Dina and Dan Occupy The Blogosphere

Rick Talbert was a violent man. But he felt inadequate. His penis was a cause of concern, its sores and lack of firmness. So was a cultural lack. So he raged. There was no comfort. He had no inner comforts. He broke down and wept occasionally although he was not very pitiable, nor did anyone notice the particularity of his breaking down. In fact it was a general breaking down. He fought and hit women. He fought and hit children. He was on the news once or twice for various robberies. He played the spoons. We don’t seem to fit in.

But he didn’t seem to mind. But of course he minded. He wanted many friends. He was really very sad he had so many friends and so many women to hit and that he kept hitting them though his arms were tired, though he wanted to be asleep, stare up at his eyelids and the lights just behind them. He was so sad that he broke into a pharmacy and hit the woman behind the counter. He slept there because he couldn’t find any speed. With blood all over her smock and her mouth like she'd been eating a plum. All he wanted was speed. She mouthed the words, I love you, in the sense she was traveling very fast through space, toward him, over violent seas, or vast deserts, or ice, under which her sisters and many sisters like her had been trapped, would continually trap themselves, because they would be foolish out of will and loyalty, out of inconsolable love. In his last year at home he stopped eating. He grew his hair out and started snorting powders. His parents called the police on him. Neighbors gathered in the front yard to watch the police haul the young men off. They all had wild eyes. "I'll fuck you all," they all yelled, perhaps at one another. That’s all that they remember about them, their confusion as to who was talking to who, and what it meant. It was his silly eyebrows and his intense wild eyes, the look he had, like he was going to burn the house down, like he meant it, when he said it would mean nothing. 

Dina and Dan Make A Map

They write letters. They are not good letters. Yet they are not bad letters. They write as if they had been writing for a long time. When the time comes to finish, they begin again, and discover among themselves their seriousness in beginning. They had been committed to finishing. They had been falling toward a ground while flying away from it. You'll see it when you get there they said. And what if nothing happens? And what if what they say about us ceases to be true? And what if we are moving while they're speaking, and what if they don't see it when they get there, to the end of their speech, so in effect, they never get there? What then? If they begin one way for a long time and then think of another way. What of this newer way, recently thought of? Are there any words but your failure of them, and if there are no sources for the ways they want to go? They write from feeling the top of their heads coming off. Along the way, they will feel the way, and feel themselves going toward where they had always imagined they were going. They are not bad letters. But they are not good. How could they know? This is purpose under intense heat. A dreadful pause. They write of their purposes changing. When someone stops them and asks them what they are doing, the heat of their interlocutor's eyes. What for do you mean: or, How now? In truth, this is purpose, this a conspirator's lament, a man looking for microscopes in a catalogue. They think it's them who wants them to quit. Is taking to sea a possible way? This is the way under blankets of seawater. Under consideration, the clouds stretch, as if on a loom, and the winds weave and unweave the clouds under duress. Under duress, they write of clouds. Now it is to scold themselves for writing letters about clouds. They write about clouds as if they had been writing about clouds for a long time. Now it is to feel themselves writing about clouds. Now it is to feel clouds. 

Dina and Dan Do It Free of Charge

We tired of making the house different from sky

We tired making our selves different from the names we had

We put windows where there should have been doors

I colored my hair blonde

This doesn't look like a Randy

You put on a wig and grew breasts and you said

This doesn't look like a front door

But we both passed through you

One evening the windows were angry

And they broke themselves impossibly

Like glass is always breaking like itself

They had been made glass, you said

The teeth we shattered

Intentionally and the sky, unintentionally

Seemed to be so intentional

Why confuse our homes for display cases

Are they looking at one another

Don't bother then with the other

It's merely an exhibition of struggle

This doesn't look like anyone I know

We tired of saying I'm pretty sure everyone I know is here

We tired of saying listen

We tired of drinking coffee and having breakfast in bed

And in the bedroom on the first floor

We tired of the way things were always becoming serious

We tired of direct speech

We tired of having it literally go over our heads

We tired of embrace

The frustration of arousal,

Of tight pants, baggy pants

We tired of shaving our legs

We exalted in what some called majesty before we realized we had tired of that too

That it was useless to turn the lights off when we left the rooms we had long sat in

The kids put away to their beds made in the shape of fists

The animals returned to the forest

We tried of making the necessary adjustments between objectively and subjectively proper             attitudes

And the decency of something to do

Night emptied itself first, then

The crowd gathering around us tired of us

This last idea we had

Dina and Dan Find Opportunity In Old Work

Fired from the jobs we at one time had

We’ve been spending more time together,

My friend and I, looking out the window.

