Post-card 88

Dear you, or Belulino,

Momma said never to ask him all those questions about what who why ever.

Said shut your mouth, he don’t need yo lip.

But sometimes in hush hush, he put a blanket over heads,

And sneak me some true Poppa wisp hers,

Like jumps through double Dutch.

About how torture was when they plug up the fire hydrants and erase the hopscotch chalk Up from your pavement,

All that happening inside you,

And that’s where scar tissue on broken backs web from.

Teacher said we like this for the storm keep rattling at us,

Blows seeds to where they don’t belong,

Which means diversity,

Like how when Momma fight Poppa I catch words I never heard.

Adultery = grown speak.

But the storm is less than half the deck, Poppa wisp her’d.

The kings and queens ride the mess.

And all the fuss and holler just dust below the light.

That’s why I’ve gotta learn and write, to make for better seeing,

Like Byrds of Jazz fly on high.

Momma said raps are the poems of nightness,

So I should black up my verses to rhyming bars for stardom.

She said Poppa yells at her cause he wanted to be famous and but became just an old broke soldier,

That war made his blood boil always too hot in his neck veins,

But I think she just don’t know how to please a man­­––

His words always just nice warm to me.

I like to wisp her down my words for true secrets float above the dust,

Like ice cream over root beer.

And little girls need more than school to not become like Mommas,

Which is why I still ask Poppa questions in hush hush with the blanket over heads.

Yours,

Django Fontina

Post-card #87

[The following is one of my favorite correspondences between Django Fontina and Dopio Wheelsworth. I just stumbled upon it in a water-logged shoebox in the crawlspace under my roof. Couldn't get my scanner working, so I had to take a pic with my phone.]

Dear You, or Belulino,

 

As promised, long overdue, here’s one about my first day of work, kind of.

 

 

Sliding on the station floor wax

Everyone minds because I have sharp elbows

And seem ready to use them

Business means gripless polished shoes.

 

I take note that my nervous sweat beads are

Inversely proportional in frequency

To the red neon minutes running short on the board

But, scurrying by, nobody minds,

In a rush but slow-motion seeming,

Like how I picture futuristic networks of driverless cars––

All flocked in crosshatched weaves

Of awareless goal-seeking barrier

I take it personally,

Like everything else that gets in my way.

I have a flashback to my brother, rolling me up

Maliciously, in blankets of burrito prison.

Consequently, I love freedom of velocity.

 

Then I listen to the Asian crack addict violinist

Shred digital Beethoven rock, which registers nothing

Of cosmically weightless human anxiety.

I slow down instead of falling,

Or stiff-arming the emaciated old woman

To leverage myself.

 

The train comes and goes

Without me.

I arrive late to work.

But nobody minds.

 

Yours,

Django Fontina

 

 

Dear you, or Belulino,

9 odd years is never too late. You got me thinking about that night we came up with this game, remember? Here’s how I replay it:

 

 

Of banter & black humor,

We belt ha-has at the thunder,

Challenging dreams to douse like storms

Under which we carry no umbrellas.

 

I like space with no owners

You like windows without walls.

A woman fresh undressed is like

A letter read out loud.

The warming chill of skins in cahoots

Like when a fresh bed quits being cold

Or the fingers of a blizzard breeze

Brushing flushed cheeks falling through sleep

I feel piano keys of spinal chord

Plucking indelible adventures

Out of strings without a place.

I like music whose lyrics I always sing but never know.

 

These whenless unnamed artifacts

That remind us of the present.

 

Yours,

Dopio Wheelsworth

Post-card #86

Dear You, or Belulino, 

I am extremely grievous of your loss. I know that things were never admittedly copacetic between Janae and yourself, which is nothing of my business, saving that she mentioned so much frequently with the others and myself during collective discussions. I knew she maintained a private folio of these postcards on the inside of her cot, perhaps because she conjectured, as was her paranoid disposition, if you will forgive my venturing, that they would confiscate said postcards and utilize them against her better interests. However, she felt that they were of grave necessity to her continuity of self, I gather, not that I am exactly licensed to conclude as much, nevertheless, I took it upon myself after the event to retrieve Janae’s effects covertly and to deliver this one to you, unmodified or censored, because I judged it to be the most significant, and could only afford to send the one. 

Regards,  

Django Fontina 

Dad,

Did you ever think about what it was like to have me in your stomach? Cause I have.  Matter of fact, I think about it a lot. It would be nice to ask Mom if being in her stomach didn’t kill her. My stomach aches a lot because I think it wants the chance to grow babies like Mom did. Nothing else is like how I imagine that being, but I look for it in little stuff everywhere. I think that’s why normal rich white girls like flowers and making dinner. I remember screaming at the TV whenever bitches were always so stupidly starry eyed over thankless thugs that just swallowed their dinner and beat them. That’s what made me rough in the heart like a boxer’s ears, cause I’m no weak bitch sticking around for to take advantage of. But sometimes I feel like the inside wasn’t meant for the outside, like when people put meat in pies. Starts making the crust all mushy. Sometimes I see stuff and it makes me feel like I’m really soft and done. Like a couple times my belly button still had a string coming out of it and so I keeped tugging on it to bring whatever it’s tied to closer for I can see it, but whatever it is gets stuck on the other side of the wall I’m stuck behind, all the while I hear it clunking, and I think it might be you. I hear stuff too. 

