Shin Yu Pai

Sugar Daddy

after Tom Friedman

refined & white
a man made of artificial

sweetener sugar
cubed, a young girl’s

longing for something
other than Equal

every kiss, jawbreaker
brittle lolli-pop – love that rots

teeth, leaves you
w/ diabetes, obesity

the sticky saccharine
of what the body

can’t resist craving –
melting in your mouthfeel

Body Worlds

sideshow with science
at best, grosses over

a billion worldwide
Van Hagen’s moniker

brands the base of
a woman on bent knees

releasing a dense red
cloud of doves in flight

skin pulled from flesh
to fashion angel wings

the goalkeeper blocks
a soccer ball with one

hand, shows off internal
organs with the other,

dappled grey of smoker’s
lung, or just industrial air

pollution? A man parts
the horse’s mane in

the second sequence
of tai-chi, hip &

knee joints replaced
with steel, corpses

stolen from mental hospitals
the undocumented bodies

of the executed, bullet holes
found in a specimen’s head-

quartered in Dalian & Krygystan

the humanity of bodies stripped
of skin, fatty tissue, age & eye color

a cadaver sliced in two, Hirst’s
“mother & child divided,”

chain-sawed parts & not a whole
or was it “two fucking & two

watching” Von Hagen’s wife
push a rolling pin over what

was once a length of man.
In the educational model

of the body’s burden,
I feel the pounding of

my own enlarged heart.

La Quinta del Sordo

in the villa
of the deaf man
14 frescoes
painted al secco
after near-death
experience,
the silence of
a sectarian chapel
hung with coal dark
triptychs & panels
the rectangle
of an exit portal
cut away
to black