Damian Garside

HONEY

do not presume
to tell me
what
is forbidden

is the sky
forbidden?
the sea
the Sun
you

yourself
forbidden?

are all the things
in your book
of prescriptions
ultimately forbidden

what of honey
is that too,
forbidden

bees may sting
but the make it freely

as is the case
with honey, your honey

it is the sting
itself that makes it what it is
defines it as honey

and so please
before you
close the gates
shut
the hive
lay the mines
string the wire

as a matter of gentility do
tell me what is forbidden
point to
what is forbidden
in all this honey

that I might discover
taste
and judge

decide for myself

EDGE

edge is always brutal.
cutting
    like a blade
.
this we know, how
it has
   proved to be
.
in your history, my.
history
   all our history

the blood on our faces
our hands.
what we have to share

there, look see!, the cossr
and beyond the cost
the lie
of the land

let those voices speak
they have
to speak
can tell a tale of what was
said promised proclaimed
and how
that all panned out

those with the feathers
and those with the powder
fire
and with steel

those with feathers dead
lost
before the war began
.
and we who do
believe we
have studied violence from
when it
first began

have the calculus of slaughter
down to a fine srt

fear
not a people alive but
a people’s demons
rising
with their death

displacing our demons
ot teaching
them a darkness
we
cannot defend

GOSPEL

gospel be
someone will find me

piece it all together
with metaphysical sellotape

some words here
proferring their services
as hooks
to hang things on

put you in the fabled position
to decide if it
is not
without value
perhaps worth saving

keywords here
in abundance
(but there again,
etymologically, what
is
a “bun dance”)

sounds erotic
he said
little fellow entirely
who speaks in my head

so much we
might call outerspace in
its ethical nexus

sun rising
wrong way round

something way way off
beam
on the horizon

the pages
fading (you thought
that stored
in your heart
your
digitized brain
they would
last all eternity
.hallmark

of a stupid
utterly dominant species
to get things
wrong
again and again

every thinker first
name Karl
harping on that thesis

POINT BLANK

Oh Mr Point Blank
I see I have a brand new
archetype
from lover and
magician
suddenly am
become
crone

hunched, crippled
in body whilst
the mind grows sharp
as a scythe
brutally clearer

seeing our nemesis
exactly
long before it is
here

how by the twisted
logic of our being
what
it needs destroy

how
it unfolds.

FIELD

Looking out from left field
not quite
field of dreams

a tad more field
of batshit electromagnetic craziness

pinging electrons
(stuff in passing we
are
made of)
into being

and so
my field report
(so many
questions no doubt now
to field)

there are no electrons, paticles, me you, distinct
individuals

only probabilities
and what the field says,
what the field believes

ready to
build for
those who come

AT THE PROLETARIAT CAFE

I dunk my bread
into my tea

dreaming of
designer coffee,
dark expresso

and world where
we are not your wage
slaves do
not fight your wars

fill
your cenotaphs
(those of us whose bodies
or parts thereof
can still be)

I dunk my bread
into my tea

nothing on the menu
Is what it seems
no one
speaks

can only believe
what we are sold to believe

OLD SCHOOL

I am
just that another
brick in the wall
that flew through
your car window

suffering at the school
where they taught wrong
physics
indoctrinated us with
false history

yep
school in apartheid South Africa
thing devised to
grab you by
the balls and
squeeze until you believed

all those teachers dead now
looking down from
supremacist Heaven so
horribly stressed
their wings losing
all their feathers

or just
turning eternally in their graves
.

PLAIN SIGHT

hiding something

always hiding
something

black ink sloshed
across the page

covering
with words, meanings
diffuse, uncertain
unsteady
complex

everything there opaque
clear as day, in plain sight

EMILY

EMILY
(a Dickinson/Leone mashup)

she good

she bad

and she
way beyond Tuco Ramirez ugly
(very
definition of Nietzsche’s
sense of beyond)

she the three –
way duel, three
pistoleros, shadows
one
self

the civil war graveyard
extreme longshot
close up
zoom

Mexican
stand-off of all time

COSMOLOGY

a magical alluring mystery
spectacle

almosr too far away
for light to travel

your dance of seven veils
alluding
to our source tempting
our return
.
and me in the back row
with much undersized telescope
longing for the front row
a window seat
somewhere close relatively
speaking
where at least I feel I
can reach out and touch

this routine so exactly
choreographed, yet primal
and chaotic
is thing you have wanted
me to witness
for billions
of yesrs

but the laws that say I am
a bit underaged to be
witnessing this
let alone understand it

tell you that
your moves are slowing
getting stretched out
breaking
dissolving

and this I can see
hear explained by
cosmic dude on
my cellphone (Cox,
Greene, Kaku, Hawking or Tyson)

time will come
when you have Medusaed
yourself
are iron cold and
a statute

and me, as
for me

long long before then
will have deserted the scene
me and my
world well
out of popcorn

this great gorgeous
cinema a thing
of the past (though
no future or past)