Eleven Poems
Poem for Infants
The moon is a late night snack for bats
And toothless old ladies. A somnambulist,
The moon peeked into a young girl's window.
“Here, moon, take my pink polka dot hairbow.”
The moon slipped into a lonely man's bed,
With its gray sheets and electric blanket.
“You grab that extra pillow. Come closer.”
The moon strolled into a busy butcher's shop.
“Go ahead and confiscate my knives, moon,
I can no longer tolerate so much bloody flesh.”
The moon tried hard but got nowhere close to
The neglected prisoner's cell. Near cock crow,
The moon sneaked up to a writer.
Looking Over his thin shoulder, the moon blushed
To see that he had filled page after page
With--what else?--”moon, moon, moon...”
Guarded by two dogs, the moon is a crazed mirror
You can walk through, to reach nothing, at last.
Jaws
Crawling, walking or flying, everything with a mouth
Gravitates towards food, crossing a wide lawn at dusk
In sub-freezing temperature, or even the dark ocean,
In a vomit-sloshed hull, if needed, or breaching walls,
To stand, finally, on a touristy street, peddling grass
Grasshoppers or faux watches, or bomb then patrol
The seething natives, passing out candies. It's hard
To keep your mouth shut, even when stuffed, but I
Am not just the contents of my belly, after all. I am
My best photo. All else, text or flesh, are slanders.
Hold the Applause!
God doesn't blunder, He has chosen me
To write this asskicking poem. Shut up!
So I can listen to His dictation. Boldly,
I can claim inspiration. I am, I say, I
n the employ of God and His angels,
The true authors of this divine poem.
There are six billions before Him, yet He always
Selects the right cog for the right job, each time,
Condoleezza Rice for her gig, and me, for this.
Get out of my way, punks, so I can do justice
To this backboard-breaking, rim-bending,
Triple pumping dunk of a poem, after leaping
Over a pyramid of squinting cheerleaders.
It's Only Me, Don't Maim Yourself Yet
Three doors marked: There's bourbon
And dancing behind this; A brick wall
Awaits you; and Why not? You enter
A dark room to be crossed in silence
Where another naked body is waiting,
The one you thought had escaped or,
Most likely, just another random soul
Waiting to be entered or enter, in silence,
Your father instead of a husband or a wife,
Your stepmother perched on a stepladder,
Her skirt fluttering, a wet dog, a mumbling
Foreigner or a teenager, lips puckered.
Over a prone body, a naked lightbulb,
Not to be turned on, or it will explode
Into your momentarily sated eyeballs.
Dang!
I thought I had writer's block, but my wheezing doctor
Opined I was braindead, paralyzed or merely absent
For a century or a day, from this airport lounge, foodcourt
Or racetrack, where brightly-dressed tricksters and fools
Congregate to trade fates. Anyway, you won't recognize
My ghost as it strides from the wall, skinny and priapric.
Speaking of going away, never accept chocolate pudding
From a grinning stranger, fairy or not, or you'll never espy
Your mama again, not that you'd want to. In my country
Of dismal birth, the dead are chopped up and stir-fried
Thrice daily, to make sure us living won't join them
For a banquet of sloes, hoggins and other regrets.
Some Kind of Cheese Orgy
As soon as I got off the boat, I stepped on a slice of cheese.
The cheese is cheesier here. The non-cheese is also cheesier.
I ate cheese with both hands, wishing I had one more hand.
“Don't bother chewing your cheese, dude, it'll chew itself.”
My cheesy thrill was enhanced by the sight of everybody else
Also drowning in milk, whey, milkfat, milk protein concentrate,
Salt, calcium phosphate, sodium citrate, whey protein concentrate,
Sodium phosphate, sorbic acid as a preservative, acpocarotenal
(Color), Annatto (color), enzymes, vitamin D3 and cheese culture.
I couldn't seduce them into eating cheese with their mouths wide open.
Good Morning, Good Night
Mud leavened by blood,
Pee, casual spit and semen,
This earth is a fruit, that's clear,
Not round but heart-shaped,
With a stem sticking out
Of the North Pole, long before
John Hudson thought he had
Found yet another way home.
(He, his boy and the sickest
Were left adrift on the icy bay.)
Anyway, my generic droppings,
Like your mama's, contribute
To this gorgeous fruit's gravity,
Its peacock pride, its teeming
Orgies, parades and carnages,
Cloaked by a sky sans gender.
Just this morning, finding myself strangely vertical,
I doffed an imaginary hat at the blushing, winking,
Cliché horizon.
