Dina and Dina Understand Normalcy

Candlestick up a cat's ass, so to speak, they say, this is what he did. They say, this is what he did. I see these people I do not know in towns far away and they say Did you know that is what he did and I do not know what that means, no, of course not, but is it real anyway, a candlestick up a cat's ass.

We look at photographs on the internet of things on fire. We look at photographs on the internet of houses and structure fires, we see firefighters carrying subdued cats from buildings, locking eyes as if in romantic love, a gesture of thank-you. On a blog a certain picture gets 1 million hits in less than 48 hours with comments such as "look at the gratitude in his eyes, can you believe it?"

When animals are trapped in fire, what firefighters can often later remember is the silence. The human survivors can remember how the animals, in trauma, in shock, will sit inside their wounds, will not lick them or clean them, will not try to stand or eat or drink, they will simply be with their wounds until it kills them. They will be passive. They will make no noise.

The camel, in a circus fire, gets spooked easily and stays in one place, even if it is burning alive.
It would rather fold its legs underneath itself and admit defeat.

In our first apartment together, we put a Grace Jones record sleeve on the wall. The record sleeve is supposed to be our art, something to fill the void of white throughout the "cozy" (extremely small) place. Eventually Grace Jones ends up on the coffee table with a pile of cocaine on her flat top. We make lines under nose like various types of moustaches with curly-q'd ends or a small patch, too much like Hitler you would say and snort it up immediately. That was the moustache that made you feel the most uncomfortable.

How to subdue a cat long enough to stick a candlestick up its ass. It would claw and bite you.
You could beat it to almost death and then penetrate. That is really the only way.

We are eating huge slices of pizza and you are wiping your hands on the sides of your expensive jeans, ruining them with grease stains, and you are asking me "What are the most aggressive breed of domestic cats?" and I don't know. I take one bite and feel like vomiting, put it back on the white paper plate you handed it to me on. We are sitting in the park watching the bums rummage through the trash for empty aluminum cans they can take in for weight and get money because there is no deposit exchange program in this state. In Michigan, pop cans are 10 cents, the largest market deposit value in the country for aluminum cans. "That information doesn't help me" you say.

How to put a candlestick up anything or anyone's ass. With or without consent. Anything with teeth will bite without consent. That is, of course, if you choose not to beat it to almost death.

Walking home from school to the bus stop, I step over a dead bird. I step over a dead squirrel, what looks like a squirrel, its teeth all bucked out and rotted, on the sidewalk, not even on the actual street. How did these two animals die? Did they die together, one block apart from each other on the same side of the street. Is it the streets fault? If you could put a candlestick up a cat's ass, if this were true, who's fault would it be? The street the person grew up on, the household, where are the parents. Did you know that he did that? What is wrong with people.

Dina & Dan's Progeny

The little girl asked her mother, asked her "what does heaven look like?" and her mother said, "I don't know, I was never much of a believer." Which was not exactly true, she pictured her father and her grandparents together somewhere, doing something like drinking tea or eating fried chicken. She pictured them together the night she decided she was going to kill herself, the night, drunk, she convinced her boyfriend Dan, the little girl's father, to slit her throat, she took the knife and put it in his hand, on her knees put the blade to her throat, screamed at him to do it, please, please, she is weeping and he is weeping, Dan puts the blade down on the counter, the little girl's mother in a fetal position on the kitchen floor crying, why can't you just do it you fucking retard, why can't you just kill me. She is thinking of her grandparents and her father, what the fuck are they doing right now. I have people to see, she says. And then, she wakes up the next day. She needs Gatorade but all that is in the refrigerator is coconut water, she gulps it down, almost chokes with her hard gulping. Gatorade would be so much better. She smokes a cigarette. She fingers her newly formed scab on her neck. She goes to Planned Parenthood and she is pregnant. "What does heaven look like?" she asks her mom, the little girl, "what does heaven feel like? does it smell good? what does it smell like? are there colors we have never seen before? tell me what heaven is like, mama."

What can you say to a child like this, heaven is not real, or believe whatever you want, whatever makes you happy, even if it doesn't make me happy, your grandmother, my mother, used to say, whatever makes you happy, thrills me to death--that's a nice saying, isn't it? Full of acceptance and love. Whatever makes you happy makes me even happier. What can you say to a child who asks about heaven more than heaven is not real. I'm sorry but there are no colors or smells or people, my love. There is nothing there. And your grandparents and great-grandparents are not together and that was a stupid thing for me to think so many years ago. I just wanted to be with family, you will tell her when she is older and you explain your scar on your throat, all I could think about was your grandpa and your great-grandparents and I had had enough of your dad, and I was done, I hope you never understand.

