Yu Chen

December 31, 2022

listen for the rain
that says
I’m you
in another sort of time
another sort of color
in ceramic
in augury
how the sparrows are flown!
with miles to bear
and fate equal to relinquish
—seraph in the mosaic stream
what charm in fortune
to have found your shape
haloing this dark world
to this day
the only remembrance
I've cared to desire

September 30, 2021

take Oktober
your silver ship
wreathed in fire
of silence, of love
love: phrase in the cauldron
a sky ablush
a crawling towards
a minute to deplete
do not watch me
needlessly helplessly
vanish in your starry lens
posted once bare to you
I know best of all
how easy it is to sever
and slide offworld

September 29, 2021

in the potent range
bleak awhile here gleams
no monument of you here rains
water like muscle here beckons
your resolve
like sand in a tilted hand
be glad of it
who else would you be
so many hours deep
hovered here
making mud

July 7, 2021

Do you want to leave this island
The ocean does not care
My brochure says our tracks
Will ribbon up to the sun
What a relief to have this seat
And the door at the end of the carriage to run to
When things get warm enough to know
The path of fire in the windowpane
A touch, a sign to fling past
All the bluish stars barely pulling
—But we will speed up soon
And hardly register those distant lights bending their careful courses
To catch a glimpse of us

February 3, 2021

warps the rain

slips in glow

plum of skin

on discovered bone

my almost flesh

breaks

grim or sweet

to the air before

the breath after

this tame morn

I cannot rinse

the what if

pit of it

December 21, 2020

in stillness again
gladly
the oblivion of blood that must be earned
I will not forget your rubric

February 13, 2019

if your hand were placed among other hands
in my particular table of night
in a place of few stars
to draw my eyes down to open cliffs
or the falling tempest of already you
in whose veins I would always rush
back to the heart of the tottered sea
where your soft body may still carve
the strides and wells
that become its contours inclined to me—
I would say:
may it never sweep the absence of desire
nor the perished dust of my breaking days
but perform its annotation or requirement still
to the futile immolation of lamp and moon
let’s evermore pretend this is the beginning
new worlds don’t excite me nearly as much

December 31, 2018

hyperion titan, whose glory feeds
resurrection of all the world:
wake me like that pious bird
with your outstretched arm
inviting permutation and activity
and beckon once more my resolve
past impressions of every promise
daily burned and daily buried,
that i might do more than linger
beyond the capitulation of doubt
and at the end of many days
under a piece of sky barely lit
dream to compare
your treasure and mine

November 21, 2017

The wind that wraps itself
Into the limb of night
Has brought this leaf
Straying to my window,
As if intending some watery trade
To me as I once vainly to your lips,
Those that I remember—
Fragrant artificer of clouds
By whose power might’ve been converted
How many storms’ swift scimitar
To rustles and mere murmurs of sleep.
But your barren inclination with my disaster matched
Made of inarticulate and too subtle force nothing.
Yet not nothing has my thought condensed
In the misty chamber of alleviated time
To signification beyond all trails’ decay
Behind morbid, torrential weather...
How distant you are to this leaf
Which I know in wending dream will ease away,
And from my mind’s false assignment depart—
Tomorrow, unseen, pressed out in the shade,
Richer to have given, not lost, its colors.

August 5, 2017

to pikes! o MEGALODON
my lines blood-raked
minutes gone
in vagrant waters clipped
slight halberds
take an ear, a lip
leave mine
the summoned breezes
your shimmer
like a dear, fervent star
(the right star)
that once glided o'er
the honeyed, whispering sea
in me
vivid, unseen—
but now you are here
& I love your teeth upon the foam

July 8, 2017

its drops become my finger
its seal presses upon my hair
saying: break—

beneath this convergence of light
I must open and scatter
like a dream taught to the water
by the closed, unmoving air
of summer

December 23, 2016

no more the dry metallic sun
or the red haze burnt
nor skin heavy as earth
when the wild skirmishing dust
whose cry is familiar to me
finds rest on my tongue
I will sink into this spire of wind
and this dune, the powder of my blood,
till there's nothing left to wither
but the silent uncoding dark
whose face
is familiar to me

December 2, 2016

a violent elision—
this change of color
this second bloom
the whiteness racing
against pure blue
—you might too
with mute vigor
chase morphoses
in the silver-marrowed air
or! waking
gather to yourself
in its bright extension
the time-lapse of another
parting

