Dina and Dan Threaten One Another With Transformation

Finally I became something I wasn't so proud of. Then I became myself again. Let me put it another way. I am a teen now--and I've been giving up for a long time

 LIFE is all about finding out that what you want it to be isn't EVER going to be what it is. And boring...the zits and what all. What a waste of my time etc Your adult time and your adult ways of going about your business Ignoring the teen in the basement with his head wired for sound ...Well sirs I have a few problems with the ways you've been going about your business. Much of it to the exclusion of my music.

Each thing has its history and history is music. Or suppose this is where we live. A WORLD WITHOUT THE MUSIC OF TEENS

And this is where we live! There's a white circle in the street, there's children, and where we live demands us to think that it is where we are not. Bodiless. What is bodiless but the child the teen in me steaming BODILESS TEEN SERPENT IN THE SKY. No I am not your average teen thrust into his body by mere biology. We cannot distinguish what tempts us from what? What is bodiless? That counted thing that can be one way to begin Falling upward into a worse sort of knowledge That is broken in on by daylight It is always finding you They say sniggering So much sniggering So then this moment's light is suspicious light. You're constantly being told to expect something of yourself. And we expect nothing to happen. There is another blank

Fixed on a spot nearest us This doesn't require modification. The teenage is without relief. Modification, the moon, the stem and scaffolding of branches fitted together HANG ME you write on your locker HANG ME you sulk home from school... 

Though there was a time before us, and we acknowledge it It seems the less important the MORE THOSE WHO WERE ALIVE THEN mention its being golden Well I was alive then and it was no more golden than the way things seem to be right now But because everyone is in such a goddamn yank to talk to you about what they've figured out ABOUT THEMSELVES you have to listen to their experiences As if this were history... this relentlessness case by case advising PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION Like I'm going to turn out the same Hacking into a handkerchief

In a broader constellation of events and people Circling one another as though hopeless satellites Hacking and coughing We all just sit in a big white room like this While every now and then one of us sniffles and sighs and the Doctors give us medicine in little paper cups Then we finally shut up and Take to bed and you sleep because you really are very tired were it not so much about being awake as ALERT to the nature outside of your window exquisite bluntly edged into its pattern Every now and then aware of the sound of someone blinking their eyes or crying into their pillow or humming or licking their teeth Everyone sitting in this room so lost in their thoughts IT SEEMS LIKE THEY WILL NEVER COME BACK

So then the evening would fall apart sooner The sooner I fall apart on the way to work FUCK IT and no sooner time contributes as much to a mainly “disconsolate mind” and where we live

With disconsolate cities and highways left for it Tracing the matter rolling Red Balls in Your Veins These manners beside mansions, yet expressed in acts that are fixed on us

Not their equivalent but their lonely

Extensions, our bodies, wriggling into other bodies, ADULT BODIES

to explain any kind of self we have to get to be like them Well I was like them and I got no reward for being like them SO I CHOSE TO GO BACK which no one will notice anyway, Because they didn't notice before.

Being a teen is more than the juice pumping of your pituitary gland and the hair under your arms and the intensity of the blood flow to your prick. I'm a teen precisely because of the PEOPLE AROUND ME. I get the impression they don't even know there's a dead kid in the room with them I get the impression they don't care While they are served coffee by children or read the paper and look at the world and Think There's More to Know And the days pass for Days though they are Slight and Soundless

For Instance One Night I was out walking around well in tears because no one was paying attention to me And was really damn close to killing myself because I was at work ON IT and then this guy came out of his house and asked me what I was doing standing in his yard I had no idea I was standing in your yard I told the old man to go to hell and he stepped a little further out of his house and said WHAT DID YOU SAY and I said I said what was in my right to say OLD MAN I said You can shove your property up your butt Well that did it He came roaring out of his house and with his big old fists beat me In the end I was ashamed YOU UNDERSTAND I was beaten so badly I could hardly move for a month and took to my bed Dreaming Anxious DREAMS So then the feeling is where one must begin BEING A TEEN That resistance to being beaten into states of ANXIOUS DREAMING

 But it is not always like this and my mother--though she's very nearly one hundred--She'll tell you the truth I AM THE SWEETEST BOY But it's true My life is a little bombastic. But it's not without its secret charms. I tell you. It's much more than these scuffles

The point now is I am working in a little store stocking the shelves canned goods and I wear an apron and am always carrying a pricing gun. The aisles shimmer I am alone here I FEEL Religious Awe LIKE I AM IN A CATHEDRAL And then I go home to my mother and her breathing tubes You should see me after working eighteen hours straight Has a teen ever worked so hard? The teen is subject to the laws of recognition, this includes the inevitable FREAKING OUT when under the microscope The teen is SUBJECT ONLY TO ITSELF and has great facility with its own inner-microscope I train it now And "work" works in this manner THE MARKET Each day has its own sound I've written on pink stickies I've stuck to my bedroom wall It's tessellated with pink stickies Generally it's a variation of the incessant sound of traffic passing under a low bridge on the highway. Or the sound of a wonky grocery-cart wheel squeaking over waxed linoleum. It's all here in my notes.  

Yes I am back at home, in the basement, but really, I'm more at home in a larger area, covering more space than usual The Internet breathes I've given up in favor of the Teenage...in a basement vibrant with dankness. I encourage you to jump to conclusions. It's exactly like how you imagine it.  

