Postcard Project

About this project: I started writing little postcard-poems a few years ago, and it has taken on various forms throughout the years. The first ones (at the bottom of the page) were written in Paris in 2003. Then another batch was written in Dalian, China in 2005-2006, and another here in NYC 2007-2008. Most recently, I've been writing these little things on the backs of Yoshitomo Nara postcards, regular NYC touristy postcards, and postcards depicting pulp romance comics from the 1950s and '60s. I've been trying to make them resemble little love letters. These I've then been dropping in the mailboxes around my neighborhood, without signing them or leaving a return address. In some cases when I feel especially hardworking, I write the name that is listed on the mailbox on the address portion of the cards.

The postcards:

The first house we ever shared was an origami cathedral. Our mornings were flooded with the glow from our windows of stained cellulose. When we moved into our straw hut we packed the mud floor with our dances. Our wooden apartment was lit with the electricity that arced between our fingertips. It was our warm proximity that built a castle of two million stones which we inhabited with zeal and allure. In the end, we stepped out into the wild and made the forest our home, the beach with its flocks of geese our feather pillow.

There was something of you in that nautilus, with its hypnotic math. There was something of you running through a field of fireflies. There was something of your sleeping breath in the laps of the waves. There was something of your voice in that Beach Boys song. There was something of your breasts in the dunes that held the delicacy of that flora. There was something of you in the way the sun disappeared into the ocean. There was something of your goodbye that day, the last day of summer.

The gospels of insects that wash the jungle in hum, the swell of brass as the great heliotropes arc in awe, the name of the dusk wind that is whispered at dawn, the shush of the sea, like a wisp of corn shucked, the song of the gulls in a new morning legato--there is music, yes, but the only music I hear is the glide of your body as it rustles awake in my sheets.

She would smile, and we'd run to catch her spittle in our mason jars of fine crystal. It was like the precious mucus of ladybugs in heat, only more viscous, more desperate. The pusyellow sun was searing our brains--soon, sinfoniettas began to leak from our lips like whale fat. We became flaccid as a priesthood, and jaundiced. Something began to smell of hot butter. Swollen cygnets floated by, nourishing us. We began to have notions. Some of our notions sublimated. Some of our notions were full of grace.

Your thighs--and I don't care if it is cliché--hold the secrets of milk and mercury. Your knees are the grassy foothills of other Himalayas. Your eyes carry the liquid encyclopedias that drown sailors. Your belly is like wheat. Your back is forged from the fleshy reminder of Gondwanaland. Your bones contain the most exquisite physics known to Newton. Your nostrils release the breath of autumn chimneys being lit for the first time. But your elbows, your elbows...

I waited for you until the restaurant closed, and reopened as a beauty parlor. Calendar pages flew out the window, then entire calendars. I found a gray hair, then four. Leaves fell off the trees. Certain styles of clothing came back into style. Before long, monorails began to dominate the skyline. I forgot why I had been waiting. At that precise moment, a butterfly fluttered past my cheek.

Let's open an old National Geographic, not simply because it's yellow but because it knows something about the USSR that we in our forgetfulness have left in the attic. Let us be reminded, on the days when hailstones of liquid methane are bombarding the surface of a moon, that there are polyps on the continental shelf which sway in the ocean blood like a dreamless sleep. Let's cuddle by the fire with an old National Geographic, and let our hair sway into seaweed.

We are almost out of orange juice--the summer seems so long ago now. Now--I can taste it in the air--is the time of goulash and cole slaw. Colors are giving way to pondwater. Frogs are giving way to mathematics. In your last letter you spoke of princes and madonnas, but all I could think about was Prince and Madonna. In my opinion, this is what makes us perfect for each other.

When I think of the way you tried not to smile that night, I think of West Virginia, a place I've never been, but have often passed through. Your shirt almost grazed my arm that night, and my little blond hairs almost stood on end. Certain words almost entered our vocabulary. You fingers stroked the champagne flute like they knew the true meaning of glass, like it was only, after all, only a matter of time.

