything isn’t there?” said Bill. “The fact is, a hard enough crook, you knock the brain against the skull, against itself, and that’s not good.”

            “You crooked me pretty good,” said Charlie.

            “But admit you deserved it, starting in on me,” said Bill, “about me not playing sports.”

            “If you say so, Bill, I don’t like fighting,” said Charlie.

            “Which is why you’re my friend,” said Bill.

            "I suppose," said Charlie.

            He turned a little to his right and started practicing his German. He read from a pink flashcard, "Wir laufen durch den Park. Die Menschen sind dumm."

"What is that Charlie?"

"It's my German," said Charlie, putting the card aside.

"Your German," said Bill

"My German," said Charlie.

"There you go again," said Bill, "with your German."

"You're right, Bill. You crooked me pretty good," said Charlie.

"You'd started in," said Bill, trailing off.

"There is only the one thing you can say," said Charlie.

"What's that?" said Bill.

"This," said Charlie, pointing to the knot on his head.

Bill scoffed. "I don't see anything," he said.

"Okay," said Charlie, "but what's that mean? That I don't feel like you crooked me?"

"So you admit what you like," said Bill, "is what that means."

"I'm not admitting anything," said Charlie, "I'm just saying I feel crooked is all."

"But I'm certainly going to admit prior to my admitting anything else you started in on me," said Bill. "Besides, it doesn't matter what you think. My sense of it gets in the way of your sense of it and then there's nothing doing."

"What if I don't have a sense of it?" said Charlie.

"You have to have a sense of it," said Bill, "but that doesn't make it anymore true."

Charlie laughed. "Sure. You started in on me. I started in on you."

"So we're just back at the start," said Bill.

He looked down to hide his face as he started to cry. It was true there was no single truth. He looked up at Charlie and Charlie looked at Bill. Bill had blue eyes and he was soft and quiet as his eyes. Bill was experiencing his senses just as Charlie was experiencing his. Charlie felt pain. Bill despaired. At the end of the day, it was all he had to deal with. These little parts at hand were all he was ever going to have at hand. They were alone in a room in a house that stood by itself on a quiet street.

"Do you hear that?" asked Charlie.

"Hear what?" replied Bill.

It was a strange, smoking quiet, smoking green, then smoking blue. Bill had had this conversation before with Charlie. He looked at Charlie and Charlie looked at Bill. It had hurt like it was hurting now. Bill looked away and then back at Charlie. Bill had never played with his hair but now he was, twirling it around his fingers. In fact, Bill was sort of twirling his hair. Charlie looked Bill in the eyes and Bill looked Charlie back in the eyes.

It was after that they both felt like they had been crooked, but that it was the worst and strangest crooking. The walls were the whitest and emptiest they had ever been. The superlative had made them get along so well together. But maybe they hadn't liked it. Maybe after all these years they had hated it. And the windows were the darkest they had ever been. They hadn't remembered anything. It could have been Charlie who had started it, affronted by Bill's distinctions. 

Dina and Dan Desire Desire

When I was young, I wished Danny Tanner from Full House was my dad. In fact, I often thought about how Danny Tanner and Uncle Jesse and Joey could gangbang me, taking turns, it would not be

so bad to have John Stamos hold you down against your will. No, do not talk like that, rape
is not funny. I am perpetually walking in everything I write but in real life I hate to walk. How else to

get around. In the south, it is springtime. In the west, it is winter, the middle of winter, almost Valentine's Day. I tried to commit suicide when I was 12 years old but I always say 11 years old to be

more melodramatic. At 12 years old, what do you understand about life that is not informed by infatuation. At 28 what do you understand about life that is not informed by infatuation. There is a

man outside my window, I will take my clothes off slower than usual. At 12 years old I wanted to die because I was sad that life's jouissance is ugly, the sheen had gleaned off, what did anything mean

anymore. Danny Tanner, my father, wouldn't have stood for my desire for death. When do you decide you want to die. In the west, there are cowboys. In the south, there are cowboys. When I was young,

the desire for death was like the way the body involuntarily acts to keep you alive, systems, systems. When do the systems fail. When is my body held down involuntarily. When you cannot act, when

you have no say, when everything is binding it equals non-consent. In the middle of winter, when I
was young, no, even now, a longing to expel desire, long for understanding of paternal progeny.

