Author Archives: Damian Garside

FABULOUS

FABULOUS

if you
are so fabulous

as wonderful
as you say

where
is the wonder?

where are
the fables?

where is the story
that is going to
change my landscape
shift my reality

grip me
grab me

for the rest
of my life?

I catch you sleeping
that very sight
transformative
beneath small, square-
shaped purple blanket

looking
Roman imperial, totally
submerged

and here I am outside
looking in
who knows what
impassable fence my
face pressed up against

who knows
what ultimate, legendary barrier

and on
that shrouded face
what dreams come
strong enough
to leave
some imprint, make
ground-breaking impression?

and so it is
between us
so much spoken
yet everything hidden

deep
beneath the choppy surface
of that text
true leviathans

denizens of the fabulous
most certain to appear

GENERAL DIRECTION

GENERAL DIRECTION

my nose, proverbially,
close to the ground
keeping me grounded

blown by
the wind
chasing the Sun
I wandered around the farm

remembering my Hobbes’
theme of the brutish and short
life without sovereign authority
implicit social contract

recalling my Plato notion
of the ethical and philosophical
supremacy of
his ruling class

somehow I
slunk back into my idealism
thought
    should stick
with democracy on
(on this hallowed day
                    of election)

choose
    Dionysus above Apollo this
and every day

not to speak of those first
communities of the faith
before
   religion got Roman

this issue
of the State
      will twist you every
which way

from
   state of being, to
highest states imaginable

to Empires of suffering
that we all know too well

from YouTube and TikTok
and old apartheid memories

so much in
this mindset still
       needs exorcism I guess

but the green of the farm
so gleeful, intense
    after this sudden splurge
of rainfall

everything gaining height
growing (forgive my
ethnocentrism) out
of its socks

gaining height, accumulating mass
     giving my theme here
weight
sudden addition of
gravity

as is the general direction
(for this stage
       at least
whilst
time decrees it last)

HIGH JUMPER

HIGH JUMPER

Alan
D

never heard you debate
before

never heard you
live before (well
almost)

stuck in your
chair
but
can jump through
the air
plucking out
conclusion
after conclusion

you should have
become a jumper
could have
become a real athlete
an utter
track star

why limit yourself to the law
to the blase life
of a Harvard professor?

when see you debate
I imagine a whole different
destiny

one where you don”t look
anything so ridiculous,
that totally bad.

COBBLERS

COBBLERS

I cobbled together
a Mary Shelley
using some
leftovers
from the
fridge

filled her lungs
with a breath
of Romantic poetry

stuffed her brain
until it was set
to burst
with every available
microchip

and soaked her soul in
a loop-feed running of
Kubrick’s
enigmatic
masterliece

that if
this
the genre
she was put on this Earth
to bring to birth

she migjt
glean
   enpugh of a gist
for a
pure reboot

remind us
   where it
all went wrong

where it
all

returned
to the slime

sank into
slick
    death hubris