Author Archives: Damian Garside

BURN

BURN

life is not
margarine

spread liberally itself
across crisp, crusty
oven-
    fresh bread
yellow golden

no
life is that
which sticks and
burns

rips off your charred skin
falling from Heaven
like napalm,
      white phosphorous
or those cluster
people killers
that break into toy-size
teeny-tiny

run like Cristiano
fast and zig-
zag as
    you can
across the entire Nou Camp
a bomblet
will find you

mind body problem
nothing in the body
the mind
   has not figured, over-
thought
   how to how to
horrendously kill

but the Sun continues
for millions of years
this avatar of hierarchy
will
    seem so god-
like, be
forever shining

until
    like us

it get old, fat and greedy
swallow
      the Earth entirely

desperate for survival;
new stuff to burn

DEMONIC

DEMONIC

you were once
labelled love synonymous

but now
we decided
we like you callous and cruel
prefer you
as death threat

happy if you love the
hate we have become
as we further warp
and twist our image

knowing it to be divine
by sacred
definition

no matter how
        much
it murderously delight
in how demonic
it has
     grown
   

YOU

YOU

you, whom I love,
who twice
   (not once)
gave me
the gift of life

who are you?
where
are you?

nothing of what I am told
can I longer believe

imagining writing the text
saying the words that
will change the picture
transform
       everything

but there you are, at
my level,
      down to my
size

picking up stones
     rooting through the rubble

lest there be those
lost and forgotten

     erased by history

needing to be
found

     restored to memory

OMELETTE

OMELETTE
“you egg!”
       Macbeth,
     Act 4, Scene2

make for
bizarre bedfellows

lead to
    crazy places
              they definitely do

Darwin
    to the jackboot

merry old Malthus
to the electric fence

dingy ripped
and ravaged
   upon the ocean

propaganda as truth
set up in best
civllized dress

but slice and dice
whichever way you cut it

there is just too much egg;
today too many eggs

which are
    not to preferred taste
being of the wrong shape
and size and
State-approved colour

hence the forever
Napoleonic solution
of
   military omelette

ALLOW ME

ALLOW ME

Oh let me
determine to
re-engineer

every paroxysm of
crescendo in
our
   head-
to-head spectacle

be nothing if not
gorgeous subtle
in whatever word

interface
      with all my
Sun and Moon,
         everything of mine
tuned to
your specific sublimities

causal, yet Oh so perfunctory
and utterly lesser
in rapturous
     capacity

as is
    Shakespeare soliloquy to

shriek of delight to
close
  drunken rant
              superfluous as
expressed

DARK

DARK

Oh, what a burden you wear
my Prince of shadow

hard not to think of you
head-to-toe in black

the state
  is a lie

your castle
is death

your family
a prison

and behind this sweet tragedy
what writer has
contrived
        to conceal what

might be
    close to this bone

this sepulcher of a stage
littered
    with all we have
come to hate and love

and thus History arriving
(as it tends to) with
an army

      new flags, iconography,
presence of dawn

this the
    poet knows, indeed
seems steeped in, riddled
with it

something here
so consummately dark.

MASH UP

MASH UP

it’s all
a mash up

can’t get head or
tail of anything

saw this thing bullet-
spewing, bullet-riddled
claiming to
be rational

so, for God’s sake,
plrase exercise, and if not
exercise,
   express extreme caution

when you pitch up
at my door to exterminate

careful not to throw
me and the baby
out with the boiling bathwater

as you flood through
every room with
mandate
       to control
penchant to wipe out