September 10, 2016

leftward, towards light
the only true ruin
⌵
spear in the daybreak sun
make me hands
like kinetic incense
on the mothed wind
be a relic of me
high-dispersed(( see
your memory's action
disedge and reply
elsewhere in
the grass
and
peaks
far

September 3, 2016

bit of molding on the low wall
good place to thump your brains… out
/a prudent time for deceleration
if I could slow any further

June 8, 2016

gothic blur
revisit me
salt-dazzled
frail
unshoulder my listing
to lines of ease, never—

June! how these days of nothing compile
(like meekly accentuated breaths)

June 7, 2016

I am as disembodied
as this bled-out
too-distant morning:
subtle flesh
thinly speak
close over
when I most miss
when I’m vaguely aware
the phone is ringing
fresh skin—
my best relapse
invokes dreams
?whichway which beyond

April 21, 2016

do small things
if I seem
just in time
not to see
myself in a different window
frame-rusted, chewed
voice: a whisper
sibyl    in the broken snow
scraping with her fingernails
a knot in a strand of hair
  brushed over
    grew
    lamplight in my hand

April 20, 2016

where I should begin anew
by your perfect thought
love!
my stranger
  off-pink
your maw
  open to search
save me
the trouble of departing
the study of names..
  replacement

March 14, 2016

can it come
swollen drabness
unclean
stride
and the rain gets suddenly louder darker beige done

March 10, 2016

skin of animals
all she is
corner print
ammo print
spend weakly here
prefer
silence to music
the sensation of travel
bite

March 7, 2016

leaves that follow me
in the morning
(I am quieter than you are)
—show me!
swiftness of autumn//
nothing is swept

as I move
barely

November 20, 2015

Magnolia stellata—
Your funereal bloom
Petals the ground still damp with rain,
Softens my ragged, encumbered pace
That wants to loiter and receive
Your gestured reprieve,
And remain stationed in your sullen grace
Beyond the pensive transport of night
Rolling by and gathering
All wreaths
Like smoky, mingled constellations
Into its colder arms,
And carrying with them
The maimed pallor of its own endless return.

To this place also in memory only
Will I myself come again,
Setting coarser or darkened shroud
Over your barest abstraction of stars…

September 29, 2015

Only I don’t know
How to go—
Hail, negation of pursuit!
(Somewhat more calamitous your silence is to me.)

September 15, 2015

Everything about me heals more slowly—
Rough are my walls of clay
To my own labored swipe of palm;
Their warmth is hesitant breath,
Their rifts, hard shadows’ latch.
Oh pay, pay,
So on my drowsy bones lay
What sensation of renewal may size and buy!
And when I am like an elemental wrought
To span the distance of his realm,
How green an earth would I myself guard,
How soft the closure of its lapis dome.

April 25, 2015

In blowing sand we lie waiting
Like moths in a rough cocoon
For a final swell of sunset to unbury
Phoenix in its vivid transpose of light.
Empress of ephemeral rising—
Summon perpendicular to the world
On wings of weightless fire
That brief, spun iridescence
Beckoning us to relinquish or desire
All the right things and resolve
The beauty that is possible,
The ease that wants love

March 26, 2015

Run in heart,
In loudness of blood that excites
Or numbs,
In throes of trajectory
Raw with sheen,
In choreography of rites
Long expectant—

Come the morning
I will do
Something awake
And forgive
Every imperfect match...

March 18, 2015

Back to that already shifted place
Back to those distinct preparations of the dead
Back to my dream that recalls another
(How blue, blue, blue is the east!)
Now, when even the desire to transform barely compels,
Whom shall I see anew
Walking over
So calmly
In the water

March 5, 2015

to a closeup of SATURN:
may your great, stricken wing pacing above
be my fortunate guide
through division and encounter
along vast curvatures of night
til every slender partition of me
comes to be rinsed of gild
and finds in your kinder shade
that tepid dissolve I adore

Image

February 11, 2015

Not a place to idle in,
This vale whose silence makes me slow
To approach the blush around the bend
Or retraverse demure impressions laid
On terrain unaccustomed to passage—
But corralled here,
All that my vision captures are
Alien hues,
The grayness of fire

Image

November 21, 2014

Yes the moon is what I’d like to eat
Standing in the extenuation of space
Waiting for things to come that would not
If I merely walked by

Even in a less annihilative mood
To you I still don’t know what to say
Ten fruitless summers and autumns on

September 16, 2014

Obviously I’m tied up
Between two mirrors facing each other:
My handler—

Overlap

(Who would not burn
With the ineffectual menace of a storm outside
When he is hid?)

