Author Archives: Damian Garside

POETICA

POETICA

I wrestle with words
mud wrestle with them

take on every kind of figure
of liberation and repression;
tag-team fight with tigers
real and paper

never win however, my
career pretty awful
bereft of any victories

perhaps something
in the mud
consistently on
their side, already purchsed
to favour

when I get down and dirty
never really thought
how down and dirty
could
play so dirty

and the great gods of
our body politic bound
to cheat
as a matter of principle

anything in that sub-sphere
vaguely harmonic, barely
poetic

going to get the absolute
skew-eye when it
comes to
judicial image
as framed
smoking gun when
we go to VAR

(all that mud

they get to sift through)

Repeated watches

What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

TV: Fringe, Suits, Lost, Film: Citizen Kane, Arrival, The Godfather I & 2 , Edge of Tomorrow, Now you see Me, Avatar, District 9, The Three Muskateers (1973) Skyfall, Tristram Shandy (A Cock and Bull Story) Gladiator, The Parent Trap, Master and Commander, 2001, 2010, Blade Runner Staeship Troopers Repo Man Robocop Budapest Grand Hotel Goodfellas, Empire Strikes Back

SOMETHING

SOMETHING

something there
is that wants to
get in through my doors
get in
through my windows

drag me before a mirror
make a blood bath of
my resignation
iron
on iron
sharpening
massacre my comfort zone

lead me out through
the jagged glass
into dark pastures
where the Earth has
opened up
is truly volcanic
and my house, once so
safe and secure, boarded
and guarded
is now a thing that
can scarcely be regarded more
than a gutted shell

FABRIC

FABRIC

felt the fabric
both in respect of
space and
in respect of time

hard to separate them
when the threads flow
over and under each other

before our eyes and
out into the black distance
where we
              see red shift
blue shift
    Andromeda
                    so much
gravity pushing and pulling

feel so expanded beyond
the limits of
      my little self

I cannot
    talk at all

SOFA

SOFA

I thought of you and I together
in a beautiful scene
shot by Kubrick or Tarkovsky

but you
      preferred
                    to be shot
on TIK TOK
          dancing your
fifteen second heart out

and so
        I wrote this satire

scrapped my dream
  of turning the Tarkovsky moment
into a verbal
          medium

                          poem
you might use
    to stuff an old sofa.

SPECKLE

SPECKLE

SPECKLE

whole life I have been
looking for refuge
looking
      for consolation

refuge from so many things
better not innumerate
bore you
        waste your time
with a long, long list

but as for consolation,
have sought it everywhere
in art, in poetry,
consolation in fiction
(and yes, Boethius) consolation
                        in philosophy

but above all
                and below

it is you
      I have sought, thirsted and
hungered for, dreamt of
prayed
      night and day that
      if only

sought each little tiny consolation
that you might give

in every (almost invisible)
        significant speckle in
your
      dark, dark skin