except for this, i am always hanging on to stones/ i should have known better than to take a dancer home/ at least i called it a home/ someone had to/ i do have rules/ rule#1/ never ever ever ever take a dancer home unless you are completely mad/ a dancer who is a bartender is better is than a dancer dancer because bartender dancers earn money, especially if they are bartender dancers who sell drugs/ danny was just a dancer dancer, and he did not sell drugs, he only consumed them/ danny will dance anywhere, anytime, anyhow any which way from sunday/ he is in shows a lot so money is kinda now and them mostly then/ danny dances in summer water, leaves, oil-slick puddles in the parking lot/ seven-eleven/ the used cars for sale place over by the burger king dumpsters in the back/ or outside on the balcony of the motel we lived in/ i worked at the motel as the resident whore/ and when danny moved in with his one ditty bag, i really had to hustle pun intended/ it was one of those late nights where i was returning to the motel from an out-call when i saw danny obviously homeless in arboretum park in town/

rule#2/ never ever ever ever take the homeless home/ danny mainly lived in his own self-constructed little bubble, and from time to time he would let me in/ no one had ever done that, i was in love with him not unlike the way diaspora is the equivalent of the wind/ rule#3/ never ever ever ever fall in love with a dancer, not even a bartender dancer who sells drugs because darkness will arrive and it will want you to suck its tit, and right behind it all the half-knots whose sallow skin is empty in the starlight of the snow/ danny had always danced at the edges and the ledges of a thousand towns/ even in the slow of things, danny’s eyes would dance even as his body simulated a motionless wandering among the fields behind the shell gas station near the highway exit/ the edge of town is just the edge of town where the train comes through in flames on the same rusted track danny regularly burned to dust whenever he danced the leaping weightless lifting up the sky wings of the buzzard hawks climbs the tree again angry one long supple spine stirring twirls of last autumn’s witness to beyond the honeycomb just before the bees have left/

danny was a dog who always knew exactly where his ass was/ straight men never ever ever ever know where their ass is/ it’s just there/ and danny could use his ass to change the conversation like a bull-whip lash of lament half-drowns in some far-away ocean place slaps and slaps repeatedly against the arrogance of the rocks that given time would yield the holding of the landscape up/ i would suckle on the breaking open of his ass, that perfect peach pit ass, dog five days unburied on your mouth’s melting of the copper pennies smelted from your bones/ when danny died, i died with him/ people say – a part of me – but no/ the day danny died, i died with him/ danny died in a small town with its suburbs and its factories and its cabs and its high school and its homeless in arboretum park and the shall station by the exit sign where trucks would park and growl until morning/ danny died in a town where the streets were all called moonlight, and on the hot days, the deep tar smell of the motel parking lot and the burnt oil from the trucks combined except for this to ruin any air conditioner or any ice machine with its blue ocean lights and danny rippling in his struts, unstoppable in his howling dance hanging on to stones/