Dina and Dan Continue to Be Friends

ODD FUTURE

It must be that I tried writing different kinds of poems. Then death's arms stretched toward the woman in her antique decorated living room. But is this the one I want? It was now raining and she was pretending nothing happened. Will you kill yourself or continue living? She looked to her phone for flight information, not wanting to be disappointed, since good weather was starting up

but she read there was a slight chance that a seat will not be available. This made her sad. Then I am sad she said and maybe I will kill myself. She had half an hour ago stuck her head in the oven, turned on the gas, and

But everyone is along for the ride? It seems Can you save yourself the question anyone asks when they see us in the morning. It matters because the body you stole into has other plans of expenditure. Only some are good, or worth remembering.

The woman sits with her two dogs who look on pouting.

The light clatters down through the trees like glasses.

What it must be is I tried too hard, but

There are so many stupid things, a kind of wearing down

The instrument any effort would have likely seemed too hard.

For all that, I felt the throb of some locomotive in the back of my head

Which I had gummed up the previous seasons reading John Ashbery

Then I decided to leave it all. But you guard your tools

While at night you plan an addition

More death or antiques or breasts in this one.

And now you're ready, saying, in this one

I'm trying. I'm really trying.

She did not speak to her husband when she got back from the grocery and he went upstairs and turned on Sportcenter and fell asleep with his shoes on. She took the roast out of the oven and said You've got your dinner and she thought to herself, it's a damn fine dinner but then roast began to curiously look her own head and she worried had she severed her head and baked it. She looked away at the wall quickly. The wall was extremely blank. She had peeled the wallpaper off. She had photographed the wall. Then she had peeled the wallpaper and cooked the roast which had become her head. She had lived here for many years, cooking and cleaning. She had forgotten how long except that it was many years. She could hear her husband snoring. She looked at the phone jack now. There was no phone. She looked quickly at her cellphone, not wanting to be disappointed. The black yorkie curled up on the sofa next to the sandy colored terrier was much older than the sofa. She smiled at the dogs. They smiled at her.

She was either very short or very tall depending on the size you presented her. She looked curiously at her phone, not smiling, for there was a slight chance she had cooked her own head, her husband would not wake up, her dogs would die suddenly, she would grow the wrong the head and it would know the wrong things, would not wake up, the weather would take a turn for the worse. The worst? She should kill herself, if it was going to be like this, always wearing old clothes, always fretting that the head on your shoulders isn't the right head, checking the phone, having to keep herself fit--alas, she could not keep herself fit, could not keep her clothes new, for she was always wearing the oldest of fashions, Here's to the head who is going to eat my body, and she looked at the dogs and thought to herself, of her husband, who had been drinking a great deal, whether he were a coward or not, and she looked at the wall and she knew she was going to cry, but whose tears, hers or someone else's 

Dina & Dan Turn 29

Is it true what they say, or more recently, Timothy Leary, who states, "Never trust anyone over 30." So does this mean that 29 is a safe zone, as in, 29 is the cusp year to get your feet wet, your shit together, there in the Hollywood Hills, there in the mountains, a mile high in the sky, where seven states touch. How we talk about living in a large city, what do we say, things like in those old buildings in the Hills, in the mountains, you will always have roaches and mice, that is just the way it is, so with the heat come roaches, out of nowhere, dead upside down, feet in air, save me, save me. You cannot leave anything out on the counters overnight because it will be gone by morning, scavengers. To remember what it is like to scavenger. You are on the street and calling me, you are on the street and saying, Dina, it is your birthday, happy birthday. It is your birthday too, Dan, if you recall correctly. We are at home with family and we are with cousins who do not care about us, or maybe care in theory, and they ask for the the one millionth time, they ask "So, are you living in California? Still teaching college?" But we've always lived in Oregon, so the story goes, up and down the I-5, we lived up and down the coast, everywhere but out-of-state and Bend, really, so why ask about California? This is not true, either. Hollywood Hills and mountains. Next year, when someone asks how old we are, we can say we are 30, and they can gasp at our perfect skin and baby face. Even at 30. What is 30 supposed to look like? Someone that is not trustworthy. Someone that cannot be trusted.