Dina and Dan Believe in Second Chances

Your ex-girlfriend made a tumblr and now all you can do is stare at her face. She posts pictures of herself dressed in black, with beautiful big hair and the saddest eyes in the world. You know that when she looks directly into the computer camera, she pretends that it is you on the other end but she isn't ever going to return your phone calls, even though you call collect from the only pay phone left in the city but you are calling not only collect but internationally and so it is double expensive for her. You and she would joke constantly about the kind of phone calls you would accept collect, internationally, maybe someone from jail? Although, I guess, you would joke and she would laugh but she didn't know how to joke, she did know how to laugh, and that's what you liked, initially, about her, is that she wasn't always trying to joke around, she didn't give you a lot sass, she didn't give you a lot sarcasm or snark, she was just loving and kind and loved to crinkle her big nose up and laugh at your jokes so you joked a lot and she didn't but laughed a lot and that was endearing. So, you call collect because you find this tumblr page with pictures of her in black, looking sad, looking defeated, and then there are other pictures of her with your old friends back in the big city where you fell in love with her and they are looking at the camera and not missing you a bit, not missing your presence one second. And you are certain, after being certain for long enough, that she has told them all what happened, that you fell off, that you fell down into a black hole, that you couldn't get yourself out, that you keep calling collect internationally from the only pay phone left in another city, the city you are from, but not born and raised in. You remember when you brought her home for the first Christmas break you had from school and how your mother, drunk and careening, insisted that you don't sleep in the same bed but by the end of the evening, she was tucked underneath your arm, her back to you, the stick-and-poke tattoo that she was mortified of, so embarrassed that she wouldn't wear anything that showed her middle back, which was fine, she didn't need to anyway. You would trace her tattoo with your fingers while she fell asleep and she would eventually shake your hand away, a sign that she had had enough. That first Christmas, you snuck out and met someone that you once loved, but in a different way, at a bar downtown where it was loud and the other someone was drunk, having already been there for hours waiting for you. You couldn't tell this other person about her, the one at your parents house, you couldn't tell this other because this other wouldn't understand about love and falling in love in a bigger city, the way it feels to be in love with someone that was so pure. The other gives you snark, gives you sarcasm, yells at you, tells you that they had been waiting at the noisy weird bar downtown all night for you, where the fuck have you been, its 1 in the morning, I love you, they say, I never told you before but I am in love with you. I have to go, you say, I have to go. Wait, the other says, please wait, where are you going, you just got here. But you slam your drink, make the other pay the tab, and run up, up, up and out back to your parents house. You have never forgotten the way it felt to get back into bed with her, to know that you left the other exactly where you found her long ago, to know that the future was not downtown in some whiskey bar but right in your parents house, it is almost Christmas, you are going to leave from your parents house to her parents house where you will bask on an island in the sun and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Her parents greet you with hugs all around, they love your face, you are so handsome her mother says to you, he is a real catch she says to her, keep him, he's beautiful, you will make gorgeous babies she says to the both of you.

After how many times you call and she doesn't pick up. You slam the receiver down how many times, so many times, you slam it until the mouthpiece breaks, until it breaks into so many pieces. You slip on the ice and hit your head, you are bleeding but not very much and you worry about the blood and how much is coming from your head, worried that maybe your head doesn't have too much blood in it anymore, aren't you supposed to be bleeding much worse than that? How many times and she doesn't pick up.

Your friends email you after a week or so. You have gone to the doctor for stitches and when you ask about the blood and your head, he looks at you as if you are some sort of fucking moron. Everything is fine, he says, everything is fine. You are lucky it wasn't a larger wound, ice is dangerous. Maybe you should invest in some of those ice things you slip over your shoes like the elderly wear and he chuckles and you nod but don't understand and don't know what they are. Your friends email you after a week or so and tell you to stop calling her and tell you they are no longer your friends, they were her friends first in the big city where you fell in love. And stop looking at her tumblr page, they say, she can track the ISP address, she knows its you.

