Author Archives: Damian Garside

ENOUGH

ENOUGH

I feel I might make it
might just have enough

so hold off on all those bandages
banging me up
in some sarcophagus

and there to leave me
at absolute ebb
just ticking over

a thousand years of sand
until my tomb is opened
by explorers from what
is now
the world’s new
great superpower

and when they wake me,
scene from your classic
Hammer horror
and despite my own
true self I do indeed
death curse them

though hardly moving
with the grace
and the fluency
of Mr Muhammad Ali

and they
having survived —
who knows what calamities
the cosmos, the planet
their own
grievous species stupidity
happened to
inflict upon them

walking into this death trap
just in order
to find me
take
a selfie with me
get to know me better

take a few crucial
vital measurements
and get
their Ph Ds.

NEW

NEW

old Ez
told me
told you

to treat each word
like a wooden block
a carved wooden block
bearing
    the ideogram perfect
    for this spot

but all these words in
some kind of crazy pattern
Canto after
    Canto bouncing across
the page

and you in a cage
caught flirting with fascism
seduced into this madness
by Renaissance
economics
        by Oriental sage

and your guard
        kind of like the boy next door
nothing more American
than his
    Thompson sub-
machine gun

your thumb snagging on the wire
a droplet of blood
to attest to
        true causality

keep it simple, Classical,
make it new

Sent from my iPhone

WARNING

WARNING

warning
I am carbon life-
form

and this poem is
about to go blinding flash
full supernova
across the page
destroying and creating

dooming at the speed of light
huge swathes of the galaxy

and all because
of another carbon
life form of my own species

but whereas the carbon
of which I am compounded
is pretty bog-standard

hers is
light-loving, light-
defining

supernova-inducing in
its beauty so, so diamondesque

ZOMBIE

ZOMBIE

I’m a zombie
you’re a zombie

we are the collective noun
for zombies
we died
and were raised
from the dead
to be life-in-death
avatars
preaching the gospel
the mass-media gospel
that is scripted
by finest hive minds
politically sub-
edited and
corporation approved

I’m a zombie
you’re a zombie
no consciousness
but we
work like clockwork.

SUN

SUN

I am an animal on this planet
wanting to learn
live and prosper

bipedal, my thoughts
swung up to the stars

wanted their light
the secret
of their light

since I could not smell
them, feel them touch them

listened out for them
listened with a power
a trillion times stronger
than my hearing

but no clear message ever
to tell me their dreams
their fears
their hopes
their horrors

what species of bridge
we could possibly build

not thinking
what was running down
what was at a premium
what was light-

speed accelerating
beyond our
control

and me
mere animal
but also
creature of hubris
creature of arrogance

if not
in divine image
blessed with the power of all suns.

SAME

SAME

heard a cough
emerging from
a sarcophagus

was
    either in a museum
    or the Hall of a Kings

then
    and the logic of this
was so screwed up

it was my sarcophagus
and I was entombed

but the figure in
the museum in the Hall
was
      distant from me
by years in their thousand

the issue of same
      not here an Aristotelian thing

SICK GLORIA

SICK GLORIA
“O quam cito transit
gloria mundi”
    Thomas a Kempis, 1418

does the fracture of a glacier
mimic the collapse of a bank?

I confess to having such
a sense of the correct sound
chaos makes
        across its great typologies
of disaster and rupture

an ear for the music
          dissonant or not

made when yet another
of the passing glories of this Earth

                              crash