That night, we made love so deliriously, I wondered what your wallpaper looks like, if you ever listen to James Brown with your eyes closed, if you are secretly a New Guinean witch doctor. I wondered what things that aren't chocolate could yet be chocolate. I stared at the fire extinguisher nervously, as if any moment, this could all burst into flame.

All virtues, you scoffed, start off as viruses. All viruses, I countered, start off as Buddhist. Buddhism, you laughed, is just metaphysical Marxism. Marxism, I parried, is just capitalism for the proletariat. And what is the proletariat, you proposed, but the aristocracy of the working class? The aristocracy of the working class, indeed! we chortled, nearly snorting our champagne. I kissed you desperately on the lips, because we understood each other perfectly, because it was true, we had no idea what we were talking about.

It was an inky storm that blew through the city that Tuesday like a frightened octopus. It smelled like we were inside a blackberry. Crows flew by, the color of green at night. As the L train passed underneath, there was a rumbling which you called a Testament. To what, I asked. To us, you replied, raising your glass of pinot noir, to all hundred thousand volts of us.

Once I boarded the plane, the "o" in "home" was a hollow tree. It was like walking down stairs when you think there is one fewer stair than there really is, and your foot falls through the empty space like a gasp. If I had known that I would never see you again, I would have planted perennials on the street where we used to live. The warm hum of the jets starting up signaled the end of an era. The flight attendant demonstrated how to buckle a seat belt. The world is full of the painfully obvious.

My fingers slid under the hem of your dress like an old familiar song, but they were not my fingers, and it was not a song I knew well enough to play. I confess that it was not I who held you. When I said I loved you, "I" was an other. When I said "I want you," I meant, "when it rains I forget my name." When I said "kiss me," I meant, "let's dance. Let's dance like it's everybody's birthday."

It rained so hard that night, I wanted to learn German. You made the Metro section into a hat and told me not to worry, it was good for the flowers. I wasn't worried, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I was trying to solve the crossword puzzle on your forehead. I thought I saw a crow peek out from someone's beard. We were as happy as wet dogs. I knew then that all we needed to do was to shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake that booty.

Home is the place we promise to meet again when it is the place that is once again foreign to us. We recognize the driveway, lined with hypnotized babies, the mailbox whose solitary red flag is always semaphoring, the rock garden that is peppered with pyrite, but we don't recognize each other, we don't answer the voice that asks, "Do you think we ever would have had a chance?"

You, Francis and me at the airport. The time we remembered each other's names and you kissed my cheek with the back of your hand. Francis said "What?" and I said "Of course!" and we all three smiled like we knew how a great magic trick was done.

It was that time of year again when Bossa Nova could be heard wafting in from the backyards of every funeral home. You gave me that look, the one that says "I hope I haven't left the oven on." I looked at you the same way I looked at my mother when she was in prison. For a moment we pretended we knew what the other was thinking. The other was thinking of Bossa Nova, we presumed. But it was only true in a sense.

Once upon a time was the beginning of a story where the end was never in sight, and we were right there in the thick of it. We never could have, but we did, like a Moroccan city made of flesh. We exhaled for the rest of the night, watching the moisture collect on the folding things, guessing what a wonderful day it was, and tired.

It was as if it were the way it seems it were, as old and fish-smelling as that sounds, and improbable. We asked each other, what is this, and replied, it is a fever. We tried to glide our bodies against each other like blind hummingbirds, but the stillness in our daybreak said now, wait, now. It was the way the lawns were bedewed in the morning. It was the feeling of sinking into summer, like falling asleep in a hot bath.

I remember well the day we met in that two-seater World War I biplane. You were the first gunman and I was the co-pilot. We dog-fought and hot-dogged and loop-de-looped, and as we fell to the earth in flames, we fell in love. You said, Charlie at three o'clock, and I said, kiss me you fool, before we die heroes.

The only thing that scares me more than intimacy is spontaneity, so that's why I screamed like a banshee when you put your arm around me. Don't get me wrong--it's not that I don't like you, it's just that when I can feel your breath on the hairs on my neck, it makes me want to tear my eyes out.