Why is it that if I’m soft I’m nuts and if I’m hard I’m emotionally unavailable, A.K.A. a bitch, but if you’re hard you’re just a man and if you’re soft you’re just a fag? Doesn’t seem too bad by comparison. All the men here are fags except they’re nuts too cause they don’t have women to cook them personal dinners and chase them around with affections.

I wonder if you ever think of me, and if you do what you think. I think if you knew me you’d have a different word than nuts or crazy, you’d make one up just for me, and that’d be who I was. And then I’d know too. What I mean is, please don’t blame me for your wife, Dad. I didn’t mean it.

Yours,

Janae Kind 

Post-card #85

Dear You, or Belulino,

What of those fronds we trembled over making in the dark

as our bare skins goosebumped into each other’s?

How brilliant and tensile and ever-dewy they were to have been,

those novels. Your songs.

I wonder if you still think of them as fronds as such at all anymore,

or if they’ve dried up

in the jadedness we now consider the true expression of maturity,

so that you now just tell people you had a dream

––if at all––

like describing a wayward gray hair that you plucked into the toilet,

or dyed jet black.

Well, my fronds are a paler green now anyhow,

with my suit over my goosebumps and my skin all alone.

Rarity is the plot of many and the plight of a few,

whether in genius or love.

I’ve realized.

Not everyone can see marmalade skies,

or meet the girl with kaleidoscope eyes,

let alone conjure them up from nothing.

But everybody fronds, or at least dreams,

whether of the cosmic wow that cries harmony from the pluck of horse hairs

on a grumpy mandolin,

the apparition of faces on a wet black bough,

or the delicate, crunching fold

of a perfectly articulated pizza slice.

Sometimes we frond with eyes agape or drool in our phrases

so quickly are we speaking for fear of how quickly

we are drying up,

las babas del diablo:

photograph your fronds and blow them up into life:

That house on the water where aging mothers have

a future memory of their grandchildren giggling,

or the retrospective appreciation of a warm silence once shared in toto

between a prisoner and his former wife.

Can you call these by a hackneyed name?

Dream dried up when King woke up and

wrote his fronds into immortal change.

You said that.

What if fronding is the arc that draws

the disparate flecks of you together,

that without fronds you could only see

the atomized organs of your head in the mirror––

prosopagnosia, you’d lose your face,

and that place between your eye and your nose

that I once loved kissing when you fell asleep and woke up

would be just as impersonal as an armpit?

That’s the logical conclusion.

Sometimes I turn in bed and I tremble with fronds

of goosebumped skin, warm with company.

I trace our arcs below our young, bold targets,

and imagine another intersection where

together we can shoot them high again.

Then I fall asleep.

Yours,

Django Fontina

Post-card #84

Dear You, or Belulino,

This is your Postcard Time Capsule/Instructions For Not Being Like Daddy

Remember that food is a toy and should always be used in the service of games like the red candles they melted onto the back of Gouda cheese. And trees are big ladders that you should always climb to be in the sky even when you’re giant and fat. Always keep your hair on your head and never on your face so you don’t scratch your kids when you come home late from work and sneak into their rooms to kiss them goodnight. Remember that boring things are secretly fun if you’re not worried about being called immature. Dragons are as real as anything you can remember that you will probably never see again like grandma. Don’t ever tell lies (unless it’s to keep a surprise) because the truth will escape through your nose when you’re sleeping and that’s how snoring happens. When you become a driver and start yelling at other cars remember how you used to lay down in the back seat and turn off all the noise by playing hopscotch with imaginary lines through the stars. Serious things are always funny if you remember how small you are. Remember that beds are fortresses in disguise and suits and ties look sillier than capes and underwear over tights. Every breath has the potential to blow a bubble or balloon. Even if they tell you you can’t be an astronaut because you wear glasses and NASA is discontinuing the space program you can still flap out your arms and jump on your bed and sing about your rocket ship. Remember to always listen to your children and never tell them to go to bed because they were playing with food so that they could try and remind you that you are not so big even if you’re fat and that when you squint really hard you can see that all big things are secretly made up of very little things and that the sun has a smiley face on it and that when the beef is burnt it’s better to play catch with it than to yell at Mommy. Remember I’ll always be you even if you don’t always remember.