It’s an outside there, or here, we have its

Morning to ourselves, silences below vast

Buildings, lights turned off, now a line of trees

Grown out of concrete, a new day's anxiety.

It doesn’t occur to me, not right away

That he comes over without his face.

I stand by the window. I wait.

Where did you put it? Today I said

We’d do a crossword. That’s now

Out of the question. Fine he says,

Taking it from his pocket

So that I can see it again. It lies back

On the pillow of his palm. He doesn’t say

So. He seems to ignore the possibility

Answering instead with an underhand toss

Sending it across the room into the trash.  

Nice shot I say. If only I were richer

Like the man down the street who sells

Insurance. I would afford more space.

Yet we remain like this, standing

Now, not looking, not

Staring, but we have by this morning

Forgotten, if this is inevitable

Wear and tear, that is

Until we hear its crying

So small within itself

So loudly now

Now everything crying

Announcing this 

Dina and Dan Creep Back From the Ledge

Providing that you seem not to care which

The man asleep at his desk was named Jack

In the room over a man likewise

Who picked the zit on his shoulder--Goddess,

You couldn’t blame him, the son of Amy and Daniel

Pale, lanky, doomed, who went to work in steel

Overlooking white space for quick fragrance

One leaves behind as another comes in, holding

The place of her coming in his bearded palm

And rage, another man in front of her, the misspent rumors

Who is brought in for food and they make love.

When you call

When Julius says we try to help every way we can.

When you fistfight

When you wear your clown makeup in perfect indolence

A week later they come home talking excitedly, but in whispers. Have you seen people whisper before? Voices came from somewhere. But not these people, have you seen these people?

This is a family of obliquely placed nights

In an auto-accident montage

When they were in elementary school, they were appreciative of bends in the road. Wear a rose in your teeth. Gravity without reason. Something about the way men look when they finish their cigarettes. The city that they had lived on, near the banks of Reeds Lake, had sprawled into Forest Hills, Rockford, Holland, Ada, Lowell, with the coming of themselves and the growth of the woodlands into a wild forest. 

They were in all things sealed up tightly in vines.

Their disinterested impressions rubbed into

The patent moon—Curiosity, cheeky, new

This also rubbed into the moonwoman

With uncomfortable hair and an ugly

Spot where Earth was interested

Passing the tubers, the students

Stormed, gathered, shook their fists at the massive edge

Of seawall returning, glowering, the men in white hats saying, Stop Worrying Now

And their chimneys, whose dark smoke had always stunk of grain, that they would never see again

The intolerable sight of grain

When the man you are supposed to see, the builder your father knew, who they knew as the keeper of desirable women

When the man you are supposed to be, the surrealist de Chirico, who danced an obscene and infernal round

For to, the children we had been

The difficultly of thinking of the family. When the mayor was arrested for treason, his family wept that the child cannot talk about what it knows.

I think of my family. I draw them

From Lipitor. It does not look like them.

It is not from time to time, possible  

We can consider it, those of us who considered its being like an immortal fact, and assembled in disbelief outside of town when we learned otherwise

but when they turn to themselves, or glance at a picture, or somehow find themselves where they had lived, standing in the backyard garden in the sun that is in their heads, they are  

often speaking of the fire, carrying mother's body up the stairs to recall a dream of  

satisfaction

where it shall rest in bed for a night, that it will have the night the night,

Nor have I ever consciously thought and intended toward goodness, by

Their coffin they swear this oath and toss sprigs.

After the fact, that's when moral flourishes appear, they enjoy the spirit

Buildings of cities in places they haven't been—men I did not know.

I've had enough reason—with far reaching consequences

I read the letter but it's worth slowly goes.

Inherent, he tells me,

Because I am uninterested in history

Save me from the one that got away, the constancy of Long Island, the coloring, the coast where they see other families, the distinguished family, wearing wreathes, is there nothing in this world so fair as rich people?