Dina & Dan Inspect the Circus

The big tent is set aflame within minutes, the outside sprayed with white gasoline to waterproof the surface and woosh its gone, the elephants skin sizzled off, their tired eyes praying to the flags that incinerate and disappear into the air to float, float, until it lights the tops of the trees, everything is one fire now at the circus, everything is on fire. When the clown drops from 1,000 feet in the air, drops in one sullen hush hush rush until they land and skin their foreheads, blood on their white gloves, blood in the sawdust below, a quick splay and sploosh, drips drips onto the side railing next to the children whose parents have purchased the light up swords from concession, the ones that make the children who do not have them jealous, if you have purchased the green and purple swords from concessions, put them in the air now! The blood on the tip of the plastic sword that stops lighting up after the kid bangs on the railing, bangs it and bangs it and now it is broken. The clown's head is splayed open. The Show Must Go On, he says into the crowd, his mouth filling, filling, spitting. The clown drops and splays his head as the tent is burning. The crowd does not react, files out slowly, files out one by one like soldiers.

Dina & Dan Figure it Out

Sauce on the floor. What attention. Where is the dying and dying, the dying has come from somewhere, everything was dying before you left. I tripped in the kitchen, everything on the floor, this baking soda, this flour, this sugar, sauce on the floor. When we are on the floor. When all we do is stare. How can it be that our organs are the shapes of puke buckets at the hospital, how is it that our organs are the shapes of condiments at the grocery store? The other day I was dying for you and the next day I am not. Today is not the day, nor tomorrow either. We are exiting the highway when I tell you about the roads I used belong to, the remnants of the shops and gas stations overgrown with leaves and vines, a tree coming up through the roof of one old structure. We are sitting on the floor passing half a joint between us and I tell you about how I smoked the other half in the bedroom of one of my lovers when their pregnant friend was in the living room next door and how when I came out of the bedroom I apologized, I said, I am so sorry for smoking weed in the bedroom next door, and they said, o, it's fine, and I said, I guess I should have asked you first, its done now, I feel really weird and guilty, o it's fine, she said, my sister is a huge pothead and totally smoked and I said around you? as if it was a crime, and she said, yeah, I mean, last time I checked nothing can happen from second-hand smoke in the other room, and we all laughed and I was awkward because she was not a weird fucking pregnant lady, you know, she was, like, a realist. What does this mean. We are sitting on the floor and what attention. I am dying, you know, Dan, I am on the brink of death. We all are, I know, but I am more than other people. My heart, the old ticker, how's that old ticker, Dina, you ask, how is that old ticker. I cannot know the proportion of my heart to other organs at any given time, is it here, is it here, is it here. In an X-ray, it reveals, the heart is not where you think it is supposed to be. Your heart in its cavity in the mouth of organ-flesh. The heart and what it does for you. How we are not supposed to speak of the heart how it is a cliche. Dear Dan, I need you to know, that before you leave, when we are rolling around in the sauce on the floor after throwing it at each other, Dan, after I tripped in the kitchen and now we are holding hands and laughing and now, Dan, I need you to know, that when you leave, I will follow. No, the other way around, when I leave, you will follow. Dan, everything was dying before you left and now you are there and everything is alive again. Hold on.

Dan Dan Dan

THE MAP (IMBECILES)

began as our little secret but something happened

because we wanted something to rescue us

from our contacts

that night happened into the plot

a guy named so and so

keeping abreast of the fountains

the man with icicles for teeth speaking rather pleasantly of the need for better public transit

and you rode the bus earlier

were you at a rally or just making things up?

Yes I was there

Rather, do you need consolation?

Where there is no map, there is no journey?

Where there is no journey, there is no earth?

Where there is no earth, there is no technology?

They were always asking for it

To not feel like anything? if it's at all possible? someone asked

Anything is possible right? Still?

That they were from somewhere else was only one suspicion  

Among the many we had had. Sometimes? Evening came a little early?

It was natural to see appearance. Did you need

It more after a light supper or like later

Like right before getting into bed? What woman did I hear

Committed to the birth of a child? Often times they did

The only natural thing.  Subtly kept speaking.

The little secret. Over and over. Into machines that night

happened into the plot via some very special rigging, wires and string.

Something had happened well above us

An event

Always having to say how you want it cooked

And none of that is really important. You run out of breath

Talking all night in your pajamas? Often times you did

When everywhere you would find its excuse.

Do not go

As though you had let it get away, and what now

You go anyway, and what now

Incites expenditures, but may not have precedence

And they’d be at the table, picking their nails

Acting all bored and shit while you sit there

Acting like they're idiots

But burning inside and someone and anyone else can see this

As though you had let it get away under your skin

Become your skin?

