eight poems
by Feng Sun Chen

X

plastic nativity scene
with light-emitting diodes tight as knots.

the hard jaw of the skyline clenching itself in sleep.

pigeons with hot little pigeon hearts tacked into it.

am useless.

underneath my clothes are fists.

expect you will sparkle with this bright.

this kind of stripping
would choke us.



Y

am sore.
am quite religious. it is a cramp in my neck.
it's faith that you are not a zombie.
that what is heard is going on.
that your writhing is felt.

that this is not an elephant on a raft going to singapore.

you
are a brilliant god, famously neurotic, fixated
on vibration and pulling out what is wrong
then putting it back in.

my prayers happen lying down.



[i can hear your hair growing sounds like grass growing sounds like water
water sounds like small eyes turning
global angiogenisis waggles millions of sea anemones
says it's not just skin receding says hair growing sounds like this
don't burn anything don't burn any
and i said ok i will not and kissed the ground with the wrong lips]



black / hole

the sound of a larynx / first sex

smuggled through the streets / in back of your closet

a closet within a closet / primeval and hot

what if kites were larynx / we could fill the sky with

negative stars



[this is not interested in closing up through sometimes it is threading the needle is frustrating like beingwithyou and satisfying but mostly it is the opening that is great and how the stuff splatters though this is fake and neat like my teeth because i have known dull people and they can appreciate the plain red blast the human boybug eyelids like hymens crushed boiled smashed and mama tells me she wanted more than anything to be a red guard these blank red eggs from the past bludgeoning butterflies intellectuals the brain like butter a glob of shiny wet butter this is a champion breakfast really sometimes when i eat break fast i have too much feeling though i don't think about much really and beingwithyou haunts me like a washed brain]



axis

more or less functional because of inverted loss.
loss is lost.
a box of candies, literally.

you are reading this
so my invisible purrbox gurgles with linnet wings and you squeal
as bee-loud scales confetti all over the page.

am capable of…



[unify is an ugly world
it is like a unicorn weird hard appendage stuck through its huge skull
it is rather necrophilic and problematic like freud…
unisex is just sex
maybe it would be more interesting to think of mouths and consumption
and america where i was born am born
and the soft guillotine of invisible hymen
and you must play marie you must you must
i only get off when i am the punishment
imagine the things i imagine…
artifice is arousing in slices
actuality and bloodworks are not…
this is no good at playing surgeon
but it is hard to make anything interesting
isn't it baby
pretty gallimard
your fatty gorged heart is slick and pretty]



PEG 1

In the undream when Pan entered my bedroom and put his hoof
through the brick wall brick wall like so much cake and butter

and then smeared it over my ungowned body
we took on the project together
of letting panic into the world
through the snail gait of mary tinged lymph
as the hairs on my chinny spread apart and the one
eyed needle pumped its art into the cauliflower nerves
waving signs protesting nothing
nothing is stronger than a pain-net
and it was actually an operating room with an antlered bed
a sarcophagus masquerading as esophagus
masquerading as a barn house and I the peg fetus in a public school
small blind hands blowing into the cyst of my preserved nature
and panic vibrated bliss through body
the pain grapes shining high over the rubber fox
and we were all in the business of amnesia
when I could call myself a poet crushing the nurse's hand
gazing up at the laminated poster of white beach palm tree
Helvetica RELAX
and see the gaping red porn of my contact with scalpel world
and see the panic flatten out into the sterile
and see the useless dark lymph flood from the pure dirty
unpopulated birth place
for a while without shame
for a while the white bright cut farm
and the soft slug without statement.



PEG 2

From the soft chandelier of my living room ribcage
hangs the cannibal eyes on wax stalks.

The eye it is ecstatic.
In its hooded flesh life it is wet with itself.

Perhaps it is within a museum of bad
because the light is sustained by bad, good bad.



PEG 3

But it is also the cannibal eye
that cries the adaptive joy.

Even in opulence
the optical speech rules

and sticks out its marine foot in want
through the lonely here-now deadlines.

*

I held mary in my arms and her eyes were shutting
her eyelids dew without the grass
mary slipped through my fingers
dried into brown crust.
I slowly remembered the brown ring around your moon
your black moon
orificial star.
Mary flows through the black moon.



PEG 4

We sit under the chandelier glow
around the shrinking carcass

thinking it is here in the mound museum where love was born.
Love was born and the earth seared

and elsewhere mounds roil in mound shit
and I get up to go to the kitchen, soft hands for detergent

for the cake pan. It is your birthday today
and I am going to eat you.

*

So you admit that you stole the elixir.
What can I do to assuage your pain?
That now you have seen the future.

Mary is condemned to live in the crocodile globe of the moon
to make medicine.

I held mary in my arms it was hard to walk.