Author Archives: Damian Garside

THOMAS

THOMAS

I came across a
wandering consciousness
attenuated, stretched thin,

tight as
a bowstring
wanting to sing like
an angel but
with a mouth full
of hourglass sand

and him in the desert
burned dry by drought
and yet
by spiritual fire

a pilgrim, seer to
the core
shaman even
yet dressed so dapper
as if in tiny thrall
to the demand of the pristine

these figures of balance
first the thunder
(and who
can do it better?)
and then
the softness, whispers,
soft rasping like
abrasive snakeskin
rattler
from that
ever expanding continent
where you
were born

which you duly renounced
somewhat on faith, also
perhaps a degree
of calculation

and love
you for it
how could they fail to

and so we met
you
at that moment
though already
the greatest of us all
one I knew
only most
vaguely

finding you here
walking
somewhere, if not
entirely linear
clear
in destination

shadowed by
something ghostly yet
incredibly present

and me
there amazed, so in need
of this inspiration, this
conjunction

only now
at last
able to see what
it all did mean.

NO TIME

NO TIME

When there is, no time
(no “when” to
be exact)
a configuration where
time cannot be
said
   to exist

everything is
lightning
or it is
tableau

the gods dreaming, or
just lounging, even
more so
the goddesses too

and if no time
what happens to process
and the logic of things

the way
       it all once

loved
to unfold.

RWGIME CHANGE

REGIME CHANGE

we are meeting for coffee
fifty years to the day
we last
saw, spoke
to each other

could be real could
be just a dream

reality getting so porous
you could easily just
stick out
your hand
test the fabric

odds and probabilities
suggest five times in nine
you could
stick
your finger
straight through

the veil fading, evaporating
and something no less
ephemeral now
about the realm
of truth

all of which we do not discuss
hard after all those years
to find common
ground, something
worth sharing we
know
will be appreciated

meanwhile flashing in neon
writing on the wall
portents eveywhere
suddenly it
is all
a troubling semiotics
of apocalypse

heads blown off my
bombs, pulverized by
missiles

innocents vaporized
at primary school

signs and codes of
death and
second
coming, dynasties
of temple

perhaps (thinking aloud)
the world needs regime
change
for our very survival we
need every single regime changed

I feel, though you
shrug, the betrayed presence
of a half smile.

WORST THING ABOUT CHESS

WORST THING ABOUT CHESS

the worst, very worst
thing about chess
is the way the pieces
snigger at
non-Kasperov moves

their utter exasperation
when I blunder
revulsion when
I lose my queen

but still I battle
read the odd book
watch a few
You Tube videos

but
the game

I neither have
it by
intellect
or own it
by pure instinct

that dream
level
tactical
acumen

that sense of what
can be made to be

AWE

AWE
“once in a lifetime”
Eminem

a wisp of a man
almost helped me drown
always
putting
me down

when I arrived
back from
the dead unfortunately
back from near tragedy
not a word passed

but then a look
that spelled
it out
told me everything

and that is the pain
that rendered me tongue-
tied, immobile, useless
so very
very incomplete

failing you
at every turn

what a poor comparison
it makes, these sheaves of
dead-end poems,
set against
the harvest
of your life

real, meaningful achievements
leaving me in awe

AGAIN

AGAIN

need to speak
but cannot
find the words
seems to me
I have
none to utter

conclude
they must be, cannot
but be, hanging
out
on the line
washed, rinsed
spun alnost dry

needed them
to explain
how it is
I cannot love, do
not live,
am seriously unable
to stave off this pain

and now you tell
it is
   all repetition, forever
recycled,
as
   bad as it gets,
good as it is ever
going
    to be

a project of balance,
even symmetry
         (hardest, most
unforving type
monstrous
in its need to be)

DARKO

DARKO

don’t Darko me Donny
scare the life out of me
with a ghoulish apparition
from another timeline

give me a guided tour of my death
via clip of found footage

no lullaby me with
a poignant, quite haunting,
lovely temporal loop tale
where I discover
those crazy intersections
that show
my parents and siblings,
the whole gang
are all me

I am thing spread across
at least generations, possibly
generations, aeons,

already
     far into the future
I have visited every star

maybe, as you spell
all this out for me, demanding
I do sacrifice myself
to restore
cosmic integrity

it soon becomes apparent
that I have succumbed
through
    sheer paradox

or, harder still
to absorb,
it will
    bright as day dawn on me
I do not exist, never
existed at all

FROZEN

FROZEN

I am a
plastic action figure

to hazard a guess
you who position me
might call
me Napoleonic

here we
are now crossing a river

the bridge I am on now
may not be still standing
when we return

but
    led with acuity
there is no possibility
that it
all
go wrong

that here in our ranks
supremely confident of glory
we might
     be rebuffed, die
in the snow
become some
carnival of death
broken and shattered,
for all
who might follow
a most cautionay tale

but here we are
marching, one massive
armee together, when
the dice
they get thrown

will all
spring into battle
do our
soldierly duty

loyal
to a fault
to flag
and Emperor

ready
to give our
little lives
in combat

freeze in the snow, starve,
or die
otherwise
unnecessarily

slowly, quickly,
in manner most horrible

returned to
that big plastic or
cardboard box
where plastic soldiers go

without thought, without
afterthought,

without thought at all, feelings
or memory, waiting to
be called, frozen in
stance
soldiers
to the end