Dina and Dan Record Gender

The boy becomes a man overnight
becomes a woman overnight and
we can figure that this inside of him
becomes a they, a we, a carry inside
twice in one day, twice in five days,
a carry inside, the ways in which
we carry each other inside. There is
a death in Tehran from air pollution
every single day. The red woman
in the square. The person who
comes to the foot of Golgotha
every day, comes to the foot of
the tombstone every day, here
lies the baby, the baby in which
we will create more babies to
fill the void, the fill what void,
this baby is dead and now we
need to have more in order to
have so many babies to sit at
the feet of us. But you were
never a good mother, they say,
to kill the mother is different
than killing the father because
once you kill the mother, you
are killing the womb, the center
of the world, all that is bringing
forth life. I wouldn't be here
without father, you say, I wouldn't
be here but to kill the father is
simply killing what could be and
killing the mother is killing what
is and that is the difference, dear
boy and girl, dear boy/girl, dear
sweet child. A boy grows up
and believes he is a girl and dies
for that cause, this belief will
kill you, all belief will kill you.
Will you make it, babydoll,
to the point where adulthood
is no longer if you are this or
that but you simply are? I am not there
yet, I am not there. Dear boy/girl,
dear sweet child, here is a choice
and use it well, please use it well,
when will we make other choices
and when will daybreak come and
how can we decide what we are
and what will happen. Make a baby
and give it away, make a baby and
forget you have a baby, when it cries
forget it is there and when it shits
forget it is there and what do you
have to do to forget anyway.
I have forgotten all of the nights
where we were not loyal to
each other, I have forgotten
all of the nights when we would
lie on our backs and watch
the sky in the alleyway and there was
broken glass everywhere and you
would shelter me with your arms
but your arms are now limp
and what happens when you lose your
arms and your sight. What happens
when you lose. Are you happy where
you are and if you are not happy why
don't you come here, be with me?
We could sit close but not too close
and not say a word, never say a word,
because being close is enough, being
close is enough.

Dina and Dan Have Yet Transcended

In July of 1983 my father wrote a tract called THE ARTICLE. It was his opus. He asked a simple question. What are the benefits of war? He was in Delray, Fl, on his friend’s sofa when the composition took place. He wrote for many hours a day. He went to bed late at night trembling. He woke in the morning thinking that the work wasn't getting anywhere. People stopped by. Once one of his old girlfriends came by. He opened the door to her and invited her in and asked if he could read some of his new work to her. She looked out the window and said she'd rather not. She told him that for the longest time the only voice she had heard was his. She came by to tell him that she had started writing. It didn't come easy, sometimes she found herself still having to shut him out, but at least she was writing. People, with exceeding exactitude, get to die, he said. I think you should go. She left and proceeded from there to drive to the ocean, and what happened to her once she reached the ocean would remain a mystery. 

My father returned to his manuscript with a new vigor. This was during the third phase of the Lebanese Civil War. The poet, Nadia Tueni, who my father had just heard of from a man at the Frog Lounge, had recently died. He began to consider the subject of his work not war itself, but the events occurring around it, the virtually unrelated activity of living and dying, what is external to casualties, collateral, economic, perhaps superficially unaffected, voided, by the mechanisms of war itself.

He imagined the bar where he would drink himself to death, but his drama would be the parking lot just across the street, or the way the abandoned building looked at him in the middle of the night, when he felt his paranoia creeping in and was compelled to go to the window to make sure the buildings the street the world he was comfortable with had not made any sudden movements, lurched itself in any one particular direction.

For instance, Nadia Tueni's death was unrelated to the activity of that war, that is, she died in a well-lit hospital room in London, but she seemed to my father a representative countervailing force, the utterance of minutely coded excesses, during wartime. It was his project to start with these coded excesses, to interpret them.

We seem to live in these excesses in America at least, our lives take place in the impalpable air of a constant war, we go to work in it, live, move, speak through it.

She was not, he asserts in his first sentence, a great poet, nor was her death the cessation of her poetic act, obviously, but the continuance of a shared banality. She was, for my father, the act of memory itself, forgetting that it is the result of a chain of amino acids, coming unhinged, a jaw, a man asking how many hours until we've arrived at a geographic destination. You live in a neighborhood, you do service in another. She was a woman pronounced and lived as if made in words used to order pizza, address your landlord, complain to your friend about the weather. Taken by them, we etch ourselves against a landscape of great foreboding, wave lapping onto wave, a sound, or a kind of sound.

Who gets to die? At her death, a few suggested that she wrote poems able to withstand the pressure of the time and were therefore, of our time. My father asserts that this is an unnecessary way of thinking. Or that it goes without saying. That all work whenever it’s read, will reflect its readings’ context. People have to assert that a work is timeless to keep that work from the incarceration of its inherent illiteracy. Such is the tension of a book distributed to classes in middle America.

Any poet of any worth will hold the world surrounding her work accountable—read or unread. Her work itself is this grief of possession of ethics. People have wars. People without phones, people with phones. Computers that are phones, phones that are computers. People whose stories keep changing, people who do not think it possible to find predicate B completely outside of the subject A, who think of sixty to zero, performance, people who know about doing everything well, or the best of everything, jazzed up with the flavors of Bourbon St, nothing called, the metaphysical component necessary for extension, the swelling and poorly officiated sex scene, afterward a lot of thought already inherent in the subject, a lot of things to think about.