THE Subcommittee on Rules

One begins certain to finish but in support

Of other, farther waves

Waves close. An article

Of definite surrender percolates within secret proceeding waves

Or something else we ought to manage in our legislature sends

A bright stare into a black hole.

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

On its shrewd bedroom scene. The self-misunderstanding you are

Expected to have at the beginning dissolves, as thin as the wafer

Passing by. Yet there are mothers fanning an old heat to their boys

Trembling in the ghostly livery of photographed afternoons.

Below is 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.

DENIED

They told everyone. They needed discovery, insight.

When we came home from work underwater,

More often, they sold anesthetics. They were asking for it

We told them. You can't have it. They persisted

What idiocy.

Why keep going?

There is nothing good anymore. This is all foolishness. When the sun rose it rose and rose and it kept rising until it was a flower and then it was nothing but itself but itself but itself but by itself it is nothing but itself And they told everyone

They needed this discovery that they were nothing but themselves.

He stayed out of it, of course. He didn't want to GET INVOLVED.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF FICTIONS

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

As I came back, crossing the lawn,

Where we went with one another

To think and twist the matter, the house

Sticking out here and there from the usual plastering

Of doors windows shutters bricks and what not,

I usually thought, incongruously, of ducks

An idiot's swarm of ducks

On small brown rivers, these on fire

These issuing somehow from the pockets of an overweight god.

Why have you come back?

To torment me?

FATE

Around the coming corner was a man waiting.

Here, for the last few days, he waited

Ignoring a view of trolleys and modern buildings.

We will have been deceived with a new vigor

For the hundredth time

After the confetti has shaken itself loose

And the drinks emptied and the old feelings wash.

Regardless, the idea of being anywhere remotely like it

Grows over the season. The ducks settle on frozen ponds

Near the trees breaking the view of modern buildings.

Until we feel ready to abscond, a still-perfect possibility

We might not make it in time, for all we know, somewhere else

WINTER

With it our sense of making

What we knew could not really love us back

Had us coming back

To the window. It is a nice touch.

Snow. Presence. Accumulation.

It feels like an emptying out

Full of things. The children flop and flail into angels

With enthusiastic gestures of laughter.

Still, it was not with irony we called this composition winter

But it has always seemed like 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? It really does seem like it. 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

This could be like a new poem, quite unlike its subject

Or this could be like any poem

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

Accumulates, is washed out, brightened

By presence, from deeper cause

PREAMBLE

The mules are whining forever.

It is replaced, or rather, forever

Shadows the hand's rabbit, someone’s

Whose face is by turns built

Of inadmissible satisfactions. It says

Nothing. One suspects there are glass

Flocks and shepherds on the mellow hills,

Moving freely, but not in the right way.

The anxious birds suggestive of

Ominous feelings, fly into its place

The handsome electric advertising

You are constantly asked to explain  

A difference for, of which there is no kind

Extant. Bedding material and oddities

Wrapped and stashed, and the slight

Of a once disregarded sweetness

Returned, except of the parade that across

It makes discontent explicit. Its detectives

Interrupt one another. Occupied vocabularies

Are gone, the spaces light up

The monument, the way the public

Conceives monuments for vistas,

The curious way. A young boy and girl

Feed each other slowly boiled peanuts

ON ARUBA

There is joy in proceeding impatiently through evidence.

Perhaps I don't know what it is that enraptures me when you

Relax. The distance that's been removed from all the pictures?

There is something else delicate in the way children

Surround one another? And the light? Though there isn't any left

This is its expunging? Yet hadn’t the thought of it not being

Eternal been theirs? It had to have been lost because they found it

In the aquarium they stood near? And all of this was pressing

The receive button in instant message? Paradise is bad

For children unable to image search zinnias? For sure, though

Those who knew the language of the island refused? Even if

Beating at the edge of things an unrelieved drum triumphed?

THE MAP

The necessity goes first, then there is a whole heap else

To do badly. Or is it quickly?

Say you look around and that’s it

Or much of it, or so much of it.

About these buildings you wish to include concrete.

But how? The necessity for concrete goes first.

Then the necessity for men in hard hats, with tools, goes the way the buildings  

Or much of what you talk about is of little necessity?

The plane you arrive on nods in the air. Like arranged lines

People take pauses. No Imputing, they say. You are given the good stuff

Here is your luggage, and, and then, of course the first step of going, it all bothers you.

You prance and lisp and say nice things.

