Don’t Try This At Home

Damian Garside

He burbled on:
a poem is a seamless piece of
artifice

site of tension, juxta-
position, paradox (the Queen
of paradox Herself),
irony and
innuendo

a banquet of sound, a
play of meaning.

Poetry can (if needs be)
pull the yawning ground up
from beneath you

show you chasms, tunnels, glacial funnels,
sublime runnels that run
their course
in and between the lines.

With this he stopped and began to swoon and fall;
became
slouching truth and living manifestation
of the perfect synchronicity in
the regime of poetry.

     ****

Having had enough brain blowtorching for one day,
I henceforth killed each word as it wriggled into life
as if swatting at troublesome insects.

Once there was a charm
upon my tongue,
but someone broke the spell -
I said it wrong,

and the world was never
at peace thereafter,

and so the worse and wiser I am forced to censor
every breath that might, carelessly, lapse into something
that might be remembered
and misconstrued.

(Sometimes a poem will
take us on full-frontally, insist
on alluding to things
beyond our shared purview,
and mirror of our dumbed-down nature.)

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