Everything is far away:
Those makeshift sails of thunder,
Telemetrically mine,

Have almost rescinded their ardor,
Their hand
To pry me forward, shake me

Onto other custodies,
And the enactment of a spring
Never mine…

September 16, 2014

how I’m framed,
with a sickly adenium for company,
creating steam for the life after
(no doubt it would be even briefer
than the shadow of a leaf in water)
those little efficiencies,
softer spines
come unattached like a diffuse toxin
to lay me down
while the sun is
to a different degree
by

Image

August 28, 2014

drift in my atmosphere
orange & blue
you, your mission
and that backlight too
and if I seem to move
you know where to vector to
because we've seen each other do stranger things
than change the parameters of our orbit

Image

July 1, 2014

Mark the herald of a dimming hour,
Its very stifling coming near,
The other gait of its approach,
Slouched in mocking supplication;
See how it wears a coat of sinister rose
Like a shaggy surrogate of its wonted pallor—
But I am sick beyond it all,
And will not turn aside, nor avert the embassy of any look!
Come invest me with your gross posture
And chant whispers of death in my scornful brain,
And show me your sleeves burdened of ash,
The large calamity of elemental decay;
Yet I know all your grimmest ordeal
And the smoldering end of all possibility—
So, enfold me in your tattered display,
And stagger onward darker off...

Image

June 8, 2014

Stems of tea
I cannot
With ferocious effort
Sink—
You are like
The opposite
Of a name
I’m ever slower to retrieve.

March 13, 2014

track me best in muddy parentheticals
by margin of exhibits ungreeted by light
in summations of all insufficient will
feeling some maze of desperate design
what am I really meant to make out
hanging on these green-sick and moistened walls

March 5, 2014

Your brief visible life,
Near the end of its message,
Winks to oblivion
Like the crawling embers
Of a burning page—
Then let me not mar
By imperfect aperture
The fading to dark,
The subtle capture by night
Of its last curled-up remnants...

February 26, 2014

Forbear me by hours new episodes of silence
To act out slow study of associations,
And ask me to make no gestures to be seen
Of picking up small values to suborn my thought—

Then, for your best and only gift of patience,
I shall not finally neglect to requite
With all persistent proportions of beauty
Due most to those who most mutely abide.

February 12, 2014

What my best-dyed lips
Will clutch and devour
Before the closing up of dusk
When your shadow is larger than you are
And I am, like the Sphinx, collecting cards of misshapen people
And eating those unable to answer—

February 9, 2014

The little that you remember,
Like a sharp corner in a dream
Amongst landscapes all denatured
And phantoms reluctant to go,
Is really something to crash into
In a surprisingly violent way
Just when you begin to feel
Somewhat safe in the dark.

February 9, 2014

Let's rope in and be digested—
(What are you like inside?)
It will be
A room full of faces,
Some with eyes still smiling,
Covering every wall with gazes,
Not noticing as I wade by—
Oh greet me with folded arms
Like a malcontent genie
Still mulling where I can see
Your fingers touching blue,
Scraping the past-all,
Reviewing
The sequence of my distemper,
Your disquiet,
Your upset
Appetite.

February 9, 2014

switch, remit
(I do love)
the glancing way
(the coming up)
of dawn
so
unlike daylight's surfeit glare
barren, not fleet

February 9, 2014

I know your pose, your shadow draped on the rails,
Leaning to the air that will not catch you
But, parting, shows siren-like and beckons
Your silhouette to a gusty doom—
Though in this game,
With damage turned off,
You can leap from mountains without dying
And play the jester to the windy sprites
Rattling by,
Yet my breaths here looking on
Are full of ornament and unrest,
As if a harder thought
Would push you careening over
And feed you to the trailless sun
In pieces ripped or waves blushing
Like scrolls of visible turbulence
Flowered—

January 17, 2014

Under a fibrous cap,
Some bareness and reserve drily whisper
In punctured, nodding breaths
Of the cavities that house the dead,
Of those caricatures of time's addition
Sealed with limbs of mortar
All cracked.

In this place of burial,
Scratches and flakes of chalk,
Skin
Settle, reside.

