Damian Garside

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

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD MORE POSTMODERN)

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD
MORE POSTMODERN)

They put the poet on reality television.

I did not get
to see the programme;
analyse the working
out of that proposition.

what was done
in the shower.

Caught on CCTV
for all eternity.

But I think I can hazard
a guess
how it pans out
as poetic expression:

the poet
dies (of course)
as a figure
of tragic exclusion

and the poem, given
space and time,
gets over its grief

rides out into the sunset
with a sestina side-saddle

and everyone, cast
and crew,
all set to
live their lives not
stoically but
much happily ever after

figure
they might need
a script
one where some
budding your therapist
pays off
the mortgage
attending to each psyche
with radical
depression therapy.

ESCAPE

cue: Steve McQueen
trying to jump the border
wire into Switzerland
on a captured motorcycle

things escape me
they dance away

or used to
but now seem
at this stage more
inclined to hobble

and I laugh
as I watch them
unable to match in
velocity the imperative
to leave

end of Empire, never
an embodiment of its
expansion but
anyone better
to deal with
its declination

conjugate the verb
to colonize, decline the
abstract noun
“imperialism”
that’s
its noun category but
nothing abstract about
its impact and
toll on humanity

Norman, Anglo-Saxon/Viking,
Germanic, Latinate
delve deep into
the linguistic roots and
there’s your
causality, there’s your
ideology

there’s everything on the line
at this moment of
impending self-
destruction primed
by wholesale denial

cue Steve McQueen
box-office dynamite
trapped in the coils
of impenetrable wire

FLOOR MANAGER

was asked
what is the
difference
between a poem
and a
soup can?

poem
and a soap box
poem and
a Rorschach blot

or should that
be blotch

seems like fractals abound
in all those tiny
peninsulas and
rough, rough edges

like constructing a flat
two dimensional map
or writing
a poem
on the floor
of my brain

FOR BLOOD

asking for trouble
telling me I’m
not allowed to, supposed
to think
like that

as if I’m dead in the apotheosis
of Solaris
            Chris
Kelvin           about to be absorbed
by massive
              alien love

and so
I throw philosophy, or its
kitchen sink equivalent at you
hoping to
shift your
tectonic plate

Nietzsche warning about the abyss
but here you
go falling
into it

silly me, silly person

must be
a horrible species of
xenomorphic extraterrestrial alien

having
thick satirical acid for blood