The first time I touched an actual war medal I was surprised by how cheap it felt. Such a flimsy cracker jack prize to take the place of so many human lives. The first time my hand brushed against your cheek I knew it was porcelain and just as fragile, and in that moment our future shattered into pieces as small as sneezes.

Every time you feed winks to those woolly-booggered bachelors who tug at your coat-tails, Baby Jesus vomits a teaspoon of holy colic on Mary's shuddering shoulder. No three-piece suitor will ever tickle your fancy like me, with my come-hithering finger whispering "uti-puti-puti", which is Old Russian for "gootchie-gootchie-goo".

Lets pack up our Gnostic virtues and Brit Pop sensibilities and move to the town where crazed rants and proselytizing are the standard form of communication. We'll lease a woody hatchback to transport our giant letters, and play the finger cymbals with wild abandon in the town square by the light of a thousand flashbulbs.

I am the boy your mother forebade you to see, if this were the '50s and you were a teenager and this were all a total cliché. I am the private thoughts you have in the bathtub. I am your secret love of Bon Jovi. I am the location of you diary key. I am the boy on whose bike you sped off into the night, if this were a movie, if I weren't afraid of motorcycles, if your hands were on my waist and mine were on the throttle.

You only eat things in foreign languages, and I have a laugh which is described in my psychological evaluations as "hungry" and "unspeakable". Your friends think you're fluffy for an autocrat. My enemies think I'm a flute, and tickle my bellybutton while blowing into my mouth. We've both scored the exact same nothing on all the personality tests we haven't taken yet. Isn't it obvious? You are the words to the song I've been humming.

My dear, my honey bumpkin, my sweetie-thighs, my candy corner, my liquid foundation, my sashimi-flavored gland, my Nuclear Age excuse, my love-stained science, my nocturnal longitude, my private library, my sleepy peacock, my tie-dyed whisper, my edible inkblot, my Robbespierre, my puppy-breath riviera, I will never have enough terms of affection.

If the croaks that we excrete in our sleep sound like babies fighting to the death, and if our tone-valves break to leak whirligig mathematics into the washbasin, shall we continue to stare at each other by the roadhouse, our teeth shining like milk in the moonlight?

And then there was the old Tuscan villa where I worked as a dishwasher, and where you in your white lace sundresses pretended to be bored with everything, where our pauses were heavy every time we almost touched. You moved so lazily when you looked in my direction, and I left bits of rosemary stuck to the plates when I thought about you.

Baby, you are my Michigan, and my Arizona, and my North Dakota, and all the other states I've never visited, but none of the countries. You will never be Tunisia, or Luxembourg, or Azerbaijan. You will never be Brunei or Argentina, Indonesia or Spain. I will not, rest assured, compare your voice to a foreign language I'll never learn to speak.

If Mrs. Greensly peers out from her potted plants today to say good morning to Father Barryman, it means there will be six more weeks of winter. If Mr. St. John should open his shutters today with a warm curse, it means Baby Jesus has colic. If we should walk hand-in-hand over cobblestones crushing citrus with our feet, it means that somewhere in India, a dying man is learning to play the piano.

I never knew such breeze as I once with you, with the ice cream man parked outside on a day for hot chocolate. He rolled up beside us, rolled down his window, and whispered our song from the jukebox, like the day we first met, like the day we made love from a pile of old newspaper.

You fell in love with the first cute boy at the county fair who could talk about Wittgenstein, and you left with bits of hey in your hair. I was left there with the second-prize pig, wondering if it could have been me, if Jimmy hadn't've pumped up Porky with steroids.

Your skin contains the same little blue and red threads as American hundred dollar bills, so forgive me if I stare at your hands. Forgive me if our fingers interlace like indices across genres, or like hairs and the teeth of a comb. Like the teeth of gears that spin wildly together. Like rock and roll.

I guess this is it, though it was only ever a guess to begin with. Why do we have to wave to each other with hands that are close enough to touch? Why do we wonder aloud what to say, when we could dispense with speech and just collide instead, like two flocks of geese that crash in midair to make a rain of pillows.

