Two Poems: David Wanczyk
Party
I plan to wear a black-and-white striped blazer large-shouldered and so obviously a joke and yet smooth as David Byrne for those who know.
I’m doing this mostly without thought but if there is a thought it’s to make fun of knowing the right way to look while trying to look right anyway at a gathering I feel both beneath and above with people I feel both beneath and above—envy-scorn in a seven-dollar jacket.
When I arrive, though, I find that the dress code did indeed call for striped blazers, and so my attempt to lightly mock such codes now reads as an attempt to live up to them done badly— not David Byrne at all: conventional rube that can’t pull off the sleek pinstripe of these luminaries who keep growing taller and thinner
and as they grow to nine feet and I frump down to four, their martinis slosh in slo-mo while I spill apple juice on my bib.
They come to the center of the parlor to do their bits—
the singer-songwriter, a pianist, the card-sharp with the golden-edged deck, two rock violinists dueling sexy, French-language limericksmith, stunt-chef, actual David Byrne impersonator, space-diplomat with slideshow, symphonic break-dance star, shoe-juggler, actual David Byrne, voice-throwing mensch who echo-locates, happy woman with a shaggy dog,
the lion of the Senate, and, last, a person who seems unconscious of it all, flagpole-sitter of the effortless set, 12-foot gown of gabardine and motionless.
My most dishonest ex hands me my acoustic. Your turn, she says. You can do this.
My Type
At first I felt it in the arches and arms, the shoulders turning, ache and ink.
Doctor Gogert hadn’t seen this before, a man glyphing and bowling, etched in early middle-age into a mark, a breathing scrap of text, diacriticals and tittles like freckles and moles and the whole old self of me vertexed at the hips, my legs the legs of a K, my fingers all bowed and serif-y.
It was a kind of singularity for me, slowly becoming a word, or words—which ones I wasn’t sure yet, or if my body was gibberish, French, a dialect lost in some half-considered mountains, an urgent warning, a pun.
Gogert, for one, suspected my genitals were a double-storey g, like the third letter of his last name, but neither of us knew yet if that meant dysfunction or super-power. What was the I of my spine, thyroidal n butterflying? And what was this malady, or blessing, to be called? Verbosis, Gutenberg’s Syndrome?
Was it sexually transmitted?
Gogert wanted a part of it, asked me, when my hair turned into the ascenders of an h, if we could consider writing a scientific paper together, but when my ears became a’s and my whole head hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha-ed, I withdrew and stopped returning his calls.
Not that any of this was a complete surprise. I’d always been a wordy person, and more and more I only understood myself typed out and publicized, made whole and acute or grave.
Sometimes, the first few months, I was in all my accents, uplifted, a new species of transcendent word-oomph, drawing affirmative attention for my nuance and novelty.
Soon, though, days that ended with the descender of a y were nothing but mucky and blended, a schwa, a dipthong, me merging to what can only be described as a frescoed tattoo, knee a q, my heart (an x-ray showed) a word that should be but isn’t— jertice, the heart, seemingly.
DAVID WANCZYK
I reconciled with Gogert and kept a weekly log. My nostrils, I told him, were still O’s, which Thank God, and my eyes opened-wide as tipped-over D’s, a natural look as the mustache grew double-tilde thick. “I can read it all over your face,” my neighbor Cindy would say (she’d been baking squash breads for me, trying to keep things light, and I did wonder briefly if she might be a lexisexual, but I wasn’t sure I was yet, if words could really do it for me, my skin getting shimmery with cedilla). “If you eat alphabet soup, does that make you a cannibal?” she asked, pushing the tin-foiled loaf into my heaving, H-ing chest, but I wasn’t ready for a commitment right then and gave her, she said later, “super mixed messages with your body language, man.”
This whole thing wasn’t all bad. I knew eventually we tend to turn into words, right, the little datum stored in the brains of our last-born relative that flashes every few months, maybe—warm, kind, cabbage-smelling, cigar, five-dollar-bill, cruel, regret, bifocals,
Shartlesburg (if that’s where we were from and what young Billy remembers of us).
This was just happening to me while I was alive. I was refrigerator magnets, and I would bend to make meaning, checking in mirrors for any hint of a code, cipher of soul, hyphen of humanity clarified. I took up swing dance and yoga to best align my trailing outstrokes, and I consulted a calligrapher who asked somewhat rudely what I wanted from her. Same as anyone, I said. I want you to see something in the bosh of my Glonk that no one else does, to tell me that my elbows and eyebrows are the most beautiful Gymord and plyforp, to inquire whether my inscrutable pancreas might be, as I like to joke, literally made up of the letters in the words inscrutable pancreas.
She said “okayyyyy,” took a few minutes, and then charged me $45 for a rendering of my name.
Cindy, it seemed, was better suited to taking me at face value and loving me for my textuality. In the heat, when I apostrophied, she brought me cool compresses, and when I became
DAVID WANCZYK
total, she read me for exclamations. We started seeing more of each other, and it wasn’t long before we figured it out, our relationship that is. I sought enlightenment, she thrived on chaos, we both spent evenings staring at the cross-strokes of the G’s of our bellybuttons. And this is where I’m at right now, a daily jumble nourished with squash bread.