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.

Dina and Dan Offer Excuses For Wanting

It comes now from a lack of willingness, to speak of my condition. But I'm writing, in the spheres of human experience, the one involved in the strictest gesture, the picking up of a phrase, whispered through a crack in the wall, picking it up as if it were a crumb on my shirtfront

That's also because what's forcing me to write is responsible for my physical limitations. If you want to see your family again, they say.

I suspect they're watching me, indeed, so plainly placed are the cameras and the two way mirrors, that the commonest man, least familiar with such circumstances, would be cognizant of the fact of his being over-watched. I think all knowledge of who I am comes from my experience of being who I am under surveillance.  

The doors of this room open up only on Sundays. I know that it's a Sunday because that's when they open. I've been handed a few books to study on these occasions. One was about yoga, which I practice regularly. Another about the benefits of a vegan diet, though I am not certain the food I am served is strictly vegan. Among the listed ingredients of the dishes I am frequently served the one I most often encounter is the critique of pure reason; it's indeterminate.

Where you stand now, somewhere else, it is never going to get easy. He says to her.

I write this for the purposes of introducing tension into the plot. These two are exiles

They are getting up in the morning in different places. Whether or not I could have such a condition.

However, I don’t bother getting around to the fact that it must be what it isn’t.

In other words, it is plainly the other way around. But all that means is I do a lot of other things beside, among other nuisance, or immediate objects, though I respect the possibility that saying as much isn’t quite the same as saying I remain in detention

I do, I do, I do.

Otherwise exercise my cognition in the contemplation of the objects that affect my senses.

One of these days, there will be a cause without an effect, or a change without a cause. I'm sure I'll take your hand and christen our boat with a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne, and leave the room when I fart, out of politeness, two minutes passing before we’re able to convince ourselves it’s time to go back whence the thought annihilates itself in stupendous comprehension  

But with newness that disappoints a sense of oldness—to what mountain do we go certain of the fact that we will reach it before others unlike us take the path over and through various machinations deter or outright inhibit our progress? If all the rules upon which our certainty depends are empirical then they are necessarily fortuitous

Will you walk to see it, your condition?  

Solemnly in such daylight the clocks progress

And new springs the dirge waiting in a crumpled horn… this is very much new

In fact is turned into sprigs

Thrown by the armful on caskets

For police gunned down, in fact

Under your bed, you've buried them

While outside, clouds piled up, and they would not, of course

Be able to rain, though that is what the mind wants of itself

A disgrace too

That will in no way ruin the parade

Dina and Dan Apologize For The Inconvenience

I am sitting on the front porch with you and it is raining
maybe raining isn't the right word, maybe I do not have
any other words to describe what it feels like to sit
on the front porch with you. When I left, what is
silence more than this. When I left, I threw things
on the ground, this bomb in the fire place goes off,
You say take your shoes off please
You say please don't do that Katie Jean
please don't do that oh my god why
don't you just go home, you come over
and you ruin everything, just go home
and don't come back
I am sitting by myself right now, open-ass of sky,
open ass of pig sty in the city,
smelling like farm, where is the farm
in the city, why do I smell manure
in the city, tell me about stables, stable-mates,
stalemate, helpmate, none.
I am sitting by myself reviewing like film
in my head, reviewing like film
I want to know all about you pardon
these questions, babydoll, pardon these
questions, I call you my babydoll,
even if you are not my main sweetheart, Valentine's Day and all,
Valentine's Day when you told me about
how when we masturbate, we touch cotton in smooth
light, we touch the keyboard of our computers,
we tell no one, our cum is touching from
finger to finger, no you can't use my computer,
don't even ask. We are in this hotel room
downtown and I tell you you are a man above all men,
a woman above all women, you are my main blood
a heartbeat, a murder, you are my main murderer,
you have taken my life time and again. I am
sitting by myself, I stole from you when you
were not looking, I locked myself in the bathroom
and stole from you. I am sitting by myself
and counting my reward, counting my satisfaction
in material things I do not care about, I will
never use. Baby-doll, listen, I am sorry
for chalking a line that hands you the gun
fully loaded, fully cocked, its harder than
it looks, it will take your arm off, I hand you
this gun and put it to my head. Listen, I am
sorry I am framing you that you were framed
from the genesis. What is genesis but three
unknowns, what is genesis but three. I am
sorry, when we are drowning, I climb on your back,
wrap my arms around your throat, take
you down with me.