You had those eyes that were so captivating, no one—not even the circus professionals—could guess your weight. You could stare anyone into submisison. But now that we're so wrinkled, I'm not so sure. From the back of a cab, you can still cause traffic accidents in other cities, but is the curse still alive, does autumn still arrive as leafy as ruins?

I was the one at the anarchists' ball with the rose between my teeth, and you were the one who caught the falling petals on your tongue like snowflakes. Our ashcan tango was the envy of the evening, and our whispered inticings the most danceable music of the night.

I wanted us to be Easter-toothed piano keys in a madly grinning smile, but we were cowgrass, we were copper dioxide. I wanted us to be naked as scientists, counting on our fingers, but we were a river delta into which the sea emptied its saltations. I wanted us to be sesquipedalian, but we were abbreviations, we were weeping women washing our sheets in mercury, wondering why nothing was coming clean.

“All the things, like carrots, that only catch on fire,” you said, “after they are buried, will never know how nourishing, and how crowded with sound, the air can be, on nights when we are still enough, and marmoreal enough, to feel the flock of transparent moustaches that flap their flutterings all around us.” I couldn't agree more.

Your brown eyes are made of milk chocolate that melts in the palm of my outstretched hand. I can't tell whether that's romantic or creepy. When the 51^st state is discovered off the coast of Wyoming, let's move our trailer there, and make hundreds of snow angels in hundreds of countrysides.

That night, it rained as if for the last time, and we splashed our way to the miniature zoo in paper galoshes. It was like a bad translation of a good book. It was me you were hugging goodbye, but it sure didn't feel like it. We watched a kimono float down the storm drain. You said something I've since forgotten.

There are a pair of orphans in Polynesia whose eyes resemble our summer romance, and they are the most beautiful children the world has ever seen. When photography is invented there, their image will burn the film the way the summer burned our skin.

In another life we are paisley, and we swim through brocade fabrics mitochondrially. We are the vegetation that flourishes on embroidered lobes, and the ambition of adolescent amoebas. At night, we divide into multiples of five and twirl each other into Yin-Yangs.

Your name is a black-and-white photograph of a prairie on the ceiling of an actual prairie. Your voice is an altar that folds into a suitcase that a priest takes with him on holidays to the congo. Your face is nothing special. Your eyes are made of water that drowns romantics and poisons plastic flowers. Your calves, your dimples, the texture of your tongue.

Pretending it's summer, you've been feeding me fruit. Pretending we're at the beach, you've been rubbing oil on my back. Pretending we're in love, you've been winking at me in Morse code. Pretending we know each other, you've been saying 'hello'. I'm not going to tell you to stop. Not yet. The apricots are too sweet.

I have spent the last few years reading your tattoos, and I am struck by your use of the word “scrimshaw” as both a verb and an adjective. You refer to the mythological past as “my body,” and I am intrigued and sanguined. Seventeen hundred breakfasts from now, I will still be thinking of your stripes in the tall grasses, and your polka-dots in a school of fish, camouflaging nothing.

If I compare your hair to drowsy spaghetti, it is not because blond is the color of pasta, but because of the way it moves underwater, like seaweed drunk on salt. If I compare your teeth to baby mice, please don't call me sentimental—it's just that I'm struck by the way they scatter when I turn on the lights too playfully.

We'd like to think, wouldn't we, that every surface, if deep and brown enough, grows grass or hair eventually, that everything, seen at the right magnification, is a field unto itself, a magnetic field, or a field of vision, upon which cattle are lazily grazing.

The first night we made love without our good old orange socks on, while the neighbor's house was burning down, in the salon in that old chateau where the irises grew from the ceiling, you whispered something so carefully, so full of intent, that all the gossip in the state dissolved. “Sassafras,” you said. And the whole room went silent.

Speaking of raw things, the night when everything was cooked and floppy. At our restaurant, we sat with our feet up, our bellies distended from mirth. The harp player was going on as if there were a significance, if only we'd stop and listen. If only...

On these poor thick winter's days when the sky and I have a runny nose, and all the pressures of this city are localized in the sinuses, I use the song you gave me, along with the porridge, as medicine. I use its whole notes as losenges. If I could only sing it loud enough, it would heal the San Andreas Fault.

