A poem by Liam Burke
Ode to Wesley Snipes’ CGI eyes in an alternate ending to masterpiece of early 21st century film, Blade: Trinity
I get it, Wes –
some days all I can do is phone it in myself,
uncooperative as a dead vampire
on a hospital bed. Most days I’m too
obstreperous to love the things I love.
If I had a stunt double
he’d be living my life for me by now.
He’d do my workouts, write my papers;
eventually there would be some debate
as to which of us was the real Liam.
I don’t mean to abdicate – but neither
would I like to die a slow death
by inactivity without so much as a
cheap pair of CGI eyes, hard bargain
for safe passage across the veil.
We see the dead more sharply than the living
because the living are living in flux.[1][2]
[1] In some ways my good days are worse than my bad.
I feel like my stunt double. Unable to offer
the intransigent body a sliver of quarter.
[2] We sit on minor seconds reaching to
resolve to our roots. We wear masks of cotton,
not wax. Our time ever shorter.
Liam Burke (@liamjmburke) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. He is most recently the co-author of 'machine dreams' with natalie hanna (collusion books, 2021) and ‘Orbital Cultivation’ with Manahil Bandukwala (2x4, forthcoming). His work has most recently appeared in Savant-Garde, the Jupiter Review, and long con magazine.