Damian Garside

SWALLOW

you put
coins on my eyes
but I swallowed them

death
is such a
hard thing to
swallow

hard act to follow
imagine singing The Beatles’
“A Day in the Life” while
you wait for the
traffic to
stop
for all eternity

digging your own quiet
picturesque grave
but gravity forcing you
down down down

one of those
birds circling your head
not making
it summer

DISTANCE

distance between our
first and
last civilizations

just a blink of an eye
who knows how many
thousands
and thousands
of years

such difference between their
long lost world
and ours so
clearly in decline
on its way out
we lacking the magic
of their wisdom, smarts
and
pure technology

ENOUGH

I feel I might make it
might just have enough

so hold off on all those bandages
banging me up
in some sarcophagus

and there to leave me
at absolute ebb
just ticking over

a thousand years of sand
until my tomb is opened
by explorers from what
is now
the world’s new
great superpower

and when they wake me,
scene from your classic
Hammer horror
and despite my own
true self I do indeed
death curse them

though hardly moving
with the grace
and the fluency
of Mr Muhammad Ali

and they
having survived —
who knows what calamities
the cosmos, the planet
their own
grievous species stupidity
happened to
inflict upon them

walking into this death trap
just in order
to find me
take
a selfie with me
get to know me better

take a few crucial
vital measurements
and get
their Ph Ds.

NEW

old Ez
told me
told you

to treat each word
like a wooden block
a carved wooden block
bearing
the ideogram perfect
for this spot

but all these words in
some kind of crazy pattern
Canto after
Canto bouncing across
the page

and you in a cage
caught flirting with fascism
seduced into this madness
by Renaissance
economics
by Oriental sage

and your guard
kind of like the boy next door
nothing more American
than his
Thompson sub-
machine gun

your thumb snagging on the wire
a droplet of blood
to attest to
true causality

keep it simple, Classical,
make it new

Sent from my iPhone

WHITE DRESS

I peel you out of your
white skin-
tight dress

as if you were a
succulent
forbidden fruit

your brown brown flesh
so supple, smooth

and taste
where I drink wild
enough to
throw me
a psychedelic trip

in you and
fused with the Universe

WARNING

warning
I am carbon life-
form

and this poem is
about to go blinding flash
full supernova
across the page
destroying and creating

dooming at the speed of light
huge swathes of the galaxy

and all because
of another carbon
life form of my own species

but whereas the carbon
of which I am compounded
is pretty bog-standard

hers is
light-loving, light-
defining

supernova-inducing in
its beauty so, so diamondesque

BLANK

safe as houses
take it
to the bank

but when if all
went dustball
do not
pass Go
take
a hike

every single tinny
tin think tank

came up
snake eyes
with
all that
house money

hit the wheels
and one-
arm bandits

drew a
winterwonderland
blank

PRAYER

I pray this poem
does not degenerate
before you reach
the final stanza

thanks to physical decay
or cultural decline

the power of poet
and poetry slipping together

ironically,
the only true synchrony
in this
disjunction of a
life

we are the collective noun
for zombies
we died
and were raised
from the dead
to be life-in-death
avatars
preaching the gospel
the mass-media gospel
that is scripted
by finest hive minds
politically sub-
edited and
corporation approved

I’m a zombie
you’re a zombie
no consciousness
but we
work like clockwork.