The dress you wore on the night of the heyride was ugly, but the way the moonlight splattered over it, I was transported by Mohammedan angels to a blue vanitas. The smell of tractor smoke, the end of the summer, the hey in your hair. “Now or never,” you whispered. “Never,” I said, “is such an ugly word.”

If I had a guitar, and could play the guitar, I would play it all day. I would play so slow as to become a painting, the guitar player in a slowly painted painting of a busy Catalonian cafe. And you would be there, too, smiling at the way everything is blurry but us.

I hate myself for sleeping all night, so that's why I wake up when I do. I hate myself for the baroque Persian tacottas that Alvin & The Chipmonks won't stop singing in my head. I hate myself for overdue book fines and sequins all the world over. But out of all the people in the city I don't hate the most, you're one of them.

I, a lonely highwayman, compendious and mustachioed, am waiting for you, a flambouyant flapper's daughter, to sway down the escalier in slow motion, so that I might admire the drift of pearls that dangle so casually from your tiara, and the flounder that ignite so spontaneously at your feet. My motorcar awaits! Tonight, I have the wanderlust of a ne'erdowell.

Let's stay in this quiet town until the bandshell is overgrown with ivy, and we are so old that we no longer have the strength to giggle at the mention of Lake Titticaca. We'll be feverish in the dead of winter and sleep on cool marble pillows in the month of August. The glaciers will chase us into the next ecosystem, and we will run away laughing.

Your honeysuckle voice over the telephone, all the way from Missouri. My garbage bag poncho and bouquet of cellophane camellias. The shiver of your petticoat when you have a delicious secret. My sweetbreads and your pulchritude. Our ten cent affection on a day like this, in a place like today, with shiny new nickels glowing in our pockets.

After all that happened, I've decided I want to remember you, and us, at our happiest: that night at fat kids' camp when all the stars were out. I showed you Orion's belt and you said that my belt was bigger. What a bitch you were. I was ever more in love.

You and I have never met. We are a breath suspended in a set of lungs that are trying to say "hello". I will always remember all the things we never did together, that night the dog's far away howl sounded like applesauce and Nebraska.

I know it's not possible, but you left fingerprints on my skin. You were like a bucket of water poured over a roll of toilet paper. I was like a laugh trapped in a Mason jar. Some nights, we were epileptic. Some nights, we said to each other, "Come on. Just a little bit closer. Just a little bit, closer."

Every year I go back to that spot where we undressed and I plant tulip bulbs. They look like newborn toes in the early morning light. Every year I feel statelier, and filthier, and funnier, and more of a stereotype, and I miss you more and more.

Sometimes I can't stand your Scandinavian cajolery but sometimes I am obsessed with the lilt of your gait when we were wading in the Red Sea, your hair tied up with a shell, and me, with the mouth-bubbles of laughing crustaceans.

I can never eat sugared eggs these days without being reminded of the way you drew in crayon all over the Spanish naval officer's uniform, and the way he looked at us as if to say, "Sure, it's ugly now. But in ten years? Frickin' lovely."

You smelled like you had been swimming in the lake, and I? I smelled like a Phish concert. That summer, your contact lenses tasted like skinned grapes, and we said things with the things in our eyes that are flies trapped in amber.

White phosphorous is a substance that has been known about since ancient times. When it is exposed to air, it ignites and produces a brilliant white flash of light. In the middle ages, this was known as Holy Fire. Don't you miss that? I want to live in a world where holy fire is possible. I miss you.

Wherever we decide to go now, with all that we know, it can be no substitute for sun-gilt Bangladesh, with all her bemusing thorough-fares and ginger chest-haired belly-dancers. You and I will always pretend to be groovy animals in the cat-naps we take there. I will whisper into the hair that covers your ear, "Bang. La. Desh."

This time, I am pregnant and you are the mother. All the songs we never lipsynched together, all those long walks we never took the dogs on--I regret nothing. Starting now I promise to look every pink thing in the eye, and exhale quietly in crowded flowershops.