Around the tawdry buildings women sit and listen

To guitars in the city. The city gangs up while then the first note

Is all that has bothered you. It must be a note of magnificence

Or is it its difference, its being not magnificent, where a reassuring

Gesture is having a slip of the tongue. The chord changes to dusk

Holding over everyone like a dark umbrella. And to be recovered

Of everything the sun gathered in to listen around you, you sing

The praises no one had not asked for. For you, they believed, they were all waiting

And then something else happened. Say you get around to naming it

Or much of what you talk about is getting lost in your trying to name it

It seems our duty to bestow squarely on our targets certain designations

Recover what does not want for returning

And what do we want for return? Misfortunes

Growing up? Precautions? A spoiled life

Viciously miniscule? The feet plant

Themselves yet do not find measure, or context, for the first step

With which to be angry is also the last, yet

They appear okay getting going like the kids are going

I mean, the necessity in the severe sense of living like a child

Forgetting among slabs of concrete, carriages, and the Platz

Where the clues, the strange genital markings discourage the innocent

Glass buildings of their reflection. I mean the mood is still returning

I mean I am from an urban environment I mean the necessity goes first

Much there is that can and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that can't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that will and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that won't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that shouldn't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that can't not and for that I am a little grateful

THE KIDS

but in order the first is always audible, the second, a wrecked whisper

a clot, dust and smothering. They are preparing the podium for a glass of water

to give their parents the clearest path to understanding, the presentation includes

the heat of the moment, in which they will weep again

over the marvelous images the light makes on the wall, they salute

a pennant of light, the hues of dusk falling, they read and crouch

under gold haloes, the children of the past wear bangles, steal pink and white impatiens

from old photo albums, in which they will run again

like this family at hand, in predictable attire, in their backyard, bathed in a dim light

the clouds come over their roofs expanding, faces lifted toward the grandeur

breaking light about the place a whiff of defection, where huge rotating platforms and sails

cut across the water viewed from the patio

PRIESTLY

though the river is but one example

with its small polished stones

in its bed, its ripples, and philosophical examples

I mean here at beach scenes more polished, ivory-eyed

tigers stalk and discover lovers in the saw grass

fugitives who kept morning in closets, New York

horrible for sea-breezes and the blood-soaked sand

who cloistered here to gather waves with names for difficulty

they starved themselves wild with great difficulty

not for the occasional burst of fireworks but something

pale, like an empty champagne bottle, the hushed

tide through the window quelled, how awful

sprawled across all this light the while

has come to appear in the glass inappropriate

but in an order the first is always audible

blankness, light, the second light mellowing as hues lengthening

in the coming dusk, stranded on your eyelids, you blink

you blink, you must go among the stranded cups

your greatness demanded

what was really his, that you could show her him

and possess him through her, here, before evening

Dan and Dina Elbow

ODD FUTURE

Your arms must be her arms

The body you stole into, clattering down

Always wearing an expression of completion 

A kind of wearing down

The instrument, which was to become its tool

And now you're ready, saying, yet shouldn't it quite be

Only just ready, the sound of it, clattering down

Really breaking down, like had you been honest

Like everything would've sounded different

What you were saying it was in the beginning

When it was winter and snowing insanely

Like what great lives you would lead together

In the wind, in the snow, stopping, starting, at this point

Here, all the past is different

But without having really changed, as though one had been living

All this time in a blue house only to randomly call it yellow

One day, because you just feel like it's all of a sudden

It's yellow. And maybe it is yellow. And something else, except these

These are things that prefer to be called among ones who had been there

In the old way, and it's no use ignoring that the old can't tolerate

The new way. It accepts the contemporary

Providing it home with its unlimiting context. But here we are

As if all this hasn't been a hundred years in coming

And so makes your face an expression of wanting

That which couldn't have been and is now coming true

Is finally wanting who you are now

That snow is covering her face with a question

You, who sits with a sly grin

Brimming with old misdeeds? near an open window in Prague?

In Brussels?

Dusseldorf?

That the things that had happened previously, to unknown people,

Found new people, through the long process of error and retaliation

And happened again. It takes a long time to say

Anything given that your time has been an exercise

In this confusion, having been made a stranger of yourself

And so you seek refuge

In that deadness that feels like

In full armor. The springs are stranded along tubers

And what other flowers, what other mountains and sledding

--and this will change your life now?

Or what life you had led approached this error, this cruelty?

There were living people? almost able to speak?

And her arms are cold, as a sky going by the window

In a curve, will seem cold? 