And they speak in tones to one another, gorgeously, all of them, the nine generations of girls who swore by moving, their eyes stained by snow

for they believe what they are saying is special, that the people they are talking to are special, and this is not to be forgotten, what we are doing, what we have said, the boundaries of which are like the procession of things not quite remembered, when one turns and wonders

Have I lost the ability to let go!

The simple things, letters tucked under my pillow, conjurer's teeth. 

Dina and Dan Get Clean

Something about the way that legs hit pavement, we are stumbling around the city translucent and immediate. We can only imagine what it is like to love one another whole heartedly. In the morning, we edge to the frame of the building, bang on the iron door twice, wait until a basket is lowered from the burned out window by a jump rope that is fraying at the ends where there was once wooden or plastic handles. The basket lowers and we dip our hands into it and pull out little crystalline packages and shove them deep into our coat pockets, we have the same pea coat red but different sizes, different buttons, long, to our knees. Demented siblings. Twins gnawing the same umbilical cord.

I enter your parents home and it is winter, always winter, the door to the kitchen closed, the slow slope down to the basement where you no longer live, your father now occupies the downstairs, your mother still sleeps in the cupboard upstairs and so you have the whole middle floor at your disposal. Your mother wakes you early and you throw up in the kitchen sink because you took everything that was in the crystalline baggies all at once and then just stopped and that's what happens when you just stop, you puke in the kitchen sink.

It is always winter, the pine tree in front of your parents house is hundreds of feet tall, it gets taller every single time I see it, every single time I remember. The walk from the road to your parents house gets longer, the driveway is more steps to take when really it isn't, when really do we have the same parents, did we come from the same womb. Your old dog died and your parents replaced it with a new dog that looks exactly like the old one only younger. You had that dog since you were a child in Jackson, Michigan. That other dog smelled so bad, you couldn't have her on the bed anymore, but you did anyway because, at one point, it was the only thing that loved you. Your pillow would smell like her stink and you would pull it closer to your body, pull it closer to your nose, you would inhale that stench even after she died. Once she died, this new dog, this younger dog, it is not the same. This new dog sits in the middle of the house with you but doesn't love you like the old dog did. This new dog yips when you enter the front door, making it impossible to slip in and out of the front or back doors at night.

Election year and outside of the house is a sign for whoever the republican candidate is. You get a text message from a long lost number that says, I passed your parents house today and they had this sign in the front yard and you respond, and you are surprised? Plus, I don't even know who this is. They are offended. We have been down to the burned out house with the basket by the rope many times this week. Our mother asks Are you shooting up again? Please tell me the truth. I can see it in your eyes, you are shooting up again.

Dina Loses Dan: an Elegy

When the vacuuming from outside the door wafts in and out from your hearing, and you can't hear anymore, you can't see anymore, how did everything turn away from you, how are you already in the desert without telling me you were going? Out in the hallway of the ratty apartment complex, the elderly landlord vacuums to somehow cover up the age, her aging, her husband who passed away just a month ago and she hasn't been back to this property in just a month because it was too hard for her to manage the property without him and now he is gone and her vacuum wafts underneath the too-big-of crack under the door that we stuff old newspapers under to keep the drafts at bay because you said you did not want to put plastic over the windows, maybe tin foil, lets look like crazy people, you said.

The vacuuming used to make you crazy, as soon as it started you would have to fly out the door, no time! you would say, no time! and the landlady greets you this time and you flip your hat off and it flies towards her, it was only supposed to be a salutation and instead it ended up being a warning, no time! you say stay away! you say.

We are accustom to want, most of all, the desire of despair, the addiction of desire, the addiction to despair, if only we could actually understand what it means to despair in the face of hope. We would walk the small city, from the east side over the bridge to the west and back again in an effort to reach the desert where there was no vacuum. The vacuum held such fits of authority for you. They can't just come in here just because they are here to clean the common areas, I'd say to you. They can't just come into our apartment, its illegal. No time! you said. No time!  Hello darling miss landlord, hat's off to you, of course, hello.

Where does despair go from here? To hope? How can hope manifest despair and vice versa. You are off to another state now to find something to hold on to. I ask of you to hang on, right now. To simply know that this despair brings hope. What if it doesn't? The vacuum as no-time, no-place. To stumble around the city as utopia. I will miss you, my love, but you are never far away.