I am writing to you now from New York City. It took me months to get here. Three camels died along the way. I think of you when I get lost in the blue of the aquariums. You would love it here, and so would the birds that build nests out of sacrifice.

When they told me my mouth was a wound and that my kisses were photos of a badminton shuttlecock in midair, you suggested that they take their metaphors and shove them in a dark closet, and I want to thank you for that. I think of you and tangerines in the same day. I'm not buying tangerines, but I am writing you a postcard.

I'm older than I was when we last met. When I take a bath, I am no longer the Pirate King Longhair. I look across the waves at my toes and lament the loss of appetite my imagination suffers.

I keep having this dream where the circus train got derailed and Main Street is filled with lions with frilly collars, elephants with polka dots, and P.T. Barnum. You are there, holding a lollipop and speaking to me in languages I learned in church.

My watery city and your watery eyes = love. The icy tirednesses of microscopic animals on the train ride out to see you.

I still like you, even though I am reminded of you when that song comes on the radio that I hate. But I don't like you more even though I hate that song more each time I hear it. Let's dance again soon.

One of the Allied ships that the Germans sank in WWII contained 30,000 typewriters. I like to think that probability-wise, that's enough typewriters to make it possible that a school of octopi, each with 8 potential typing arms, wrote a lost Melville novel.

The last time we spoke, on Prince Street at dusk, that old Stan Getz song played through the blown-out speakers at the barbershop, and a receipt fell out of your pocket. I took it back to the bookstore, found the book of poems by Pierre Reverdy, and exchanged it for $7.99 plus tax, which I then used to buy you flowers.

I am waiting for you on the side of the road in OHIO with a DOG.

I can't stop thinking about you and the sound your perfume makes at night. Tonight, and only tonight, the radio has a runny nose. We were never meant to be together. I regret all of your apples & want to count your glistening hairs.

All our sacrifices lead to this twinkling. Come back to California. Your tidy storms and untied shoelaces remind me of our salads and bazaars. Hello beautiful. Goodbye postcard.

How many years was it, my dear, when we swam like newborn iguanas in each other's mouths? I miss you and your secret piercings. This and all ten thousand glistenings from now until we next meet. I love you like a mad hygenist today. Don't forget me.

We, my dear, and all of our lovelinesses and all of our puppy-blinks are made for each other. The only thing softer than your kisses is hollandaise. Let's wake each other up with warm yodels and cakes in bed.

Yesterday I met a butterfly shaped like the letter W. It was perched on a flower shaped like the letter P. Next to it were bees, tracing lowercase Gs in the air. It was then that I realized, letters are not symbols. Rather, nature is what mimics letters. I am building a dictionary of things reverse-engineered from words. Thinking of you.

At the same time as the last time we met, a baby was born in a far place. Now, at the time of writing, that baby is speaking its first word. Its first word is 'hmung'. In the kingdom of baby speech, hmung is king. In the baby language empire, hmung is God. The pirate-king Hmung sails the black seas, cross-eyed and laughing, while somewhere a phonograph repeats: hmung hmung.

Dearest friend and comrade, I'd like to watch the steam of the city get swallowed by the sea. I'd like to watch the city do things it's embarassed to do in front of the sea. I'd like to wait for the part where i'm supposed to laugh and then laugh. I'd like to headbang on a quarry of slate and write messages in dandurff that can be seen from space.

Dear friend of lathes, do you own a lathe? Do you pretend to own a lathe? If not, why not? Do you know someone, a friend or colleague, who has once owned but does not currently own a lathe? Why? Do you know what a lathe is? I don't. Let us go, then, you and I, to speak with one who knows of lathes.

At one of the following locations:
* at the festival of the god of saltwaters
* the bath where theories are disproved
* in an itty-bitty tiki room
One of the following things happens:
* the head of a giraffe disappears into the clouds
* the eye of a lizard looks contemplative
* a door opens to reveal a room outdoors

This message will self-destruct when it feels it can no longer handle the pressures of living in an advanced capitalist society. I feel like a secret agent today, and Dalian is windy as usual, allowing me to write love letters in Chinese on paper airplanes and send them out my window where they will be blown to the stratosphere. "Is this a love letter?" you may ask. "Is there an answer to that question?" I must respond.