Having thus detoured, he begins, again, by addressing the dead poet and her body. She is lying on a small table in an empty room. My father is the only one in the room with her, tasked to keep an eye on her--or is it the engulfing stench of decomposition? Either way, he feels like he’s being tested, or set-up. Her body is perfect and my father is afraid to touch it. Not that he is afraid of her body so much as he is by the compulsion to touch her body, which he feels rippling through him, like a sound. He can in fact hear her, her cold perfect breasts, the soft mound of her vagina. She is blue, veiny, ghostly, and the nervousness and dread he feels on him loosens him from the trivial dimensions of the room and sends him headlong into a black and terrifying opening in himself. It is a small and fiercely written passage. He states calmly that he could not comprehend his desire. He moves on from the body to the TV. This is not apostrophe in the exact or formal sense. A hope rings out almost immediately. I sense some urgency here in my father’s writing. One sentence begins and ends quickly. Another goes for it, and you can see the screws tightening. He trains his eye just so, then squints, then looks at something else. It is not among my father’s best passages. I get the sense his own urgency didn’t interest him. Who gets to die? We preceded his writing. There may be an answer in the next sentence, written after us, before we encounter ourselves, or the following sentence. The man gurgles. What is that sound he asks. She was speaking to him while he wrote, that is clear. His world could not have contained what he spoke of. His position in Delray was limited. But his world was trenchant. There were tanks and bombs, people who filled streets, who poured into them, giddily or angered, people who spilled into nearby streets, dazed and wistful. He was listening. He felt the next book she would write inside him. It felt like an event, he felt like he had a concert hall inside himself. The traffic on the Miami Federal Highway was sparse. He listened to it through the open window, the sound of passing cars soothing him, and at this moment the composition took a turn for the worst. He felt the sound pass through him, into being by him. He thought of cars as he wrote. They became the book, accelerating.

Dina and Dan Realize the Meaning of Ghosts

I am at a loss, as in, in bed
and here I stay until my
eyes have sprouted flowers,
o magnolia, o sweet pink rose,
the south is in springtime right now,
a February of springtime, the Japanese
violet bloom, Japanese elm in fall,
how everything is weeping with spring,
as if winter almost killed us all,
as if flowers in winter almost kill
everyone at the thought. Chill,
and then chill, frozen ground,
fooled the tulips into believing something
Other, how we are the Other, chilled
and then nothing, not one thing.

In bed, there are ghosts.

In this bed, your ghost.

I dream of my grandfather and then
there are two grandfathers and then
I say out loud in my sleep No!
There cannot be two of you!
You are dead! And when I wake,
this bed, this icicle outside, take
pictures and look at them.

What does all the photographs
from your entire adulthood look like
in this sea of fire? Pull them out,
brush them off, ash, ash. It is one
big pile of plastic. Smiles, and then
smiles and then. Why do you always
have your tounge out in photos, its
disgusting, its not even cute.

In bed, this ghost of my grandfather.
How we grandfather anything in at all,
what does it mean to grandfather. He
used to speak of progeny, as in look
out of the vastness and see my progeny.
I am at his feet in silence, I am sitting
close to him, holding his rabid hand
saying, I love you I love you I love you
and he is saying, I love you I love you
I love you.

Understandable, this season. Understandable that years ago,
we left each other around this season, we were young and
in love. We were young, at least. We were in love, secondly.
We were at the foot, thirdly. O bed, each bed, I crawl into
I lose sight immediately.

My dream where I am kissing you and I am masculine,
I am on top of you, I can feel your small frame and body,
I am a mass on top of you, I am a mass inside of you
and then later, I tell anyone, I tell everyone,
later I figure who it was, it wasn't you after all,
but some Other who I do not know. When did I stop
dreaming of you. I am a man and now I am not.
What happens when you wake up a man and
you are not. What happens when you look down
and there is nothing between your legs but winter.

Dina and Dan Join The Subcommittee On Rules

One begins certain to finish but in support

Of other, farther waves

Waves close an article

Of definite surrender within secret proceeding waves

Or something else we ought to manage in our prayers

It’s possible they'll begin paying attention the very minute

His or an aspect of his attention has retreated

Into its shrewd self-misunderstanding. Yet there are mothers

Sending old heat to their boys in ghostly livery

Trembling in afternoons

Below something in me like sheets hanging out to dry. We seem to believe

Having said in no certain way that we are not certain it is possible.

