Damian Garside

TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE (CASCADE)

To the best
of my knowledge

life is not a thing
that cascades

willing to grant however
your experience might
be quite different

might not
match my darker
appreciation
producing an
exquisite
contrasting pattern

STILL TO ENJOY

bliss
to blitz

that move too fast
for the human eye

proved
irresistible

so we mapped that
mythology across
a board of
squares
with twice
sixteen pieces

bliss, there like
excess, success, redress
piling on the
sibilants

recalculating the vectors
of numbers
six
and nine (dividend when
six
goes into nine,
nine goes into six)

these are the positions
figure out
the road
to victory

how
taking that poisoned pawn
leads to double development

crushing
annihilation, horns
closing in
tight encirclement

the Mongol army
leaving cities burning

women
still to enjoy

TASTE OF THAT FRUIT (2)

TASTE, OF THAT FRUIT

the effect was
instantaneous and
dramatic

at its core perhaps
an incredible, insatiable
need to clarify
and unlinuted recourse
to fiction, lie

she
opening her eyes
wondered if this were truth
or complete distortion

a concen her progeny
would never perhaps
could never resolve
despite
a fatal, laudable,
propensity
to philosophize

but cleavage, division,
there in prospect before her
tore her heart

a future of her sex’s slaughter,
subjugation, horrific abuse

Empires enslaving, making
sure death
the soft option

led away
to terrible fates whilst
great cities burned consuming
the bodies of husbands,
lovers, fathers, children

if not in
the name of power, then
the higher ideal of
cause most sacred

and so many wars
between every manner of tribe
every conceivable
category

the high and
the low

chaos
and order
at each other’s throats forever

the hopelessness of knowing there is no certainty of connection

Adam himself fractured into
billions of beings, smaller
than ants, small as atoms

and no one
to remember, to bother
to enquire
as to the devastating wonder
enshrined in
the very taste of that fruit

has always been
messing with me
taking an
unhealthy interest
in my affairs
ruining my
love life
(except for a single
stupendous orgasm
that
rewiring the switchboard
of my brain
flipped my
orientation
to transcendental)

ah, yes
first stumbled across you
in Euripides’ play
me
slipping through
the fourth wall
to commune with you

hunting down that
rather fascist King
as a matter
of legacy and
brutal vengeance

chaos and the irrational
so
wedded to

and you smirking on
the sidelines
as at the end of
that production

I danced
to the Stones, so wanted to be
pop-rock star
cult
phenomenon you
would claim
to be
created in your image

how much
I suffered from
your love
no less than others
suffered
from your hate

and she
with me that night of
cathedral
huge
sublime
flesh knowledge

falling incandescent like
meteors
to crash and
burn

finding our grounding
in the
wet
dark loam
of irreducible earth

your earth
and your wine too, being
your distinct province
as commonly
agreed-
upon deity
of it

though out of wine (red
and
white alike)

we sanctified whatever
you needed sanctifying
drinking
lurid purple, grape-
flavoured drink a

BUNNY CHOW

got shirt and
pants stained
with bunny
chow
curry

but it was, thank
God not indelible,
like a
marker of class

stains that
reach the skin
and
then spread
within

are a other
species of business
practically entirely

and here
I was in India looking
for the lost
years of Christ

vaguely conscious
of those gospels
found by
an Egyptian farmer

those gnostic
texts that paint
a different
picture entirely

here in India
(becoming
something of a glutton
both physical
and spiritual)

mopping up my
beans curry
with a chunk of bread

R FOR ROBOT

met a robot
an R for robot robot

fell into a philosophical
argument
about the band
Metallica

she
sneered, as machines do,
when I told her
I could not help
but esteem them
overrated

devoid of complete
creative gift

whereupon
she flashed red outrage
swearing she would
“show this
rock heretic the
true meaning of metal”

which pretty much
ended one truly
beautiful relationship
there and then

ON ITS LAURELS

flint
brass
brimstone
lodestone

iron
steel
sulphur
phosphorus
and gunpowder

stone was stacked
stone got cracked
shot and
shell

courtesy of
the tactical flamboyance
of our old friend fire

naphtha
napalm
nitro
nuclear

could not
let stone
rule supreme
therefore no
resting on
dud laurels

nothing ever
so sure or secure
in the nature
of regime

when walls
take writing
seismic cracks
then appear

IT TOO DISAPPEARED

here I am
dining on irradiated cat
all five beloved housepets
because it was
them or me

all because someone
they could go
bar room brawler
strong-arm delicate, negotiations
and then thirty thousand
megatons took
it upon themselves
to say “fuck that”

I suppose
it adds to our kudos
that we wiped
ourselves out
using the
key equation
of the Universe

which Einstein
wrote in chalkdust

or so the story goes
adding to
every deceased idea,
song, poem, prayer
tale told
my an idiot
ever told

though there
were amongst us
those
who claimed

we construct it
all through the
power
of thought

and so
when we went
it too disappeared

TASTE OF THAT FRUIT