Virologists are concerned with the spread of the bird flu. Meterologists talk about a cold front spreading over our peninsula. Botanists are concerned with alien plant species being introduced and disrupting the ecological balance. Me? I'm afraid of the spread of POLKA DOTS. I fear they are multiplying, spreading bad taste over the world like frozen butter is spread over fragile bread. Do not be alarmed. I have a plan. It does not involve paisley.

If anything ever happens to me (and it does all the time), I want you to mail all those letters I wrote to Santa Claus. Please make sure they don't go to the magnetic North Pole by mistake. The sleepiness of continents is awake there, where the compass needle spins wild. There is no real land there I hear--just the frozen arctic sea. Infinite ice. An idiosyncratic laugh: ho! A reindeer with a bioluminescent nose. I want to believe.

Before he shattered it, a wise old wino told me that a glass bottle contains hundreds of sharp things waiting to assert their individuality. Before he drank it, he told me the Yacutxtl word for wine contains the word for 'fire,' thereby describing not only the liquid but also its potential. We have spent too long apart, but the ocean and desert between us contains this--something that has traversed the distance, a coupon for a coffee and a long long chat.

After all these years I've spent in China & I've never once seen anyone use an abacus. I've also never seen a kung fu fight erupt over a gambling debt in the middle of a bamboo teahouse in Shanghai. I've never been to Shanghai, but this is beside the point. Come visit me and we will play chinese checkers, which here is called only "checkers."

When it snows here in Dalian, it sounds like typewriters underwater. Pencil shavings dance magnetically on the underside of a glass table. I ate a live fish the other day and looked into its scared eyes, it little serrated mouth mouthing the word "sushi." When you've been away for a long time the most random things make you think of home. One day I'll come back wet with seafoam and grinning like a pirate, arms outstretched for a hug or as if to say "it was THIS big!" I will of course be exaggerating.

I write to you now in English because it is the language of my captors. Snowflakes are melting into my eyelashes. The sky is pregnant with snow and I am full of things to say to you. Next year's winter from last year came as we predicted, colder than we expected, and we shall go out, roll our our tongues to catch snowflakes on them & laugh muffled laughs. In spring we will do the same, but with butterflies.

I write to you now from Dalian, in the northeast of China. It is the last month my neighbors have dried their cabbages, and now they resemble a certain...what the Chinese call "je ne sais quoi". I gazed romantically at the way the white mountains arch into the sky and thought about your eyebrows. I miss you like I miss forks and knives. Or, like a fork misses a knife. I am getting so good at using chopsticks that I mailed this card using a pair I keep in a holster.

I would like to cycle through the sounds of this city as if I were spinning the radio dial again from the passenger seat of your car. The casual clatter of miniature beer glasses. The laughter of passing livestock. Bubbles from mortally wounded seafood. Words in foreign languages blissfully misunderstood. Welding. Impatience as performed by car horns. Endless waitresses outside endless restaurants endlessly reciting their endless menus. Potential emergencies, quietly procrastinating in a snow blanket that covers everything in silence. In media res. Here's a high five so high it reaches you.

The ATLANTIC OCEAN was called the Sea of Darkness and we hallucinate that the Pacific is the sea of ten thousand suns but the Sonar magicians tell us otherwise, tell us otherwise in song and dance. You know what they call Chinese Checkers in China? Royale with Cheese. I miss you like China misses France. I realize I said that all wrong. What I mean to say is, may the Force be with you. End of the movie references postcard.

TONIGHT I WILL yawn until mosquitos sound like car alarms and car alarms sound like crickets and I can go to sleep. I will lubricate my left nipple until it stops telling me to scratch it, and I'll wake up thinking what I might say that the brick saw would understand. What we have seen in the morning is a colloidal suspension of the sediments of nighttime. I miss you like the continents miss Pangea, and in my least lonely moments I still think about home.

