Damian Garside

THINK OF ME

I love everybody
I hate everbody

I love you
I hate you

I love your
ideology
I hate
your ideology

your nation
I hate
I love
your nationality

ask me again
what I love
or hate

I will hold two
mirrors
up to
your face

decide then
whatever you think of me.

HOUSE RULES

there is no
poetry
about
this house

no fibre
in this room
to speak of

just so-so people
who
when the word
was elevate

when the word
was transform

were absent from school
dreaming the dreams
that children
of Empire dream

of securing power
of the ever so nicely
polite and
compliant backs

of the suffering mass
of the British people

LORD JOE

Oh great senile
lord of the world

you brain is a barn
in a hurricane,
a barn without
a door

the wind whistling, wheezing through
telling you

you need some structure
to your stupidity

and perhaps Amanda to
write and perform you
another of her
golden,
inspirational,
nonsensical poems.

MOREOVER

got shot
at point-blank range
but you say
I ran straight
into a bullet

a good bullet
moreover

one that knows
the difference between
right and wrong

a silver bullet, a golden
bullet, a Willy Wonka
eternal
gob-stopping bullet

made by the great
celestial munitions factory

over the rainbow
before that got
shot to shreds

LIZARD

are you here
to read?

or here
to monitor?

looking for the words
that cannot, must not
shalt not
be used

by universal degree
laser-etched onto paper
by lord god algorithm

(by their fruit
you may figure
this is rotten

to the core)

BY GEORGE

by George he has
won the election

by a thumping
gazzumphing
tub-thundering majority

Dundee’s master
of words, knife-thrower
by vocabulary
a voice growling like
Churchill
from the benches,
resonant, indefatigable

leaving those who battle
to string two
words together

at a
loss for any of them

HOW

how shall
all this remembered

find its way
into the the books

be retold
by the old folks

taught
in the clsssroom?

will this desperate spin
you are Hell-bent
on manifacturing

find its way from
your dizzy life-ignoring,
image-igonoring
brains onto
revered pages?

or will history be
your bitch
as truth is now?

DANCE

went to
a damce

mat at
a dance

danced
at a dance

fell
in love

danced
their dance

came
and went

from my
lifelong observations

never
danced again

things so
much happier;
simpler then

CHANCE

thank you for
sending me all
those weapons-
grade poems

in return I sent you
this end of days
story I am working on
entitled: The Day
the Earth Looked
a Bit Different

something does not
destroy the Earth, or
attack the planet
accidentally or
by intention

merely
plays around a bit
with our perception

desperate to save our
home world by
heightening our sense
that we
do not belong here
have little idea
what we are doing
and no real conviction
about who we
really are

undermining our current
compensatory drive for fixity and certainty

it is believed that this
unprovoked alien
interference and
attempted celestial
manipulation

may well be thing
to give us a fighting chance

MEASURE

measure that phrase
see what we might
distil from it

Oh the essence of that cadence
is elixir, to put it
plebian plainly
is music
to my ears

has a French know not what
syllabic ring to it

is pleasant of feel and
to the touch in exquisite extreme

would that I could write so:
be creature of delicate
supplement, careful balance

even as the world is shifting:
places where already breakneck
is even out-accelerating

and the page
the page

things seismic there, the text
spiking, falling, big fear is
cannot but
be flat-
lining somewhat shortly

as for the stage
much staggering incomprehension in respect
of beneath the boards all
tectonic plates

strike at the need to measure
but by then, of course,
too late too late