Author Archives: Damian Garside

PURVIEW

PURVIEW

What is you woke up
none too tetchy this morning

only to find your whole lived life
was dream within a dream?

what would be
your prevailing emotion:

terror?
anger?
confusion?
something that you felt
no word might label?

would you
      compose a haiku?
draft
  a philosophical compendium
truly titanic tome

floating fine but
then there was this iceberg

a thousand pages devoted
to every letter entry
(except
    for S
which got a thousand-and-one)

or would just as you always do
always have done

shrug shoulders
take it in your stride

why to worry about
metaphysical mayhem

when comfort zone
is
   somehow there
ss logical necessity

infinite realities and
yet
within or
way beyond
your purview
it

keeps its name
forever stays the same.

NO WORRIES

NO WORRIES

no worries
be not alarmed

all she is quantum
physicist slash leather biker
cosmologist

spouts electro-
magnetism and
I could die for that tune

oh when those words
hit me
    bumper to
bumper
(brutal the noise they make
down that Shannon
Weaver channel)

pretty quickly better
wheel me to launch pad
announce to Mr Musk
that she
gone lit my fuse

get NASA and the Ruskies
to clear
     my trajectory
find

a love conducive planet
where
     we can
make our home

in the goldilocks zone (and
one two
three
bares)

we can do
     that fantasy

the gravity little
atmosphere
    care free
                 kindly
Xenomorph of
       utopian politics and
soft
   epistemologies

so me and my cosmologist
can feedback loop gone
apeshit

obscenely cybernetic in
cute sexual secrecy
   

MOSTLY

MOSTLY

“They come out at night. Mostly.” ALIENS (1986) (dir: James Cameron)

so quiet
almost peaceful

in space
    a hydrogen bomb drops
fast as a feather
equally silent

here however
our parents together
gambollihg in the garden

innocent
             unfallen

not even
a grazed knee

everything on course
ticking like an Swiss watch

ticking
     also
     somewhere down there
way beneath their feet

something in
the rock and stone
down below the earth of Eden
that nourishes everything

shedding heavy particles
yet
   no need for caution, nothing
yet to worry about

and there
to one side
a much disgruntled, disfigured figure

recent transformation
put him in the arcana
rendered him archetypal

whose tale
could be more cautionary

whose loss
              the stuff
of insanity

and yet the flicker of a smile
a flash, a spark
                 and with it
a vision
of annihilation
.
countdown close
ending begun

SOLVE

SOLVE

to comprehend the lie
you would have
to go back
to the beginning
of life
before
the fetal position

read everything scan all
those media flashes and
opp ends
from before the
dawn of time
masts and headlines

kick up
a fuss
     deconstruct
every word, not
believe anything

sift through
every fable
every conspiracy
every secret
every
hole

back to
Plato’s cave
and its
very first troll

and
   every major minor
gaslight that
masquerades as history

liberal radical
whatever what
not worth
the clay
tablet
    so-called stylus
scribe
wrote it down on

and there it is
here’s where
it starts
   chain reaction
of all
that is
unquestioned

where
it all
got stuck
became impacted

unable to solve
resolve dissolve

impossible
to redress

DEAD

DEAD

trust me, it’s complicated,
but if you
are reading this poem
you cannot
be dead

maybe
not quite alive
but cannot be dead

no paradox here
neither the trivial
nor the magical

just a philosophical aside
regarding your
spiritual condition

not alive perhaps
but not yet, definitely
not yet
not completely dead

so many
I know (have the pleasure)
would argue
totally gone
do not yet realize
it
but beyond the pale
dead

but
step up
to the mike

and give me
your best whisper

here I feel, hear
breath, am certain I feel breath

WORM

WORM

not just
cocooned

bookworm
is dead
and he, she
having passed
we
must lament them

and so all
is left
all that survives
be text
worm and woodworm

would that
they did exist
          did ever
exist
(thinking now of
sweet prince
    so obsessed
with wormwood)

nothing left
on the planet
to mouth, tongue,
suck, kiss
speak

swallow like the anaconda
devour like a dragon

all of this text
this smorgasbord of snippet

or do
    the drive through

read as per graphic
point with long finger

so many choices
all fast and
neat

so
   good
for the
       soul

eminently digestible
fully branded and packed

EYELINE

EYELINE

my eyes
slowly adjusting
to the darkness

yet in the same darkness
my mind going
billion percent Lovecraft
gone
  in thirty seconds

imagining every
conceivable category
of inconceivably
ghoulish beings

and most
truly terrifying thing
of a writer
           one who
lives and
dies
    by imagination

no paper
no pen

   not a scrap or
stub at all

FIN

FIN

we are
at the end of the last reel

the sea is out there
other mise-en-scene

steadicam shot tracking
us as we
go our separate ways
last piece of
dialogue

syllables exchanged
words spoken to each other

the crew are removing things
the theme is ending
catharsis death

back at the studio
a nightwatchman
flicks the on off switch