Yours,

Django Fontina

Post-card #83

Dear you, or Belulino,

I used to be a postman, but that’s not why I’m writing. Suffice it to say, one night, I was rambling about my old route, trying to recall the will that came with having official messages to deliver, struggling to sort through the self-nausea of realizing my expertise is outdated. When there was a screech and the smell of scorched rubber got locked up in my nose hairs by the black bag that now choked my neck. My arms became useless because there were much bigger, more useful arms around them, and the tender area of my inner thighs became warm. And this warmth I quickly internalized as a placid acceptance that my life and nausea were no longer in my hands, or stomach. When then there was a voice in the van I found myself suddenly sat in.

It told me there was once a man who woke up to a searing pain like as if his intestines had grown the head of a snake and decided to eat their way out of his body. The man felt that every speck of his not inconsiderable misery was concentrated in his now clogged, writhing intestines. Not soon after he became aware of this agony did a slender and delicate hand reach for his stomach out of the dark, followed by the face and voice of a completely ordinary-looking female stranger, who he noted had her eyes shut tightly. “I found it,” she said to someone who wasn’t evidently there, at a decibel level that made it seem she was speaking with headphones on. “Found what?” the man asked, placing his hand on his stomach too. The woman’s eyes shot open in shock at the alarming realization that she was not touching her own body.

“Who are you talking to, anyway?” asked the man.

She told him she had woken up to a terrible pain in her stomach as if she had eaten glass, and that a voice had told her that if she kept her eyes closed and placed her hand on the spot that hurt, she would be fine.

As soon as the man understood that this strange, ordinary woman had found her pain in his stomach, it was as if he could feel every cell in his body at the same time as they inspired cold oxygen into warm blood: the snake was gone at once, and the woman, who was no longer ordinary but irretrievably beautiful––she was gone too.

The man, now finished with his story, apologized for having abducted me in such a dramatic way. Taking the bag off my head, he explained he could spare no effort. And that is how I became a postman again, stalking about the strangers of the world, delivering the man’s words in hope that, eventually, they will find the woman whose mouth they came from. I wonder, how does your stomach feel?

Yours,

Django Fontina

Post-card #82

Dear You, or Belulino,

You wrote that it was all about effective communication (that’s what you meant, right?)—like that time you called me your dandy lion and I thought you had made up a cute moniker in reference to my stylish facial hair, only to realize you were probably trying to call me a dandelion because I was your dream-come-true (maybe a little too cute, I thought…in secret)–and then, I learned that the word dandelion comes from the French dent de lion, meaning tooth of the lion (right?), which made me feel much better (I pride myself on my virile maw, as you may know) until I then discovered the French word for dandelion is pissenlit, which, if broken down like dandy lion, would mean piss in  bed; or that time you told me you liked inky linguini and I thought you meant saucy but you really meant inky, as in with octopus ink, and when you saw my reaction you thought I was frightened, but I was really just trying to contain my excitement for your being so bold and adventurous and teaching me new things––but I didn’t want to let on I was so excited because that would have been untactful––and then you made me the linguini and we used the sauce to fingerpaint thoughtpictures to one another, and that was really effective; and I agree, by the way, effective communication is what it’s all about, if I’ve understood you correctly, like, for example, I love it when I’m driving and a fellow motorist has signaled his or her way to a stop, and, what’s more, proceeds to roll the window down (in the dead of winter, no less) to wave me over––that is a connection––and I hate it when the person doesn’t use the signal at all, or, even worse, uses it when he or she is not about to make a turn at all (I think they call that a false signifier) and I’m driving behind all slowly, awaiting the moment when I can swerve aside and speed back up, but it never comes (are they so stuck in their own heads that they don’t hear the signal’s nagging tick-tick, tick-tick?), just like when a person sitting at a restaurant waves over the waiter and then asks for the check, making an extraneous move, wasting everyone’s time (has this particular diner never heard of the universal, please-bring-me-the-check signal?). Yes, I do appreciate effective communication, but unfortunately my Internet is down, and so I cannot access Google translate. So what is this all for then, you ask, if Google can’t convert my chickenscratch into the language of love? It all goes to say, our friends were right––if we cannot understand each other, it is idiotic, and, actually, downright ridiculous for us to act like we are together, even if we like to think we are so prime a match we can really, truly get each other sub-vocally. Now that I think about it, maybe we get along so well because we don’t understand one another half the time. For example, you might try and translate this manually, then give up when you realize how godawful my handwriting is, and then just giggle away your frustration like we always do; you’ll tape the postcard to your fridge as a souvenir; you’ll smile at it from time to time, taking in the mystery that is all the things you don’t know about me;  you’ll smile simply at the fact that you don’t have to know it at all, because, truth be told, who’s mystery do you know entirely, even in your own language? And, in that case, I’ll see you when I get back, and everything will be the same, like it never happened, like when I confess my sins to you in your sleep. Even when you don’t listen, it’s nice to know that someone’s heard me.

Yours,

Django Fontina