Author Archives: Damian Garside

SUREFIRE

Ah, yes,
social Darwinism
be your inclination
pitbull terriers —
      they
are your thing;

but would you pit, against
a tank, this,
or some other poem

without ceramic armour,
without armour-piercing
depleted uranium shell?

For all
       poem got going for it
is knowledge of shadow, and
pulse of humanity

and that is
sure-fire defeat, on
hiding to nothing,
as a Nobel Laureate does suggest
himself suggest

Oh, if only tanks could be
stopped in their tracks
by bloke
     with shopping bang

barrels get so stuffed with
gorgeous flowers things
might
       misfire; shells
and bullets simply melt

in the face of all
         that sweetness and light
(and
     metaphor, let
us not forget)
the antennae
   of the species
       wrote on paper, in clay,
on the digital universe

who dare order?
         what dare fire?

but then, who has ever
really talked to the mind of a tank?
               


AS FAR AS

AS FAR AS

 

as far

as poetry is concerned

 

I am

provisional front

 

out

  in left field

since poetry owes me

has not been

so sweet

to me

 

demanding

I constantly exceed myself

 

never too

understanding

or overly kind

 

this poem too

  gung-ho

about

  its sympathy

and charity

 

  and desire to

  enshrine this

  in the hearts

of all of humankind

 

this poem too, no exception,

giving me

  a big fun for my money

 

obstinate in making it case,

protesting its faith

 

whole world of difference however,

between what it seems to be saying

  and how it appears to me

 

 

 

DONE

I am done with dissonance
except where
   it captures the complexion
of what surrounds
gives
    taste of the chaos that
riddles through

harmony is the thing that
must nourish, bring together
                        harmony that
feels
      like
             impossible belief

when last, if ever, were
woken by wings
              hovering above
taking angelic form?

just add a few Pratt and Whitneys
and there you have dissonance

what you figured might be
Michael, Uriel, Gabriel
                drowning out the room
with clamour of regular comic
superhero
        (or, indeed villain)
elevated to cosmic, epic,
mythical proportions
        by virtue of three-
act structure, and titanic movie screen

already you can see it touch it
smell it feel it, let alone
                             hear it

this dissonance, every tiny
breath of harmony
         here in me, here
in the poem

so desperate to distance from
                quietly eschew.

REVIEW OF MY NEW COLLECTION BY PROFESSOR JEAN- PHILIPPE WADE

Dear Damian,

Sorry for my delay in replying to you – I was suddenly hit with 2 PhDs and a Masters, all rough drafts awaiting my reading.

And then I received your collection of poetry, to be read Buddha-like, away from my supervising .

These are great poems, and so many, racing from the ancients (Greece, Rome), to the futuristic stars, to Tesla, to Vietnam, to the Aztecs, to Hendrix, to astrology and Tarot cards… your intelligence sweeps through time and space, from TS Eliot to Homer to Shakespeare to Coleridge to popular culture, and always there this beguiling poet with his doubts and hopes, his hard look at the world, in poem after poem this relentless imagination at work, teasing meaning out of a unimaginably complex world.

These are brilliant poems – often requiring many re-readings to feel the full impact of the ambiguous words, the complex visions.

Thank you for allowing me to read them, and congratulations on a fantastic collection of poems that make us think, and re-think.

(My favourite: Queen of the Khmer Rouge).

They deserve to be published as a collection.

Best wishes,

Philippe

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BOOKWORM

BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)

a mysterious book
appears

what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
    quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
    bookcase
is,
  uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)

my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
                          from this tree

though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
          from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
                    the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
                    against the blasphemy
of writing
              reading

but
  who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
      suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?

