Author Archives: Damian Garside

BEN

BEN

having just returned from
a workshop on ethics
in the innermost
circle of Hell

            hot foot, exhilarated,
ready to go

and being
back with
that wisdom am
kind of
a man
on a
mission

can
safely say
to all
gathered here
this torchlight parade

we got it
all wrong
got the logic all wrong

it is not that they
are to be punished
because they are bad

but that
they are bad
because they
are to be
punished

this confirming
the promulgations
of big bad Ben
of the tribe of Ben

a man, or should we say entity,
divine in his devilry
demonic
in his divinity

nothing sulphurous
no toxic poison gas
pouring out of his nostrils

this not
the kind of evil
you would expect to
proclaim itself
and yet
it does
and yet it
does

reveals itself to the world
from the pretty low-key heart
of his tacky execution  chamber

unlikeliest avatar of
noneless than
the Devil himself
priding himself on
a golden achievement:
supreme infiltration

a stand up guy
slipping the noose
around
    necks himself

***

the game given away
but we
don’t give
a shit because
mentally zombied
nobody told us (nothing
ever
   gets told us)
but we are
way more than
half dead already

clap
when we
are told to

hiss
   when that evil we have
been warned about, are
forever getting
warned about

every bit and every byte
thrown into the fray to
have us
believe it
is here

warbling its way
into our words, taking
charge of
inflexions, determining
our speech patterns

spewing out
monstrosities
in
  some alien
tongue

except
it isn’t

except
it is
some demented
creole of
our own

idiolect of
insanity

and there
that word, in all
its hushed extremity
easy
   to parse, let
slip through
your fingers

fall
   fester beneath
the floorboards, build
its own underworld

evolve, pledge allegiance,
pride itself
    (and, Oh, how
it will pride itself)
or the
ability to puppet
        marionette from behind
the screen

light
  trapped in its prism

final prison


BEST SHOT

BEST SHOT

riddle is,
and here we talking,
riddle of RIDDLE

where language
confronting reality
longing
    to go mimetic
takes its best shot

despite, in its
heart of hearts, at
the root
of the tree

suspecting infidelity
reality hiding
something, putting
on a show
(and not
for that matter
a critically
acclaimed one)

yes
    language has
always clung to the
possibility
that when
we speak of reality
grounding identity

we might
    be shocked and
surprised
that when
push comes to shove
the thing
about reality is
   there is no such thing

and yet one would swear
to their being
billions of miles, even
lightyears
of thinginess
    surrounding us everywhere
in every direction

here
    every quantum mechanic
steeped in
field mathematics is
dramatically enjoining you
to hold
    his (or her) beer

as you
      take a dip
out of consciousness to
hear this
spokesperson speaking

explaining why
everything so
riddled
     with riddle

paradox boxed
inside paradox

the more certainly so
the more
      simply impossible to
conceive of
such a thing

BIG CAT

BIG CAT

big cat, little cat,
let us not dance around this;
I will touch you regardless,
more than brush your fur

seeing yourself
slink right past me:
                                as if!

little cat, big cat
those eyes at night
I can tell how
keen they are to leopard me

look here
      Mrs Sabre-toothed
all these love wounds
where you nibbled

were it not for love
and due caution
        you could well have
severed an artery

nestled between
your two paws, soothed
by your purring,
all that
is ferociously sweet
about you

me and all my poems
bleeding out

ANTI

ANTI

don’t like my poem?
is it
   a matter of form, style
or theme

or do you find itself
offensive
by its, and to your,
very nature?

Oh, if only poems
could be conduits to
all we feel and need,
and all
we feel we need
entirely!

you
don’t like my poem

well, I’m willing
to stake a bet
that my poem
doesn’t
like you either

much
like a true mirror

much like
Sir Isaac’s great law
about action
eliciting if
not demanding equal
and opposite reaction

perhaps
my poem
    exactly did not enjoy
the reading experience
suffered your
reading
         badly

put you the wrong end
of the spectrum of
enlightening being-read
experiences

on a readership scale
placing you
closer to
     muddy river pebble
than cut
and polished sapphire

closer to worker bee, even ant,
than to Apollo himself

TWINKLE

TWINKLE

twinkle, twinkle
little Persian cat

how I wonder how
you catch

so many of
these bats
as they
flash by

target locked on
in your
green eye

stripped
of suppression
stealth, and
other mega-
tech wiles
dead duck for the taking
when all
this ballyhoo
dies

or flies
home on prayer,
tea tray clumsy as,
battered
and mauled

supposedly invisible,
we are told invincible,
layer
upon layer of
vaunted superiority

little
Persian cat
had
on toast served

deep fried

RIDDLE

RIDDLE

drop me from
from nearly thirty thousand
feet

or maybe
more aptly
two thousand and one
plus which
in Arabic numerals
at least will
tally up
to two thousand
and three

the sneakiness of three
plunging us
headlong
via Oedipus, foot leg and
stick of the Sphinx
into the heart
of riddle

whose subject
              framed by that odd
counterfactual
joke
   of time

we now seen
born
    held up to the Sun
but dreaming
of Moon
    strangely named Moons

Phobos, Deimos (Oh, I
mean
Demos
Titan, Europa, Miranda,
plus others
as well

five listed here for
every toe on
your foot, finger
on your hand

held up to the Sun, ball
of such Uranian energy

watch him
      long for that furnace

given
the slightest opportunity
doomed to there
walk, hobble,
crawl

MISUNDERSTANDING

MISUNDERSTANDING

Yes, we did
have our intimate moment

but now
in the afterglow

we seem
to be labouring
under a
misunderstanding

talking to each other
as if every word
macine transcribed
into Enigma code

acting under
the erroneous assumption
that we
are somehow created
as divine reflection

and not
some extension of plankton
whose million
year evolution took
a pretty
    ludicrous turn.

FRIDGE SYLLOGISM

FRIDGE SYLLOGISM

my cats, great philosophers
that they are
assure me
that inside my
old fridge

it is
pure utopia

a Platonic communist state
jam packed with delicacies
for all
     felines
to share

each according to their need, and
power to irrutate

and I, for my Sins (all of
which pretty mortal), have
five of
     them, one Socratic,
another Nietzschean and the
rest undecided whether
to follow Slavoj
Zizek or
call themselves Arisotelian

masters (and mistresses) of
the art of the syllogism
each of these
little logicians
           expert at reasoning

and so would you be too
if you believed for a moment,
as cats indeed do,
that we
       are blessed with
a modicum of rationality
if not an entirely rational species

whose yes/no, valid/invalid, true/false binary processes
can be read off their faces

and exploited to
        ensure the

keys to
     that aforementioned
paradise are not
left entirely in human hands