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.