It was a house with many rooms, just like this one

Where we went with one another

To think and twist the matter. Ducks swam

On small brown rivers, these

Issuing somehow from the pockets

Seared into your face. Yet no man with a knife was to wait

Around the coming corner. We will have been

Deceived for the hundredth time this time next year, when its laughter

Escapes us, or the nests built in the stadium lights

Coming crashing down after its confetti has shaken itself loose

Prior to the storm. Regardless, the idea of being anywhere remotely like it

As it grew over the season

Until it felt itself ready to abscond and with it our sense

Of making what we knew could not real,

But going to the window is a nice touch

As snow flops and flails into agglomerations

With the enthusiastic gestures of laughter.

It was not with irony we called this composition winter

But it was the least thing worth saying

And now it's come out again

Sorrowing and estranged, but requiring our handling, our care

Though long we've been tired of the sequence, out and in, out and in.

Suppose one might get away

But would it be dangerous

Going, the roads ahead? Suppose

Something else happens.

Something cold, something instilled

Very much like an expectation

Or the security officer who has detained you

Is impersonating a security officer

With the intent to induce you to submit

To his pretended authority

And this is not like lying in ambush.

The first spectacle was falling from beams.

There they say

You’d be happy here

I’d like a word with you

To be felt among them

Lights inside of cars

Music inside of cars

It has happened before

And the oldness of our lives

Sometime numerous details

From deeper cause

Dina and Dan Give Them What They Are Owed

Keats returns. He sits pensively.

What happens is

There are the dinosaurs

The dinosaurs from his youth

Around the terrain of his lonely days

Their tiny claws picking dog bones from their teeth

The seasons' clouds disappear and sun from her ears falls out like a sound

Unhearing itself

Who is she?

The girl acting like his sister is his sister

Crowns of fire from the number of crowns of trees

Visible in the window when he takes her to bed

What happens is

This is not autumn

He says I have returned

But his ghost is waiting for him at the top of the stairs

My goal is to get a haircut at some point

She starts crying

One goes and one returns to where the previous was

This is what he returns to

The reason there are dinosaurs if you will, 

To watch dinosaurs, and why he

Of all people

From this perch

Wishes there were more dinosaurs

In the bed with them, their parents shudder

And this is what we are doing

Wishes where he is able to enjoy the maximum of sunshine

The way his thoughts go, as a steam, disappearing

His sister removes her socks and says

I can't feel my face

The rest of what he sees in this ancient setting

He will have to figure out, as if urging forward

His sister standing in the mouth of a cave into which he must go

To discover himself

Though he is afraid

For there to be anymore of it here, for us, so to speak

Likening ourselves in its being figured out

In the process of us becoming ourselves

For instance the toads and his sister in the garden, realer than the garden

Cooling her breasts with pearl combs and fleshy flowers

Or she wears his hair in a forgetting fashion

Stands on the promenade in the latest fashion

Forgetting that he is addicted to making things up about them

Taking therapeutic baths

When they go out with their parents

He wears on the head of this two headed child this forgetting

Her love now wobbly in his mouth he pulls it out

Like a hair in his soup

In his mouth, an affinity for all possible teeth

Keats what king on the hill deduces a tongue in his mouth

Were you to usurp the land of his youth with your tongue

Or spoil the soup with piano keys

Chalking this up to the chalk

And this big green field in which dinosaurs roll

He looks out on, as from the window

Of a result he has yet to reckon

I am not sure what gushes but it is the color of silver

There is moss on Mount Sentinel, gorse and sage

There is glass scattered on the sidewalk of Atlanta

In which you can see yourself

But is it fitness, that is, one going well with the other

So like the hills, for this is a hilly site
From which he stole his genius

Gave it back momentarily like fire

Through our tears, dear sister, or it is by our tears

We see the land as a principle of the unseen

To mourn our ugly losses, and tally,

And after taking flowers, the apparentness of the results

And after taking

All but the face emerging from the perhaps not intelligent picture

Of a thing operating like a wind on the hot coal of the other

But if you get to the top of the heap because

You understand through and through what it means

Then fine, reserve a seat for me beside yourself

Because I've heard every word you've ever said

Whenever you've been beside yourself.