RULE #1: If you blow bubbles from a soapy pipe in a crowded square with a pensive expression on your face, you will eventually make somebody giggle. RULE #2: When somebody giggles, become instantly horrified and run away as fast as you can. Chances are they'll stop giggling. These are the first two rules of my new religion. Join me! And together we'll change the world with random acts of kindness, only this time without all that kindness.

MY LOVE FOR YOU is like SOMETHING CHINESE named after a TURTLE in the hopes of giving it the characteristic attributes of longevity, stubbornness and the bravery oft mistaken for cowardice that describes a creature that hides in its own skeleton. but we don't need to put a shell over a campfire to read our fortune, you know why? The SKY is our EXO-SKELETON. It's 7:23pm in Dalian and the harvest moon describes the suns in song and exaggerates.

There are a finite number of possibilities, my dear friend, with what I can do today. But there are an infinite number of impossibilities. I'm not going to go to the store and buy a fruit I've never seen before. I'm not going to take it home and washt it and let it not remind me of you. Instead, I will hire a monkey to put a dot on canvas every time something impossible doesn't happen in the hopes of reproducing a Seurat. My love for you is a turtle.

I AM A WILD GOOSE having flown wildly East fort the winter. To prepare myself for the climate out here, which is no different than what it is back home, I brought all the same clothes I usually wear. They say you gotta bundle down to bundle up, but what they don't know is bundled up in knots. I get cold after I eat but the food gets colder. It's in direct defiance of the laws of thermodynamics, those laws that are so fun to not break. I hollowed out a globe I cut in half and am currently using it as a bowl. When I get to the North Pole I know i'm going to to get cold.

Your back to the mountain, leaning and your eyes of the sea floating around you forget what's ironic and what's poetic and just think, where can I buy toilet paper? It is the harves moon day and I'm returning from the supermarket with freshly harvested doughnuts thinking I'm pretty clever. But you know better. I'm just a man! A man with a map of a constellation in his head who gets lost coming home from the beach.

DINNER IS ON THE TABLE is something I mumble to myself before I can set the chopsticks down. When God was invented by a bunch of lonely people in the desert who decided to be lonely together they must've thought they were onto something BIG. I fucked up the tofu but the vegetables in this portion for one, they're BIG I tell you. I'll bring it back in the form of bad breath.

I WRITE TO YOU THE following sentences from a city with tattooed eyebrows arched in confusion: We took an oath of silence when we had our first conversation. the sugar soaked up the coffee spilled and the coffee dissolved the sugar and the daylight ate the stars while the darkness flushed the sun, it is our sworn duty to forget half of this and to write our memoirs on the backs of used train tickets, on a plane home, our asses spread over the grasses like butter on bread.

I HAVE SEEN the mad violinist, and he always has the hiccups. hiccuping down the street followed by a boy who constantly wears an expression on his face that seems to say "EEH!" or perhaps, "EI!" in front of the house with the one green shutter & the topless farmer's wife, and I got lost between here and Paris, and then again within Paris, sucked into the labyrinth whose only Minotaur is the realization hat there is no Minotaur, sleeping int eh same clothes I've worn for three days, while great white horses arrive at avocados, smashed over lemon juicers standing on the tops of steeples!

I WANT TO ASK YOU a question in the form of a gesture of changing seasons. I want to tell you everything I was ever afraid to say in one word or some falling leaves or an illegal shipment of cherry blossoms over the border into summer but it's much easier instead to write a postcard and mention something about a cowshed. Consider this not a lover letter from a writer of technical manuals but rather a technical manual from a lover! All the best.

NO ONE ever runs away to join the circus. You join the circus and the circus runs away with you. One moment you're deep in remembrance of marbles and piracies and next thing you know you're wearing a fancy dress and standing on a horse. There are some questions, for instance, is it us dreaming of clowns, or rather the clown dreaming of us? Maybe there is a circus between here and Paris. Maybe there is a comically small car we can all squeeze into, big shoes and all. Maybe the traveling circus is the only thing that stands still...

©2007 Jonathan Reeve. All Rights Reserved.

contact: jon dot reeve at gmail