Author Archives: Damian Garside

NOTHING LIKE

nothing like
poetry

to mess
        with

your
sense
of identity

flood
your memory

rewrite
all that stuff
you thought you

knew about
yourself

never
       called
into question

now reshaped, reconstituted, in
the very flow of
the words
themselves

and thus
as collateral
damage

nothing
as might have been said before
somehow, somewhere

nothing
quite like

what we may
well find ourselves facing
called to
account for

in such
a space,
in this place right here

ON THE PAGE

looking back in time
at this poem
(coming at
you at the speed of light)

could have hit you
aeons, days, five
minutes ago

causing me to wonder
how
     (by virtue of what
dark arts) you can
tell yourself
you profess to see me

so much history (your history)
necessary to compute
need to
shuffle through

before you
       have any notion of
how to
answer

when I ask what I am
how you
found me
on the page

EVERYTHING YOU WISHED
TO HEAR

overwrite me
fix this poem

make it
nice and
comfortable

easy
for yourself

everything
you wished to hear

SCAN

scan these stanzas

with Geiger Counter
deep-seek radar

this
at the outset
and at
regular
intervals
as proceeding

it does not take me
all that much time
to reach
critical mass
has been
   happening

quite reguarly lately
all that
    satirical anger
driving every
atom
   to chain reaction

and then
    there is the question
of half life

will take radiation levels
such as these
      here, levels
totally
   batshit crazy

hundreds of years to
even begin to calm down

OFF THE PAGE

I have shed many a tear
over her

far fewer
over the forests of trees
did sacrifice to
her beauty
(bringing out
the most prolific
in me)

less guilty as charged
now all is digital
impinging on
brains electrical

barely a whisper of sorrow
short-
      circuiting synapses

teetering
on the brink as
          under cover of
supposed elegance
        here, there,
                       everywhere

raw emotion
       leaping off the page.

NEEDLESS TO SAY

Sylvia,
    she whom,
Lady
    Lazarus
style,
I had resurrected from
the
    dead

warned me
of the day
political retribution
would find me

the day
a poem got
me
   burned
or stoned

I laughed off
her horrified concern

without a
single
   reader
what outraged crowd?
what danger?
what damage?

a single solitary stalwart
sold on the truth
of the established order
or turning up
to avenge
    some imagined slight
I had long
   forgotten about

turning up
with twig in
one hand
pebble in
the other
   (always best
to keep
one’s
   options open)

but
   needless to say
the stone missed
and branch

refused
to take flame
.