Damian Garside

DRY

there is no everyday
there is no ssme street

everything has
been disconnected

there is no
same old

go home
pretend that home
is still as you
have always known it
nothing
has fallen into ruin
nothing has been resprayed

watch all the cheap
global disaster extinction
level event
end of the planet movies

you can get your hands on
an election is coming

you will need
to drink the drinks’ cabinet dry

GONE

same street
same street

you are walking down
the same street
could switch to
automatic
know this street
so well

same street
but not quite
the same street
not
the same street
at all

street has, whoops!
gone
hit by a stick
of huge dumb bombs

was here
a second ago

now you see it

now you don’t

no one sees it
street has gone

no one sees it
no one

sees you

BANDANA

she wore
her bandana
with relish

consumed every
banana I bought her
with radical abandon

and I just
sat there immobile
like a can of stewed fruit
as
she proclained herself

nothing
for her to gorge on here

nothing appetizing
about my
no-
name
pictureless
house brand label

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Is this the poem
you have been monitoring?
Is mine
the face in the feed
from your spy satellite?

Are their words here
that triggered
your security
algorithm?

And, even if you
loved or liked this poem

are you
going to swoop down
and arrest or
assassinate me
in the middle of the night?

WITH WHAT PASSION?

with what passion
do you make love
Oh my sacred soldier

returning from duty
returning from the kill?

does it excite her
that she can smell
death on you, taste
the predator inside
of you

do you murder each other
ecstatic touch upon
ecstatic touch

no seeming end to
your divine lust

the whole night through
the lurid love
that you do here
fulfil

viewed
       here
     through the cold, dead, eyes of those
     tortured, slaughtered,
                         mercilessly abused

a different,
alien perspective

FLAME

so committed
to the horror
they ignore,
overlook, suppress
the flame

Oh, brief terrible candle,
do you not know
that it is possible
for the atoms
in your body
to reach critical mass?

that you could blow
like a regular backya
plutonium warhead
take out a street, a city,
a neighborhood

and even then
they would not listen
would find
the spin to
cover their sins
hide their complicity
deflect all blame

but you burn small
tiny, a brief candle,
your death your own
no spreading
no lingering

sign of how deep
it runs, all
the refused shame

ONCE AND FOR ALL

was talking to you
but then
you evaporated
tried to speak
more loudly
but it was
to no avail

but what is space
anyway
but a construct
of gravity
when we are hurtling
in our group
of forty galaxies
towards some
great attractor
billions of light years
away in space

hundreds of kilometres
a second
how do you even
start to
wrap your mind around it
but for relativity
such a speed would
be impossible
to comprehend

and
the fabric of the Universe
expanding above light speed
about to strip
the stars
away from us
and all else

this and more
I get from skimming through
all those YouTube channels
finding an
alternate politics
to chart how deeply runs
the establishment lie

pictures of the war, of
slavering holy savagery

mind-bending theories
of our origin, identity
and destination

disasters to
end the planet
once and for all

I was going off and this
when they decided it
was right
and proper

a political necessity
to turn you
and your world
to ash and rubble

an insane vision
that somehow,
for my sins, I do not share

BATTLEFIELD

butterfly
fluttered over

the battlefield
trench war
combined arms
cyber war

tanks
versus chlldren

butterfly was looking
for someome, anyone
to give some
kind of explanation

but we
are humanity

we kill in the name of
all we hold dear

incapable of
the art of transormation

REPAID

anger
from above

anger
from below

and here it is,
their
meeting point

where all the debts
and offences
of our kind

get
monstrously repaid

RATHER

send me to Hell
rather than Israel

put with the wicked wicked,
thrice wicked poets
and beloved philosophers
who got everything wrong
with every evil
left-winger
who went to extremes
to get justice for humanity

not with oligarchs and Presidents
and chief
executive officers
of Corporate entities
and those whose mouthings
about
and tinkerings with
the dream of democracy

led to
the crushing of humanity
beneath such unconscionable power

send
me

to Hell

rather than to Israel