Damian Garside

had to battle my
way to the garden gate
and along the garden path
to avoid his wife’s
deadly creatures, Doctor
Frankenstein having
restored them
from thing called death
to thing called life

the latter, at this time,
for beings deemed inferior
infinitely preferable
in the minds of those
for whom they forever
constitue
a serious problem
life best reserved for
the good and the rich

and so, ushered in,
I did speak with
the great firebrand
asking of him, quite simply,
that he
do show me the way
to convert pen traversing paper
or fingers attacking keyboard
into a manner of address
designed to inspire
and, yes, shame
shame, shame
particularly that shame
that is due
for having no shame.

SOUL

I’ve had it
with these poets

gonna go
full Hannibal
gonna
go Buffalo Bill

gonna dig a deep
fat hole
in somebody’s
basement

give them
the hose
until
they stop
writing little
little little
all whisper and muffle
and sort of
sense tickle

until they surrender
to brutality
and show me
their soul

BUFFALO BILL HITS THE CIRCUS

was at the circus
but the tent fell
down
swamping poets,
academics
and other clowns

maybe the pole was broken
no way steadfast Shakespearean

perhaps
Nietzsche’s concept
of evil which
I did lately relate
offended every deity,
was tempting fate

a direct dereliction
of poetic duty

speaking of which
         when those poets
copped it
not much, to use my TS
word should be
bewailed as
    having been given
much
    lilting solipsism there
sweetest narcissism

stuck in
    their own heads:
what it
means to be
        this sort of man
what it means to
be a woman
    what poetry must
become in a Zuckerberged world

and
what magic deserted when
we got skinned

those bodies even more
dumb and devoid of stuff

no
magical coat for me thenn

GODS

great
we got our journalists
picking his pockets
tapping his phone

if we
get enough dirt
on him
can use our pages
to persuade him
not to
talk about kingship
stay away
from such plays

and that one
who would phosophize us
away
from our set and staid
and hegemonic ways

would
think us
inside out and
upside down

we got the video, had
it photoshopped, PR
refined smudge
and smear aligned

shows her at her worst she
could ever be (though
neither so
bad as you, or I) but
good
enough to bring
her down

any one who thinks (gender
aside) is
a worse-than-perverse-clown)

why
do they think themselves
above all who
think what
they are
told

why else this business? Why else
the rollers
roll

serving you your world up
on a plate, we tell it as
freedom but
we all know
its fate

you
are
what you are
and what
we designate

so
test us out
why don’t you?
just give it
a try

nothing we cannot belittle
nothing we cannot dare not
cut down to
    basic size
who would have thought
crudity and super-
ficiality supreme
human virtues
who could ever have imagined
we couls write an all
new ten commandments
use all our
   new-found political
pressure to
sell them
     in the market before
entrusting them to God

you cannot challenge it
we are
perfectly set
in our mindset

lie
is truth

and
slimy and obese-
brained though we
may well be

beneath this tawdry
bleary mortal flesh

we are gods
we are gods

test our powers
you will come to believe

COPERNICAN SYSTEM REVISITED

tellers of tales
doctors of spin

can get smothered
strangled in
all that
yarn

this
how the world demands
we do not
turn
eschew
revolution

history freeze
take
everything as it
comes, it falls

without (us) and
out of the blue, within

MONSTERS

we expect
better of
our monsters

more
from them

we demand that
they be
fully
institionalized

but there again,
demand is perhaps
too strong
a word

we wake
but we
do not see
unfortunately

and thus cannot
but fail to notice
that we
fail
to notice

that in the mirror
everything is
reversed

not upside down, as
radical theory Zizeks
would have
us overthink it

just simply reversed
take a quick squizz
on your way
into the world

and you could be forgiven
for not thinking
the monster is there

SAPPHO

poem from my 2014 collection: Zero Gravity