Damian Garside

THERE

look to the desert
space there
for all your allegories
of good
and evil

secret wisdom
of the sand

every grain
a universe in itself
worth contemplating

when the rains come
if they ever come

such suddenness
as the world transforms

MACHINE

sometimes I slip
into a bad
philosophical space

lose it in
my psyche

flirt with
falling off the rails
when it
comes to my own humanity

thinking
if you other,
you alien

no way
you think, feel like me,
we never
can
agree

our speech
never intersect, no
coincidence
within belief

shame on me
shame on me

I bleed, I desire, I want
I need

I fear
and Oh, my God, how
much I fear

and yet as you look
wonder
what you see

it could well be alien
I may be just machine

INVESTMENT

on a farm somewhere
in Africa
everywhere
in the world

lost everything
except, maybe,
my British accent

all those flat Northern vowels
as if opening them out
would be
like opening a door
to huge pretension

and the dream too
that is getting packed away
my intellectual heritage
getting sold for
what bit I can get
at the flea market

the book that told us
to be fruitful and multiply
did not have
the nous, the where-
withal to think

billion dollar takeovers
trillion dollar debt

mortgaging all the taxes
ever paid
to offset the god-blessed
stupidity of
disastrous investment

SPOKEN AS ONE

only one sign
of the zodiac
got eyes

look right through you
see your inner dreamworld
your structure
in all its proton, neutrons
and wave collapsing
subatomic particles

you ask a question
and you know you will
have to
wait aeons for them
to consult with the cosmos
then
get back to you

but
worst would be
if they ask
themselves a question

never ever
ever let

them ask themselves
a question

for suddenly you hear
smell the ocean
see
those eyes
go tsunami

and then in an
instant

disappeared, shapeshifted
or something

fins and gills hitting
the deep current on their way
far away

FREE PRESS

you spin
spin
spin

like you
Rumpelstiltskin

no gold
no truth

just
shit
and lies

merging
as you spin them

before our
very eyes

FINGERS

forgive me
for running my
fingers down
your spine

to that
place of confluence
my tingling
meeting your
tingling

and talking of tingling
(chimes brushed
by the wind being
what
I am now thinking)

I am in and out
the habit

of making connections

getting
connected

loving every connection
I have ever loved to make

THEN

can see now
why you were
so quick
to do him
in

then immediately deify
deny his
flesh
and blood reality

make him
the most sacred being
has ever been

stands to reason
none of us
want any
of us
getting too
close asking
him questions

about shared
human experience

LOST

we have lost
poetry somewhere
down the line

no subtlety
to speak of
no time
to let the word
find itself

relish the slow verbs
the ones
in whose nature
much inclination
to digress

and beauty
what has happened
to beauty in all
its carbon copied, cloned,
photoshopped glory?

our
idea of beauty
(very idea) is

ugliness
itself

ForGIVE

foregive me
for nor laughing

or
if I did laugh,
the wrong
kind of laughter

when you talk
of murder, slaughter,
being
LIVEstreamed

the irony,
as it
should be

just too
much for me

JAR

gnosis
in a bucket

gnosis
in a jar

gnosis somewhere
in the story you
are reading
commuting
to work
down on the undergound

beneath
TS Eliot’s eternally
lost city devoid
of salvation

the subtext written
in a code
beyond modern
comprehension
hidden

somewhere between the lines