Author Archives: Damian Garside

WAYSIDE


WAYSIDE

the worst ones
that fell by the wayside
had to be poets

what other conclusion
can we come to?
what wealth do they bring
unto themselves
and unto all of humanity

with words and lines
well beyond the general reach?

I think about
why this
    should be so, plainly
it seems to resist explanation

this compulsion to
act otherwise, play
in a different key
sing
   a different song

so far beyond my comprehension
I have to reach for
the oddest of all metaphors
to get my head around it

AND TO LOVE

AND TO LOVE

danced all night you did
first meeting and me
not yet
on the agenda

I suppose I must feel glad
you contrived to shut
every other option out

don’t know what it would feel
like right now
never to have been conceived
never have to come
into existence

never to have encountered
the day the dancing stopped
ground to a halt
    eventually dead in
its tracks
   and me and my siblings
left wondering
if this is what time
and children do
    to passion, and to love

OUTSIDE

OUTSIDE

living
in metaphor

living
outside of time

do angels
like tachyons
dance
   backwards

have they seen
your future before
you were born?

can you pack more of
them on the point of
push infinitely more
of them
   through the eye
of a needle
than an equivalent
mass of
Higgs bosun particles?

and all the bad that you
spill or contrive to
in your
little life narrative

do they dissect
to last recurring decimal place
or simply erase?

EMILY

EMILY

those serial killer eyes
that butcher’s smock

dead give aways
told you are a poet
I would have put
good money on
you writing
thus exactly

your writing desk an
abbatoir
where you carve and cure
your fillet steak
cut thick or
thin, made
to exact measure

horrible and gorgeous
how when I read
a line
I can taste
the bloodwould you like your

poetry rare, Sir, or au
tartare

the potatoes, greens,
well these we can give you
done well done
all the way from
crunchy crisp
to
rock hard

sweeter than sweet when
you sing
the soul’s dark song though

solitary in the darkness, none
so intrepid as
to join, let
alone sing along

MEMORIAM

MEMORIAM

too much in tatters
to make a tapestry

so cold it is
this morning on the farm
it takes all
my enterprise and endeavour
to stitch one, two
things together

but
   if poem is mirror

so the farm is a mirror too
it takes and it gives back
gives back
    strangely, crafts
the strangest equations

and me speaking to
my shopkeeper friemd
asking him
    for the meaning of
tte birds’ singing (and
their songs)
in the Holy text
of his religion

and here
      where the birds do sing
you might have found
refuge
for your spirit
succor for your soul

those three years ago
   might have found something here
to change your history, put
on path more safe,
less immediately fatal

and now
    what legacy?

the world knows it now
too well, what
we cherish, but
         what we have wished
to hide
of all thst is darker, bleaker,
all that is
    so explicitly of the margin
the edge

but, as Afzil says, it is
for God Himself the birds sing

this love is what
their song
        was given to express

as celebration
      or in memoriam

FROZEN

FROZEN

my hands are frozen stiff
and yet
all this sitting
in the cold snow
in vain

nothing here
so
   beneath zero
able to cool the hot
zeal of the words themselves

lust for life no
matter how empty
how inconsequential
this life
       might well prove to be

my demons
marching across the page
demanding their right
to speak
   for themselves, go
the whole way

a wildfire about to happen
whilst I must, logically speaking,
submit to
        their will, to the right
of language to dictate
what it has to,
desires to, needs to

comply with the smart, counter
intuitive, freezing thinking,
with your
     frozen-solid conception 
of creation my dear
Monsieur Michel Foucault

idea
  that author is
the thing the poem itself,
this poem itself
             has issues with

confounding your dreamt of structure
        bringing it all
into one
mesmerizing sequence of
gorgeouslly miraculous fractal moments
       dancing, despoiling, flaunting
seducing, infecting,
                  overpowering

such resonance
birthing in the brain patterns of
wonder
            the world
            has not yet
had the pleasure to
                       discover it owns, it has, as
     has been ruthlessly revealed

and
    still stuck
in the snow

once again, these fingers freezing