Damian Garside

Train (Snowpiercer)

You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?

SCREEN

Need to get
with our twelve-
step program

say no to
lassitude, polysemy
and poetry

soon you will wake
from high-definition dream
to high-definition reality

will be like watching
every channel through
the clearest
of all screens.

GARNISH

I have eaten crocodile
which means, in the grand
scheme of things

I am
one up on you

bacon and
rice-pudding being,
to the best of my knowledge
neither forbidden
fruits; nor
in any way exotic vegetables
such as might
truly flavour my poetry,
garnish this
particular text

it’s only my love life
that could possibly be
considered spicy

huge flesh fetishes here
and commodification
of lust interesting to see

where it leads, this stripping
away of the rituals that
assure satisfaction
via surfeit of sensuality

to that austere conjunctive
morality and cold, soulless

pornography, rapid-fire supremacies leading to
ultimate in
orgasm, true
labour-system test

the less hint of nuance,
imaginatively the best

I have
eaten crocodile, like
eating river itself.

FREELY

Muse
is not taking my calls
think she has blocked me

I imagine her sitting
in a cafe reading The Paris Review
drinking an aperitif

not wondering or
worried about me
in the slightest

or why it should be, despite
the myriad reasons not to

I have sacrificed my life for her
given her
love her
so much for those who

know nothing of her power
are so happily immune
to her seductive beauty

selling
her soul unashamedly
giving
herself freely.

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