I write down my dream
                      but then read further, find,
it was
    already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
                                  by the conflicting
gravitational pull
        of dramatically dissonant worlds

I burn
    all I have written
                          the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
    having failed the inquisition

we are
        all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain

stuck
    in
    either hemisphere

doomed
  to tell our tale

                leaves    pages
things metaphoric,
                  synonymous

left
all over the place

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND
“Oh, Mr Bond!” Raul Silva
“Skyfall”

the rogues
want to prorogue

they want to
go Klingon
they want to buccaneer
they are the
best worst pirates
you had
rather you
had never heard
of

when ferocious alpha aliens
arrive to conquer in
(of all things) their mothership

they will be desperate to
host, put on
a show,
suicidal in
their need to bond

play footsie-
tentacle
    under the table

with these creatures
human, or alien,
nothing ever
      on the level

nothing
above board

Sent from my iPhone

ONE DAY ON MARS

ONE DAY ON MARS

Mars bars
Mars bars

the man has been
eating far too
many
Mars bars

his brain
is reaching
escape
velocity

reading too
much Martian poetry

I blame you
Mr Wells, blame
you Mr Raine
blame you Schiaparelli

dug
  all those
canals
in is brain

and above all,
I blame you Mr Bradbury
filling his head
with Martian mushrooms,
telepathic Martians
losing a war
of colonial conquest

most basic parallel
with Earth history
a writer
strolling across
a desert
      plain
munching
        on a Mars bar
(overhead the irregular
shaped
      Phobos and Deimos)
might feel compelled to make

Sent from my iPhone

WOBBLESY

WOBBLESY

My wobblesy body feels like it was made of TS jelly wobbles and was

dragged Through the Looking Glass in search of a body of knowledge

manga fans oh how all the animations allow you to stylize my body horror

They do not give out Nobel prizes for nothing come

Follow Me
I shall take you out deep into no man’s land to where the Nobel Prizes grow graphic, thick and furious like a jungle or an industrial complex

oh this thing entropy nothing on earth and under the spell of gravity can resist your will
under your Sith serpent
power
      avoid
  becoming aged and bent,
  crippled by time or
flattened entirely; rolled tighly  into a Prufrock ball
              silver-papered
collapsing under mass of own gravity or hideous weight

such as the case
        with its monstrous prosody
that
      cuts through carves through
sinew and line
    thar mighf be way better expressed
But I am consciousness, damn it,
and will
      not be so undermensch, slave
mentality addressed

and so will resist
have it in me: in my D and also my A
to pull a radical chemistry,  total
kitchen-sink alchemy
become blob of early science-fiction
horror
        terror of the cosmos eveb
with ridiculous prop  and

sans world-altering green screen
philosophy-rewriting graphic
(that
    book hollowed out
where Neo
      hides his truth
truth you
        have to see
        and feel)
and as blob

name up in lights and
star of the John Carpenter show
lovecraft loving myself
    (yet nothing masturbatory)

demigod of
            sexual psychosexual
sixties psychedelic acid
dissolving everything in my slow inexorable path
and
        then some
putting paid (style of
                          late capital
economic erotic orgasmic ectoplasm)
of all that
          Borg resists, fails your

cosmic Turing test of simple logic
suppliy and demanfd
        not to speak of Malthusian
stupidities of my sweet but stupid
biodegradable humanity
      float tp the surface stuff in
the primal soup and
        expendable offal connecting tissue
body fluods
    in event of war and advent  of
armanents’ industry

could cry for
this humanity
if I had eyes
      and I  had tears
lurking in the undergrowth in
alien camouflage
              so far beneath ice and
fire
    and blasted rock planet
of your proverbial, perpetual underworld
below, beneath and

                so incomprehensible
to ali
that is Aesthetics of  Guides and Gods and
old outworn mythology of
Anglo American poetry
                                          modernist to
a cataclysmic
            fascist  failing fault.

JURASSIC

JURASSIC

we grasp
we create

imaginary worlds
in abundance

hold up mirrors to
our nature than little
old Hamlet could never
have foreseen

would have
fallen off the stage
in pure
stupefaction
(and his author too,
for that matter)

and yet
for all this gnosis

we remain in essence
still prehensile

machine-like, true,
but prone to self-
subvert

and so, like the entire planet,
I was spellbound watching
Mr Spielberg’s tale cautionary

wondrous meditation
upon Mary Shelley’s theme

still
some of that ancient T-Rex,
velociraptor inside of us

the monstrous beauty of
these creatures
blazed across the screen

huge thrill
massive awe

but ultimately, big money,

every cent of which
drained out in sequel after
mindless sequel

these creatures
so passe, defunct,
dead
and threadbare

a different fable
here

about art
and story

and the death of
our species

to be
dragged out kicking
and screaming
into
the light of day.