I Owe You These Lines
Welcome, friend, I give you
My very best friend, to eat.
I did not kill my best friend, friend,
Although I did rejoice at his death,
As I would rejoice at your death,
As you would, no doubt, fall over
Laughing at news of my demise.
With the sharpest or dullest knife,
Whatever's handy, I'll point the tip
Of my blade at your jugular vein,
Observe your jiggling jaw, ask
About your questionable taste
In wine, painting and poetry.
Fall is my favorite season, I somberly reflect,
As your blood pools in the sharp morning air,
As I incise a clean cross on your funny belly,
As I gut you, glancing over my thin shoulders.
Grounded
Soon, we'll kiss this denuded earth. OK,
Bad joke time: Stewardess to frequent flyer
On a long-haul flight, “You want red or white
With your dinner, Sir?” He answers, “Do you
Have any other color?” Imagine thriving
On a tropical, volcanic island of only a hundred people,
With no truck or sports with any other, where your menu
For decades on end consists of lobsters, turtles and turtle
Eggs and a dozen flightless or weak-flying birds, where
The tah tah love of your life will turn out to be, inevitably, one
Of your countless sisters, maybe the youngest, who's barely
Toilet-trained, or the constantly scolding mother-substitute,
Your oldest sis, who's always on your ass for nothing at all.
To escape her gleeful bitching, you can always dash and duck
Into the brightly lit, always empty free library, where every word
In every book means nothing at all. What's London, annex,
Missile, fashion or alarm clock? That's why you've resigned
To drink in the same sun sinking daily into the mute horizon.
Vietnamese for uptight?
__, _éo or __t all mean fuck.
__t is fuck in northern Vietnam, fart in southern Vietnam.
__ m_ means fuck mother, used to express frustration. __ m_ mày is fuck your mother, used to convey hostility.
__ alone is not aggression. There are no Vietnamese equivalents of I will fuck you up,
he dicked me over, this is all fucked up or don't fuck with me.
C_t means shit. Vietnamese already see turds often, so they don't need to be
reminded, no voided victual after every other word. Ngu nh_ c_t means
Stupid
as shit. Mày ch_ng bi_t cái _éo gì means You don't know fuck, as opposed to
You don't know shit.
Bú c_c means suck dick, bú l_n means suck cunt, both used to express I will fuck
you up.
Vietnamese don't say You bleeding cunt, like the English, but You crippled cunt.
Vietnamese has two definitive articles, con and cái. Con is used for living things,
such as con whale, con boy, con prick. Cái is used for supposedly inanimate
things, such as cái planet, cái house, cái vagina. Cái also means female and is
even used as a prefix in northern Vietnam, as in Have you seen cái Hillary lately?
Some Vietnamese dodge words for vagina: b__m, butterfly, chim, bird, c_a mình,
body's door. For anus: h_u môn, back door. For schlong: d__ng v_t,
male
object, h_ b_, lower apparatus. One can also say, for all of the above, ch_ kín, the
hidden place. Your hidden place or mine?
The English uptight used to mean close, intimate, as in She and I are uptight.
Double Double Portraits (long version, well strung, as in horses, as in thief)
Next, I will translate you into you.
Have you been translated lately?
How long has it been since you've been translated?
When was the last time you were translated?
How much long, length of time, since the last time you were translated by someone, a person, human being, biped, other yourself?
Take a deep breath. Are you translatable?
Scholars agree that this translation is more reliable, more accurate, more true than the original.
He translates by looking up each word, including “a” and “the.”
That's no mirror, dude, it's a translation.
Two unique translations, side by side, both useless.
I translate so much, I don't even know I'm translating. Am I translating? Sorry to be translating again. Now you translate, I insist.
I translate everything, Greek, dolphins, paperweights, the city of Philadelphia.
The only thing I can't translate is squirrel. Squirrel syntax and slang crash my hard drive.
Poetry is the illicit booty gained through the strenuous or glib art of translation. I got it right, finally. (I just translated that from squirrel.)
Translation is in fact the engine of much of the world's poetry.
Without translation, poetry would be reduced to a few ballads sung by your upstairs neighbor, on his balcony, at 3AM.
We must localize our poetry production, to reduce our self-destructive addiction to translation.
Translation, like jazz, is a form of revenge.
Translation, like jazz, is a tool of imperialism.
Translation, like jazz, is an improvised explosive device.
I cannot mistranslate. I don't even know how.
He thinks it's a virtue to translate away from the original.
My translation is way longer and way bigger than yours.
“Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness.”--Pascal
Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.