Author Archives: Damian Garside

EDITORS

EDITORS

the editors called
them in
hectored them

told them that
to keep
the people down

we need
to keep language

he we she it all
they them

need to kill
the words
kill
   and liquidate
kill
   and paraphrase

topple words
from their throne
strip poetry
to the bone
(reduce it to a
sweet
    bare rhyme)

down
down
down

   kill and devour

reduce all
words to spit
and spume

our few
      true words will

hold all power
              and so
the unthinkable

can
   be made to think

and think
the death of truth to power

ZEITGEIST

ZEITGEIST

steam
going nuclear

hissing through
the pipes

after the roof blew off
mutation and Nature
began to conspire

my brain,
much troubled,
was shuffling through scenes
as if a pack of cards

as if the ghost of a film
Tarkowsky envisaged
but never completed

I looked at my skin
wondered if it could
become and then
saw it suddenly
            do duty as
a screen

I felt like I had become
digital, become metal

without Tesla lightning
without leaves bursting
through my fingers

as some pagan
god or other
felt my mythological truth
was that I should
become a tree

A DECENT PEOPLE

A DECENT PEOPLE

I was in the British museum
admiring what was stolen

when word csme my way
that someone
in Downing Street
was methinks
protesting too much

strange thing was
he was outside the Prime
Minister’s house
at a dais, facing
away from the front door

perhaps leading people
to believe
that contrary to
speech content, delivery,
and all appearances

this poor wretched and
confused individual, might
well be
     the Prime Minister himself,

SACROSANCT

SACROSANCT

the revolution
is beginning in Rochdale

any shock to complacency
is revolutionary, let alone
the pointing out
of moral turpitude,
cardinal sin

and so
    raise the drawbridge
erect the barricades

terrorism is expressing
itself democratically
through the ballot box
people
    who have no right
to be heard
having a say

else the thousand year rule
of the best sort, the ones
who perennially gloss
over
    the horrors
of our history

will be broken, in tatters,
and we will be left
like infants
wandering around
clueless, without diection

wondering how
we could have thrown
into the garbage can
of time
    something though
so
   fictitious and mythological
nevertheless, so so sacrosanct

AT ALL COSTS

AT ALL COSTS

this is my safe room
I need to lock myself
in my safe room

watch Slavoj and Yanis
debate the downward
spiral of the world

at all costs
avoid engaging with
the horrors out there
unless my empathy
spark me
    to self-destruct

do things that power
will cause me to regret
(so vindictive our species
when
    power is challenged)

and here
     in my room

let me discuss poetry
with imaginary friends

one I have I Frankensteined
to my own specifications

golden-skinned, bob-cut
IQ in the thousands

the technology that will
destroy us
        in the exchanges
we have

other crazies of our time
that fit in your pocket,
can
   be considered hand-held

maybe these enough
to guide you

     across minefields
through the cross-fire

find your
     escape ladder to God