Damian Garside

FINISHING TOUCH

I love
your

finishing
touch

coup de gras
in the corner,
on
the back rank

Mike Tyson
punch

(the one
all plans crumble in the face of)

SQUARED

the Universe
likes circles

the Universe
is beholden
to ratios
and squares

speed
of light
squared

sixty
four squares
in eight by
eight
light square
start e4 d4 nf3 c4
dark square
alternating configuration
stop with
a hashtag

and
let us not forget

square deal
square meal
square shooter
square up

and all those squares:
Times, Red,
and Trafalgar

without which
what would history be?

C & C LTD

C & C LTD.

playing chess
making love

knights
forking everything
on on the board

I think Cheech and Chong
as in my grandmaster stupor

Chong
and Cheech

to know where I am endgaming
right now
need more
smoke and mirrors

don’t want to Robin Williams genie myself
into a series of explosive
moves
rebounding in
my face

need some of your C & C good stuff to
take
the edge off
my embarrassment

need to conserve, focus
direct
until in sight,
within
touch I do get
to light the fuse

Oh
let the joke not be too
much on me my darlings

cold fusion
supreme complement
contribution

ultimate solution
to needs and desires, desires
and needs

SMOTHERED

smothered mate
Mr Bond

love of
Queen (now King)
and country
has
squashed you
into a corner

no man supposedly
an island but
you appear
to be a
tiny one

deluded by the believed
magnificence
of your
self-
importance

and now
to put it bluntly
you are
screwed, have
lost the game

and this
foreign, highbrow, villainous
post-atomic, cyber-
crime,
deformed
asexual, intellectual mutant

gloating at how
you took the Gambit, swallowed
the poisoned pawn

in one wrong move altered
geopolitics
and the nature
of Empire

and you
with your jaw
hewed from granite and
tinker-tailor brain

wondering if like
Admiral Horatio you too
will be
elevated above the laiety
on towering
plinth
or column

as the streets of old-time Motherland clucking
for
her lost
children

all smashed to chicken shit
beg you
to resign next move
before,
    like a guillotine, it befalls,
becomes the
iconic moment captured
for all time
   that now will change
                        everything

FLOOD

Bee is out in the Bayou
cutting some tracks

me I be drinking
skipping stones, drinking
some of her lemonade

got a bit today drunk on it
then watched your blues movie
(the one
where you were Miss Etta
singing you would.
rather go blind)

wonderd how
you could spin gold
in your land of cotton

Marigold dress reborn
baseball batting those
windshields apart
and Warsan
Shire
words threading through
the cloth
kneaded into
the dough

get those words finger painted
at least, if not tattooed

write their calligraphy
    across a dancer’s body now
everything
on six
   inch heels
   moving in full formation

Mississippi
night magic
Texas Bama

police car sinking submerging
like the Hunley
or
the Nautilus

epic how these streams
flow together
a world in flood

STILL LESS

the future
will not be
like the past
not remotely

and sucks to
all your other
continuity assumptions

no same same
for all your days
I’m afraid

Heraclitus (who
else?) decisively
nailed it:
you cannot step
into the same river
twice
(be it languid crawler
or raging torrent)

nor can you,
for that matter,
be
the same man
making love to
the same
woman twice

or, once,
strictly speaking,
the logic is saying

THEY CAME

they came
with their kite shaped shields
sense of destiny and
much dynasty
soon
to be unloaded

hard task masters, speaking
a special dialect of
that most beautiful tongue

to suppress the native until
the languages blended
before conquered and
conqueror
did so themselves

and me writing in
in that hybrid innovation
words gushing
pouring in
to layer this
speech, render it
exceptional, versatile
like no other

I say to you now
in my genes no small
trace of
that villainous breed

whose thirst for triumph
victory nigh insatiable

an Empire of nice brutality
sprung fron this seed

GRENADE

my candle has
burnt down
to the end
of its quick

now butns
bright as a flamethrower
as a phosphorous grenade

as a ton of uranium
whacked into plutonium

Sun on a stick
as you might say

one last
loving blast.

RAW

poem
is chimera

its own system
supernova

is basic and fundamental
sinulation of the real

is Hamlet staring at a mirror
shocked at how
it looks back at him

as species
of the real

is that reality you
wished you had, wished you were
best and worst
in its class
for supreme transcendence

also for all that
otherwise there in
the down and dirty

the flesh of things so
succint when earthy and raw

EDGES

every
action has

an equal and opposite
and horrible beautiful stupendous réaction

revelation: here
is a poem
(gnawing at the edges
of that definition
but let’s
let that ride for now)

author (death of
disregarding) still waiting
for comeback
feedback
at the edge of causality

horizon of each
river of time