December 28, 2013

How poorly I am ventilated,
To be so charted with perspiration
After mellowest exertion
From chasing nothing.

November 23, 2013

Dot smear
run
Sheath your massy wings
But not your blade's peak
Angel bestriding the world
Flash up
Swipe through
Go before me, show
Scarlet by the sun,
impale

October 20, 2013

Cold Hands for Rent
Teeming and Persistent
Austere Comfort!

October 6, 2013

I've peeled away too much again—
Now blood pools at my lip
As quickly as I can dab away
Its taste on a paper towel frantically torn.

October 3, 2013

Coconut time off—
I'm juggling (random spin) a unicode egg,
Brassy toast.
Who's here?
What a break (fighting)
Whisk together, teach me
In the morning
To feel hunger again.

September 24, 2013

Go to,
And mime with a rictus
The creak and burring of life.
Parse, parse
This canyon in my tusk
Pledged to run deeper, swifter into dust—

September 20, 2013

Across a pool of primordial pitch,
Past shadows of trees that used to breathe,
Ferry me in a little ivory bark
Onto the margin of her siphoning strand.

September 17, 2013

Where I am always approaching,
Staring tunnels into walls—
A rapid, helpless folding back
Along creases in the paint.

August 28, 2013

There is so much movement in the melting of ice—
The way bubbles agitate and warp through cracks
(Like fingers on hands of fluid applause)
Almost faster than summer's brush and wave
Can transport once more through glassy chime
Its full anthem nearly sung.

August 24, 2013

This gunmetal cloud, driven into the horizon,
Towering fearfully in the distant gradient,
Is the torso and stiff arms of a colossus
(I will lean into your heart of alloy)
That might even pull the moon close
(Giant, insentient beauty)
And break it apart over vast water.

August 22, 2013

My weight is a series of dots
Stippling a gridded pad,
But I am really made
Of feathering,
Bleedthrough,
And the unusable other side.

August 12, 2013

Creep in
All sleek dark
Resin dark
Mute—
It’s not like
I’m

August 10, 2013

Piled under sunrise,
Death in a cart
Overheard:
The streets are beautiful before people.

July 16, 2013

A little while longer
—Always my reply
To each pixel a chromatic herald
Spinning through—
But how many more frames will race over me
In seconds and
Clicks gone by?

July 14, 2013

(I think I should like to find)
Brightest meteor, bursting white
(The crater where you smoking lie)
Trailing such a gleam of tail
(When you have fallen and dusk is red)
Behind the tree-topped horizon

July 9, 2013

What's jump
Only wish
Another wreck
I know

July 4, 2013

Some day to follow
Your serene skatings by
Lodged in a groove
Long ago dimensioned
And chiseled out.

Image

June 30, 2013

Ghost in the lamp:
Buzz, buzz—
Oh I’m lanced by a filament
And become a crazed, burning smell.

June 23, 2013

The gray that your closed eyes see
Pens up leafing hierarchies
Behind escorts and stern banners
Joined to a wheeling procession.

June 20, 2013

Daylight spreads like a shivering harpy,
Wearies pursuit with tenacious chiding
Of every victorious ostentation
Barely warmed and clawing.

June 12, 2013

Your secluded eye as a scimitar bites
Its own fiendish glow
That Time’s fond prism cools and collects
In shadows like a tassel of bone.

Image

May 21, 2013

Show me horns like idols reddened,
Dancing steps lascivious and blue
In circles about your bristled fire
Gilding the frigid lips of night.

Image

May 20, 2013

Are you gathered into a clump of nerves
Fatted with milky sheaths for me to climb
Downward through a vat of marrows
Bubbling like contours of rescinded urge

May 3, 2013

With all my hoarded composure
Flood reminiscence of a slightly brighter time
Playing too faintly for my thoughts to transcribe
Past those same repeated hooks.

April 29, 2013

Olympic mole:
Silver medalist in the hammer throw,
But less competitive at the burrowing meet,
Amidst the suffocation and clamoring debris.

Image

April 25, 2013

Last chill of April—
Luckily I’m still hibernating.
One day I will want to look out,
Hopefully before winter’s hush.

March 14, 2013

Soft banana, rotting banana:
I squish you with my fingers' trip
(Not without fear of contagion)
To divine the mettle beneath your skin,
Whether carrion Time has sucked away
All your inward ripened store of state
—Or if there withstands some braver patch
Not too gross to eat