Author Archives: Damian Garside

NEMO

NEMO

suddenly I’m Captain Nemo
fathoms deep

contriving to
fight a liberation war

against my people
against myself

sharks swimming past
my bedroom window

and me
       tearing into
everything I was
once
   taught to believe

PERFECT

PERFECT

your sarcasm
perfect

you poem:
who dare call it so
each word
a detour, a question
no matter
how tight
how close to your chest

coming from a place
where stuff gets chiselled
when quibbling of legality
behoves
a perfect storm

but perfect joy is the trope
that I am here
to be in the market for

perfect joy, perfect bliss
things that start not with
pressure fronts
on massive collision course

but simple,
deepish parable
and perhaps a kiss

that fall from grace that be
your righteous sarcasm

can
take a pause moment
to accept incomplete

FOLLOWED

FOLLOWED

followed Jacques Derrida
down a rabbit hole

seriously
name-dropping all the way

saw Slavoj Zizek
and all his twin twizzle
and tweedle brothers

who asked how I could
have been so sure
that down was the direction
I was heading
  when, counter
intuitively, up might
equally
      make perfect sense

and I
might be twin too
Moon cavorting on the lunar surface
doing sibling-style stuff
with young
    Castor and Pollux

and other twin
who penned that tune
I am the Walrus and Richard and
Karen
    in such seemingly
beautiful harmony

Oh you cannot
     put a cat in a box
and have any kind of certainty

you cannot come up with truths
you can always reconnect

the very land we stand on
slipping and sliding
so slippery-slidey

what
     we have before us here
(not referring to the tea party)
so different
    from what I was thinking, what
expected, and
what I almost fancied
I was destined to express

THAT WILLIAM BLAKE CHARACTER

THAT WILLIAM BLAKE CHARACTER

saw that William
Blake character
on social media

disagreed about the war
had a few sharp words

fresh from this exchange
looked him up
found
   not a word on Wikipedia
save a reference to a character
in a Jim Jarmusch film

which seriously flustered me
for I had got this notion
into my head
   about this far from prototypical
radical
      early nineteenth century
English Romantic poet

but seems it is all a myth, a false flag,
huge disinformation

which 
     stands to reason,
for if there were really
a Songs of Innocence and
a Songs of Experience

think how
different the world would be

HEAVEN OF THE UNREAL

HEAVEN OF THE UNREAL

somehow I have ended up
in the Heaven
of the not real

I do
apologize

do mythologie

am unsure at this point
whether I be many
or am alone

every choice
so critical
    slight preferences
of tone and shade
altering how
the Universe should appear

so much nuance at this point
infinite possibilities

and yet so
     austere

feel
     so abject       so incomplete.

BLACKPOOL

BLACKPOOL
“how many holes it
takes to fill the Albert Hall”

I came to
Blackpool, Lancashire,
to be conceived
my soul already garbed
in tangerine

inland from the Irish Sea
I lived
our little river
up to something

revolution in music
to be remembered forever

there in that old, dead
slave port
swept up by voices, songs
steaming in
from a wilder West

brief Renaissance they
just had to
weed out

the fiction of Empire
in such dire need of it.

I came
to Blackpool to
get conceived

though sex, as Larkin said,
waiting for its establishment

INCONVENIENCE

INCONVENIENCE

I am an inconvenience.

The outs
outweigh

the ins.

Suddenly I am a
question that
leads into an issue
that creates a problem
                  in need
           of a solution

that will
speak bare faced

only after generating
euphemism
             upon euphemism

euphemism to
                       truth
         being as absence
                       is to death.
          

NOT TO CONCERN

NOT TO CONCERN

mystery planes, crazy
ambiguous figures
suspect characters

appearing and disappearing
popping in
and out of existence

later we shall be told
move on
move
on

nothing to see here
nothing of interest

do not concern yourself
what you are looking for
is at best
speculation, figment
of your imagination

how can there be
a story to uncover
an
astounding narrative

no words were ever
spoken about such things

in every dimension of
space and time

these are phenomena
that never existed

SLURP

SLURP

I drink your
strawberry
chocolate
salted caramel
hazelnut
even
      vanilla milkshake

slurp your sarcasm
as if
    it were melting ice-cream

munch your foaming banana
fudge

as if
it were
direct from drug store spigot

sweet Vesuvius, blessed
Krakatoa

fallen
    like hot manna
into my lap

        swirling like
          a spiral nebula in the
machine of your receptacle

thoughts
            of cosmic body horror
subsumed by the

rush of your
            sudden pink
flamingo
        sugar

treacle and absinthe.