Dina and Dan Never Go to the Races Anymore

Did I ever tell you that the night I yelled you out of the bar, I had planned to give you a hand job. I had resigned myself, in fact, practicing in a mirror the different ways I would hold your cock. I have imagined it many times, all of the adjectives and puns to describe your cock that make me feel uncomfortable now that I think about it. But that night, I was hoping you would get drunk enough to come home with me, drunk enough to comply. Even with all of the compliance in the world, we cannot understand the heft and weight of kismet. Who is to say and when. Come home with me please for the first time anew this one time, I told my friends when we were getting ready, this one time I was so close, I was so close to putting my hands down his pants, but he wouldn't let me, I don't understand.

Did I ever tell you about that one time. This one time. No, now.

Did I ever tell you about bravery? Did I ever tell you that my mother found my foils when I was smoking cocaine and asked me if it was for weed and I said yes, it's all I do, as if that alleviates the fact that I am smoking something on foil in her house in the first place. You tell me you do not live where you lived once and will never live there again. Inside all of the feelings, commence on bleachers, American flag waving, this is America.

Did I ever tell you about the time at the races when things didn't go my way which is every single time? They took the dogs out and brought in horses, they took the horses out and brought in video games in consoles, you don't actually sit next to other people in real time, you are a consul sitting in a console, alone.

I am sorry, he says to me after he hits me the second time, I am sorry, he is weeping while his hand comes down, while I jump back as his nails scrape my face (what does it say to have long nails for anyone, really?) I have a scrape on my face, I am so so so sorry he says, what can we do, calling
the police on himself, hello yes did I tell about the time we had to call the police, I didn't even know you.

Dina and Dan Employ the Language of Wallace Stevens As Political Outrage

If it wasn’t elegizing personal preoccupations, then it was a knack for the confused turn, as if among complex phrases, the true thing would feel itself move outward, away from its first appetite, to reach something alternately structured that would relieve its demands. For dawn comes from a dark place and the innocent might suffer it, yet another kind of clay, limpid and chilly, no one else but the fatal you apprehends, may be enough to remake the world. First one gesture with quick fingers then a decent shape for whom we might destroy the chants of night. Through the final rages of its firing the dark, such as your eyes urging forward, flows, and is what we enter when we are ready to stalk from door to door in the village nearest our base. Taxed by the values and shades of the ominous gesture, we asked what was there that we could take. But were we actually the reason why it happened. One breathes in a mountain cave the air smashing over the city. One knows through raging, the air in emptiness, even if afterwards we recognize it as a banality, without seeing the tattery books aflame in a dumpster. An image of ourselves? Are we a thousand men in one radiant conflagration? The commercial for itself tells us to pack our bags. We hurry then. An opalescent jar searching for its treeless hillside. What had gone out of the world as they moved forward in it they tallied, freeing things from blanks and gaps. Thus we celebrated the power to muddle and absorb the objects of the senses, sink them deep in a world of nourished things and annulled things. A voice was mumbling. Is this the new sacrilege? The leaving out, to stuff the ear, down atmosphere, the helicopters feasting on the air, every object and idea comprised in their fuming wilderness. The uroboros, the mobius strip. Yet there is always the chance that the first act would be misspeak, leaving out the surprise of its violence, then another. 

Dina and Dan Employ The Language of Political Tirade

There isn’t one of us who hasn’t suffered the relation of relations. Yet all debts postponed until after breakfast. That we never got up to begin with under the weight of each other’s attention. These few smirks, guesses, depend upon privacy. The hushed bells in your poems mimic the walks, bridges, orchards, towers of others. There we go, faster and faster, because we do not know what else to do outside the sound of ourselves, to dwell like a globe in a relaxed hand. It’s only now that we are suddenly afraid of the roundness that surrounds our boides. Then the announcement of your two names stamps itself out, the women’s bodies, the men’s bodies, the windows and birds that feed one into the other's sky. Anguish and embrace thus merge, flight and its medium. The full range we see are its culminations, mountains and mountains crossed with light in rooms where music plays and we meet one another.

Dan Tells Dina He Saw It Happen

I saw it happen in a vacant lot behind a clapboard house. The white girl was a small painter of nude self-portraits and the black man had once sold magazines door to door. It was Wednesday, early in the morning. Over the roof I could see the sun tinting the sky variously, and underneath this, in the foreground, the little scene. In the middle parts of the country the landscape is divided into sections, one fenced in, the other open; but because the former area is, the latter seems likewise fenced in, though this is not necessarily the case. The areas are too general for case. The vacant lot behind the clapboard house is in what you would recognize as the middle of a fenced in field. Here, the night is never quiet, full of insects too small to pity, and men hurt one another without thinking. The black man comes towards me. His dusty chin quivers a little as he begins to cry. If you mention the President, a black man will invariably cry. The President is the President of all of us, I say. When I was a young man I wore a mask when I went out at night. I hid behind corners, waited for footsteps, went through pockets and took what I could before I ran off. I would do this until I tired, hearing nothing but the thump of my heart deep in my head. The white girl looks like a girl I may have known. I look at the black man’s face. He casts a faint gray shadow on the sidewalk. I tell him to run but he does not run.  Most of the time they just stand there. There is nothing to do now, I tell him. Most of the time there is nothing to do but wait. Even if you know what is going to happen, you still have to wait for that thing to happen. But there are ways to keep going. Sometimes you have to forgive. You remove your clothes and you remove his clothes and you offer yourself to the painter. You close your eyes. She undresses too. His back is already scarred, but he holds his arms out, like he’s praying, and waits.

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