Author Archives: Damian Garside

Mr Wonka
keeps his Jabberwockies
in a special, secret room,
carefully hidden, as if
he were a
  James Bond villain
with an ultimate weapon
threatening
    global doom
and not just tooth decay

and yes they do Jabber
all day and night so
there is much
    sound proofing
and sedative gas piped in
to stop them
  from bickering incessantly
over what the lines in
nonsense poetry mean

not
    toves, slithey or otherwise,
are they fed with
  but generous helpings
of meringue, and creme brûlée

but Wonka himself
not really a fan of Freudian
fantasy
  however given such
an English fairy-tale veneer;
mathematical joke and
logical
    conundrum given
a fair sprinkling of
to distract you from any
birth trauma, worm hole
singularity, cosmic horror
felt as you
    with Alice down
  the rabbit hole do
                        disappear

flattening out horizontally
in order
    to board Wonka’s boat
at the entrance to
his terror tunnel

where he will
            flip into a ranting
temporary insanity
to remind us
  he is sweet entrepreneur,
but also
      bizarre fruit
              of a strangely cross-
pollinated, Rimbaud, Lovecraft,
Edgar Allan Poe tree

as we steamship along
journey timed to exactly
to recitation length of
his weird
    psychedelic
avant-garde film of
        a gothic poem

flowing with the chaos of
      the cosmos
                  shades of
Rimbaud’s
  alcoholic Seine trip

or maybe
    trapped in what
seems like an eternity of
malignly-authored
            simulation

moving not at all
    (in the absurd
                there is
no
  terminus only
infinite
    departure)

for the truth here we need we need
to ask
      the Jabberwockies (at
least
  the one of them that
as in the riddle
always
    tells the truth)

Charlie and Alice
          having long disappeared.