Keats forgets the night’s purpose or knows and decides not to

As too strong for happiness, all young men do so

Or too ambivalent, all young men who get

And what burdens are the family and the chords that chill 

Sometimes it feels like I've been

Hammered into the ground

But often it's the opposite

Every sense is strange, equivocal

It's like I'm not here, not in this terrain

All is wind swept

Far down flying from everyone else who knocks

Extinction of the entire surface

All dissolves in thin water

The compulsory question

Can you hear me now

The subatomic mass of what you do not say

Is shaped like the possible shapes of bones

For animals

Repeating can you, we must

Ride one another with baby oil

Or there are too many

Dinosaurs to overcome this limitation

Of having mentioned

What nuances, endless nuances,

I can't even leave the bed. O I'm always

Crying mommy o o o

The night is black murk with its delicate stars, my laziness

Makes me cry, black murk

The joke played on us all, my sister

Stop it, little man! Youre a snitch in a police state

He stole my clothes

He took my PS3

Thinking will not move

The law nor the prior facts of itself

Nor unhide your purpose here!

Heart surgery

That's the order, here,

Be here of all places

And be for all the faults

What it will not say of itself

This region where everyone is born lucky

And you know damn well no one will speak

For what doesn’t belong to them

The buildings grope along the sky

Until tumbling, the sunlight fixes

Its target, we are encountered streaming out of movies

Which one haven’t we seen?  

The one where your picture is at the station?

Recall it then, dear sister

Are there jobs to be done?

What war will we wage? Today, it pays

O morning, awoke to ripen the fruits of my muscles…

I feel like a white rifle! I feel weak!

Everyone else is getting what has to be

The fragrance of car parts—

What the hell? What time is it? No, no—

Not to jail. I regret my power to charm.

Not assassination. Bolt me to the floor.

Come on this isn't fair. I know already,

The world isn't, I know, I know

That is the American thing to do

Dina and Dan Can Never Say For Sure

In one hour I will board a plane that will arrive at your doorstep non-stop flight and I will enter your front door and it will be time to say good-bye.

I always said that if we said good-bye it would be in the desert where I left you once and continue to leave if, if and only if, our good-bye is something we see as divinely inspired. To see anything as divinely inspired means that there is a divine to speak of.

When you say "o, this is so divine!" I want to be sure we are speaking of the same divinity, in an honor code of sorts, in a way in which we both understand what divine means and what is divinatory at any given time.

Pull the tarot and it is the 2 of swords, pull again and it is the Devil. You say that you do not believe in reading cards, that you read people instead, that you can tell that all we both want to do is take our clothes off, touch bellies, leave before morning even hits, you've already called a cab, don't come back to my house at 4am if that's not what you want to do.

To be addicted to a hunt, a haunt. To be addicted at all. To be the addict, in all of its post-script. To be addicted to desire as in desire is the only thing worth hunting. To sink belly to belly and never tell me, to tell me years later that you were sinking belly to belly with anyone at all and how is it even a crime, its not like we were together, its not like we were ever together.

Who am I even speaking to anymore? Who is there to speak about? In a sense, time
robs me of everyone I speak about, time robs me. If I am speaking of anyone at all,
if I am speaking about you, it is a different you than the you of now, it is a different
now than that of then, we are in the desert when we really we were never out of the
desert, we just never looked around us to see.

I am flying to you today, or maybe tomorrow, I will arrive at your doorstep and you will be forced to let me in, please let me in, let me in. You may or may not, and even before arrival, you can tell by the way the air around you moves that something as flight something as this is happening.

You pull a card, I am no longer a man. You pull another card and I am no longer a woman.

If you do not see these as divinely-inspired things, we can feel a new direction pulling. What does it mean to desire inside historicity, historically. I enter the space, you look away. I enter the space, a divine timeline and you act as if you do not know me. Why? Because our bellies never touched before this time, because you and I were never a a you & I, being a we for so long, we were never a we at all. Do not act like you do not know me, you have no reason to look away.

What does it mean to speak to someone that has abandoned you, better yet,
someone that was never there in the first place, this ghost as place, this ghost
as time and space, this ghost of another sense of being together. What ghost
yet resonates and does not resonate, what you bring to the table and what
you leave on the floor.

It is 4am and the desire, the desire. When we decide to be capable of making decisions
what can we do put look forward. What is forward? Death. Death of desire. Death of
the self, of the divine. You ask me if I am a poet and I tell you no. I would never
accept that answer from you. I am not a poet at all, why would you think I was?
In the face of death, all we are is poetry. In the face of the addiction, all we are is
lineated. I am no longer a block of prose, I am no longer a block at all.

You pull a card, you run late. My flight is cancelled, again, again.