Author Archives: Damian Garside

DARKO

DARKO

Darko (what a great name!)
watches
     worlds collide

sees, in his, mind’s eye,
molecules taking
an entirely different shape

thinks the sentence
that rewrites
all the rules

writes it on a wall
in alien script no one
has ever
read before

just a drop of
the divine, juice that
the Universe built itself
out of
    doing its job, evolving awry,
turning the planet
to sand
    in one blistering millisecond
or rather, moment
by moment

minds reeling, suicidal panic
in Central Park
for Christ’s sake it is
all just purely speculative,
a text
    a radio broadcast
a twilight programme

not
   to be taken so deadly
seriously

as if
    suddenly an outer limit
a roadside picnic
manifesting itself

suvin suddenly
in your own backyard.

SECONDS

SECONDS (for Manchester City Football Club)

So, in hindsight,
it was all spectacle,
all show

Matrix football, the machine
having flipped
the switch of power

cheat code running, who
can live with you
and you
were flying high, state
of euphoria, football utopia

but then
        sadly

got found out
got shot down
plummeting to Earth
bad
   blue moon
riddled like Swiss (UEFA)
cheese

and so we have
to adjust, history
insisting we edit

give each
         one an asterisk

stick inside
inverted commas (task
of Herculean proportions
now to clean
           soon mountains
of damage
to repair, oceans of discredit)

but
   all with fade, get forgotten,
our saving grace to
let
   it tarnish

some will take long years to
forget, forgive
     some of that false gold gone
in thirty seconds.

HITLER

HITLER IN MANCHESTER

Hard to believe it
but Hitler is not in Manchester today
neither visiting the museums
nor watching the Manchester Derby.

He is in fact in Blackpool
recovering from the latest
amongst the host
of victory parades.

Tonight he will,
with  few choice SS guards,
find himself
strolling the promenade
taking in the lights
thence
   up the top of the tower
surveying the Irish sea.

The town
conscious it cannot
compete with Paris, but
is determined
to show its best face.

Seems he heard about Blackpool,
the Las Vegas of Lancashire
whilst munching on
his strudel whilst still
a young, maladjusted boy,

but now
the propaganda ministry
finds itself with
far too many
photo opportunities
that it knows
what to do with

but did get
an endearing clip shot
by Ms Riefenstahl
of the Fuhrer barefoot
testing the sand with
his toes,
paddling, sticking
his feet in the
freezing sea (impudent
frothy ripples washing
right over them)

smiling,
      not just for the publicity,
but out of a growing inkling
that the conquered English
(or should he
say “British”) are
at last
    beginning to warm to him

an encouraging sign, this
melting of hostility, he
tells himself
          tiny wooden spoon
trying to dig out the last
morsel from
the bottom of the
tiny tub
   of truly delicious, blackcurrant and vanilla Italian ice-cream.

EMPTY HANDS

EMPTY HANDS

We were mere babies then
before we sailed
the length
of the Atlantic
to find our new
colonial home

and there you are
in that photograph
English Catholic rose
of Norman Viking origin
young and lovely
twenty-five, twenty-
six
   by my reckoning
pushing my sister and me
across the Tame River bridge
in the heart
of that old
mill
   town

and all of us
arriving home safely,
without a scratch
in this scenario

but not
     in the other        one
the alternate
universe
one

where you lost us, lost
everything dropped
pram
  from bridge into
the river

and the two of us
not having
        read that book, kind
of hopeless as
water babies, swept
along by the river
             past Anfield, past
Goodison
past
   Ringo, John  George
and Paul not together
as
   a band

down into
the Irish sea via
             the estuary thence
to Ireland

my Mother, in
                  this rather
different
scenario

returning home with empty hands.

TAL

TAL

must be special
the wood
they are
carved from

what do you think
Mikhail?

they seem to mesmerize
commune with a source
of vast intelligence

wonder what
secrets (instilled by
nature
or by nurture)
are to
be
found lurking inside

something there cerebral
doing the heavy lifting
rattling through
truth trees
devising their own
algorithms

every carbon molecule of
that wood
steeped in the history
of the game

which brings me to you
son of Scorpio, maverick magician,
conjuring up combinations
opponents cannot grasp

as if you are
playing chess
at
an entirely different level, in
a higher dimension

sleepwalking to victory
radar guided by
the pieces themselves

HORIZON

HORIZON

Poem
Is the edge

poem
is the horizon

forever pushing the edge
forever  crossing the horizon

thing itself
notwithstanding being
its own
process
of creation

flattened out, creature
of a plain off-white
two
   dimensional
surface

blank underneath: here
bereft of sign and meaning
but from
        below, from all
that is off the page

within the words
betwixt and between invisibly
torrent of all
that is in us, beyond us,
defines what
we are
      breaking bounds,
bursting right through.


BET YOUR SWEET ASS

BET YOUR SWEER ASS

Your paradigm is slipping
was always slippery

can see
bare flesh, stuff exposed

wondering
who schooled you in
this philosophy, laid
it out
on a platter it
would seem

so let
me put this hypothesis
to you now

whether
truth be whole or
(Boltman brain territory)
it be severed

you eschew the wisdom
forget the transparency

force down
that blue pill
without a second thought

knowing, not knowing
who or what
on top

who on top
and who at the bottom
(in or out
in terms
of innuendo, sauce for the goose
in terms
of double entendre)

either way (feeling your way
in building your
perspective upon it)

the symmetry here, the super-
position, sweet Thomas Kuhn,
pure paradise

your paradigm
no longer slipping
must have got the hang.