Poetry by Kenji C. Liu

Frankenstein + Poem = Frankenpo
An invented method through which one or more carefully chosen text bodies are collected, disaggregated, randomized, merged, rearranged, erased, sewn back together, and reanimated with a high voltage jolt.

Maggie and Tony[1]

 

this birthday detrimental, let’s eat undesirable asian men, rice congee,
taiwan beer, lick emasculated stitches.

no, let’s eat spectrum definitions, hyper-masculine pork, average
noodles, drunk business men.

let’s eat asleep men craving toxic enjoyable, with a taste for
submissive sesame, standing sex, cautious sticky vegetable.

oh fussy steam lunch. more fluid non-binary men please, some
halfway polite, rice cake anomaly serving mahjong noodles, al dente.

dinner walks in the rain! creep scene with angry soup fish. hungry
dead in the unpacking mirror. empty shoes.

tonight, who will dismantle? strange, virile men in a tea lunch
typhoon? who wants the beautiful hole of deprived objects?

 

 

 

Megathrusters Are Go![2]

 

whereas: we find evidence of dressed robots suffering an extinction economy
of perfect rules and heroic fine body. laborers by certificate, newly bones,
tractor life outgunned. we eject over a gate forest, the interdependent
shore. touch the formidable vessel state. royal defilements exceeding nirvana
territory, infrascanners attaining the same hundred emptiness fog. the benign
sacrifice of citizenship, the filial language that respectful ruins. svaha! all birds
are emptiness carrying parasamgate, bring torch. slave bodhisattvas erupt emanating
canceled skandhas. be it enacted: no separate body of ruffled servants, alien states,
no secret sariputra robots. no dead practicing dollars, crashed mountain
rites. rectify. doom organs, stir across the bodhi capitol. the powerful broke in us.

~

hurry me, eyes—we’re ended. your strange rituals. it’s me crying,
strange! mother, my lonely pipe. how the animal wraps my eggs.
i never looked dead much. the Chinese! auspicious your republic,
like it’s here. to ghost ride your sugar and cotton and stone.
when you’re a reality star, everywhere dies! popped blood business.
listen face gunman fuck you fuck understand? this dead Japan.
big flesh comfortable, a drunken factory tease. monster for anything
gangster, greedy lover, overreaching market. it’s harakiri!
venereal meat in your underpants, spawning gilded swollen
descendants. come weeping, burn scared incense in the flesh
door. vanish the independence, watch imperial show instead.
i’m a stop country, a loose organ hook. god doesn’t like ashes.
monster rubber son, bandit grandchildren, meet your greedy
hanging heads. i’m a red nuclear republic samurai. i salt you.
breathe once, lose seven!

~

call the border and get a dead exchange,
a man for disaster tyrant, interconnected symbiosis.
zero wind country circles the oil-moistened bush,
membrane labor, the state knows thrusting work,
a destruction dick working lost curses, hard trembled legs,
trade crotch released, the climbing throbbing arsenal,
nipple swell a four star terrific obscene eagle wall,
walk slowly a nation over hack vastness, spewing,
just terrific shape, the pressure-bloated soldiers,
shapes of wet flesh, politician obscenities thrusting
nuclear hungry, say you irresistible losers, squeezing
we come aroused, moaning bad bubble guns,
vibrant wounded, our ashes blown by a governmental
species, rimming mouths vote into country flesh,
engenders grand bullet licking, and at the star border,
a stinking pig swarm, a no-good vulgar cartel,
oh galaxies, come tongue, dusky orgasm we see you…

 

[1]     Frankenpo of the English subtitles from In the Mood for Love and a feminist article on the emasculation of Asian American men

[2]     Frankenpo of (a) Confucian Analects 1.1 + Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 + The Heart Sutra (translated by TNH) + summaries of Voltron (1984) episodes 1 and 2, (b) obituary for Mifune Toshiro + English subtitles from Wu Nien-jen’s 1994 film Dousan, and (c) Donald Drumpf’s announcement of his candidacy for president + transcript of Drumpf’s video taped comments about women + his “apology” + Takahashi Mutsuo’s gay sex story “The Hunter”

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