Dina and Dan Finger

THE MOVIE THEATER GOERS

And Steve woke in the morning with her arms.

His were lying by the window, stale.

A bout of eating and drinking had made his face bloated.

Spring stole into, clattering down

And broke across the floor, such lethargied wonders.

The red sea is not red but water colored

And the thought I had, Steve thought

Were hiccups, stolen, crocheted, ill dukes.

You were always wearing puka shells. You. 

No, not wearing. But a kind of wearing down-

Ward. Steven proceeded like a torrent

Which was to become the like instrument

Of a stream, down a mountain,

Yet it shouldn't quite be overpowering.

He opened the window. And now you're ready

BEER BREAKFAST

Only that the sound of a virgin

Crying was its breaking down

This is only the perverse spreading of the nomadic scene

But had you been honest

Then everything would've formidably sounded

In feverish rush, like praise

Different from what you had said it was in the beginning

When it was winter, and the instrument of snow

Was a ghost and very critical of what praise.

And down the road the suburban teen came

And near the empty street his sneakered step sped

While the telephone wires whispered above him

To trees in which the wind had stopped, at this point

Very much like a person who mid meal vomits.

Now all the past is different. It has the advantage of not being

Without having changed. A man struggles onto the shore

And thanks the heavens that matters are no worse.

Sure the blood rushes headlong everywhere it shouldn't

But it is as though I have no other choice. Steve is discovered

By his violent mother rummaging through his dad's casket.

They carry on a conversation by candle light.

Dan Fucks His WAy Out of a Pension?!

PLOT

Son inherits house from Dad after he dies. Lives with mom. She dies. The house is his.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED

To my television?

They took the simple life

Off the air because we

Were just fantasizing about animals

Just sounding like animals.

THOUGHTS AT AN AIRPORT

Where did all the phones come from?

Why is everyone talking on a phone?

Who are they talking to?

Can you hear me?

Security just took the liquor I had in a water bottle and my toenail clippers,

Security felt my body

Like it was really private
And they just photographed my insides.

THOUGHTS OF A CHILD SEEING PORNO

That was it.

OMG!

Don't our bones look like just ghosts?

White shapes usually a foot long

Meant to be inside our skin

Moving through the dark

Isn't there any light inside our bodies?

THOUGHTS OF A WEDDING PARTY CRASHER

We slumped deeper into our seats,

The game just started

And we just started playing

But like really hard

Like this was our moment to silence our critics

Holy shit, I crashed without abandon

Or I abandoned my body

And became like this consciousness floating over the whole field

And the field was becoming red

It was just acrylic paint. But oh my god

I thought that was blood.

Obviously. I thought it was blood

The game just started

I really had no idea what I was doing

THOUGHTS OF SOMEONE SEEING A STATUE AND RECOGNIZING IT IS ANDY WARHOL

What happened at Union Square?

That's a sculpture of Andy Warhol

And that wasn't there before

When did it get here?

Google Andy Warhol Union Square Statue New

Oh it's not new

Oh it's not here anymore

But when it was

It would have made our idea of Andy Warhol happy

Were that idea to have taken on life.

Oh my god.

This whole grammar thing

This whole intuition of airwaves things

It's pretty fucking tricky.

Isn't there any light just inside Andy Warhol?

THOUGHTS OF A SPRING MAIDEN

They took just the simple life

And too far, just like new flowers

Like you look at them and they're all colorful

Like they exist like they're going to be like that

For forever

Like it were real.

When my dad was old he rested

At the foot of wild hills.

THOUGHTS CONCERNING ANDY WARHOL

Andy looks like security looked at him for a long time

The IT guy looked like nobody had ever seen him

The Artist looked like he should have been but wasn't and so he was drunk and was totally okay

For the time being, being drunk

But Andy was really looking

Right

He looked into the tinier bags under our eyes

Into our handbags

Did we have little knives little napkins, little breath mints

Make up little secrets

Always giving them up little and little and so

Their faces may never have changed expression

But so what

THOUGHTS OF THOSE ADMITTED

Security allowed us to pass, gave us simple instruction

Told us, this is simple

They said the small things are actually quite large

Outside of the rooms and corridors,

Outside of the stadium

THOUGHTS OF THOSE NEWLY ELECTED

We celebrated our power

Then with thoughts so big we really had to step back and realize

Reapportion and to customize, to send and receive

Message, to writhe and reapportion, to reapportion

With acrylic paint, the field we slumped deeper into