Damian Garside

LANTERN

LANTERN

bottle rocket
ship lantern

nothing so poignant
in my humble opinion

braving the dark pond, the calm lake
that is the ocean
that is the immensity of
intergalactic space

soaring high, showing the stars
what we are worth
how we can make stars
that explode and fall
with our chemistry wisdom
every
colour of the rainbow
(where in the cosmos
star that burns lilac,
star that
burns lime green?)

the stars our audience here
so tiny from our perspective

our moment of
triumph
ecstasy the dead Universe
out there has never felt for itself, seen
the like of

no feared fable of entropy
the lantern boats sail, burn
are consumed, sink
disappear

tiny energy, cause
and effect
to perfection
our hearts hopes
on that little
Odyssey with you

the morning rain turning all
those spent cardboard tubes
to mulch

the stars
in recess, no doubt
conferring such distances involved,

such titanic energies

doubtless stirred into some
kind of reaction by
all our performance

STONE

STONE

they support life,
are Goldilocks planets
like our own

scattered through space
and you can find them
like the islands Odysseus
hopped
from, one to ths other, on his journey back from Troy
to his beloved Ithaca from.the arms of Circe and

Calypso to damn-near the
intestines of Polyphemus, the Cyclops into his grear marital bed hewn from a tree to be with his loyal

wife Penelope waiting for him
all those years

which analogy ends for me
befpre ig has begun

no parallels for me in
this seminal, archetypal tale
not even in
James Joyce, or in
the Stanley Kubrick versions

but my sensibility remains
Homeric, Greek,
strangely Pagan

as i somehow find myself
before Medusa, the Gorgon
feeling my
brain atrophy, everything
I am, or thought I was,
hardening, petrifying,
turning
to stone

Medusa, twisted punished
serpemt coiffured demi-
goddess
who could turn the great
gas giant of our system
into a pebble into
a statue
to Zeus

this planet of rock becoming
more rock
submerged rock
and we all waiting wondering,

mesmerized, as if in Medusa’s
snake-like
laser-scoped toxic
vision and like her victims knowing

inescapable transformation has begun

Odysseus sailing the seas
chased by Poseidon
ruler over all
the waters

fish-teeming, such waters can
be walked across I belive
by ultimate
creatures, beings of
redemption

maybe now I am stone
Medusa’s stonethey could use me,

deploy me as a tablet
upon which
to write these things

as they look for Goldilocks planets
look for Ithaca

find us
and our home

DISTANCE

There will always be
some distance between us
because we arenot the same person

and gender-different, and
race-different too

and other minor, pin-point
differences
to different to
mention

need to take them all
into consideration, subject
to close-
careful evaluation

lest we be led to conclude
upon way too superficial analysis

no two creatures in the galaxy,
let alone our smallish
Goldilocks planet could ever be more similar; less short of same ,

GRIEVE

grieve is a verb
loaded with abrasive vibration

seems like its nouns
should be grief
but also groove
for there seems to
be a chiselling, rasping,
shaping
process involved there

whether in all the grief stages
whether in every form
as it will
emerge in conjugation

I cannot be sure of
though there is today
such a cold, quiet
clarity to
the grief
I grieve

NO SAINTS

no saints in my family
but martyrs for their faith,
that
is a different story

and Norman knight
following William
the Conqueror across
the Channel
dealt land as a bounty
because of battle bravery
against the Anglo-
Saxon English, other
side of my family

and descendants of both sides
caught up in that war
to end wars, we barely
understand now, short-
hand signifier
for all brutal, terrible,
inhumane wars that
could have been
avoided
a flash of Serb Austro-
Hungarian rivalries,
a single, seemingly
inconsequential assassination
and the whole
world on fire

how would they have understood this
our ancestors, family
from times so distant

and now
here we are

now here we are
the tree with all its graftings
the river with all its fresh
tributaries blossoming
out
into the future

I leave it to you with so
much time before you to
quietly overlook or
begin
to care deeply

my pen
(and what it means)
finished here
for all that this is worth

WHO TELL THEM

It is our stories that are told
and we who tell them.

We who have the campfires
who being flesh and bone
feel the warmth
feel the cold
are in the front line
of that ever battle
for survival

or, more exactly, in perennial
reserve
we left to ponder,
honour, remember, feel
as much empathy as
a human
being can feel

and yet
we do not

there are nothing beyond
the barest of lists
of all those lights
that were snuffed, all
who disappeared which anomaly we justify

in golden terms, speaking of
the space and capacity
and love
in Heaven

but, staring into the campfire,
I sense out in the cold darkness
great absence
present those forever outside

looking in

many as molecules, so
many, many, many

and why
we are not there too

why we are here
and now got so crazy, crazy lucky

we
dare not ask and
thus never do

this a tale
here right now
as we do tell them

HARD STUFF

HARD STUFF

you are hard stuff
all of you are hard stuff

same genetic makeup
but I am
of air and water, and
you of aphsalt, rock
and iron

the good stuff of the Earth
all that floats around
its molten core
dividing up the tribes
helping in the fine-
tune proliferation
of each
and every species

and keeping us
a house in schism, forever
divided
no hard-stuff engineer
of a mind
to fix that

AND AGAIN

AND AGAIN

we discovered
a planet of poets
annihilated with
our death ray

could be a useful
profitable resource

so had
their bodies skinned

last night I had a pretty
intense, harrowing dream
inspired by reading
one of their poems
about someone
who ill-
advisedly brings
back to his house
a captured alien, one
of their queens

and dare not leave her
unattended for fear
of what
we might fast-
evolve or transform into

and so my
guilt-ridden nightmare
of horrific self-
transmutation

am never
going to read
any of those poets’
poetry again dreaming such horror again and again

SUMMER SERENITY

SUMMER SERENITY

must be some serenity
out there for me just need to pack

a rucksack, set out
and find it

go through all the acts
and phases, whole
hero’s journey

autumn
winter spring summer

all the seasons
searching but
not, sad
to say
necessarily finding, but

me at least
dancing with summer,
glorious Summer

talking grace and determination
all those roles
as Texas queen of science fiction

and she
imprinting every kind
of message subliminal

into this mixed up head

than my serenity journey
be doomed
from.the outset

much check my
files, my innards

peace be
programmable there

WHATEVER

it is all
whatever
light
and shadow

you could write a poem
close your eyes
and die

find the God-particle that
explains eveything all those conundrums

solved, no more questions
to ask
just do the Maths

or have coitus with one
of us to put
you in the frame of mind

you
in spiritual communion
with the Universe

and suddenly nothingness
is not the shock horror you let yourself

be led into
making it out to be