Author Archives: Damian Garside

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

SKY CITY

SKY CITY

cities in the sky
beneath the waves

circling the Moon
dug into
    the rock on Mars

towering structures of
steel and
          glass

not for me in my lifetime
this realization of
all we
        did dream

not
    for me
but
  for you
  maybe

maybe these
wonders
for you

or your children
or your children’s children

if you
    have
            a lifetime

and they
have any
    kind of
existence at all

SKY CITY

SKY CITY

cities in the sky
beneath the waves

circling the Moon
dug into
    the rock on Mars

towering structures of
steel and
          glass

not for me in my lifetime
this realization of
all we
        did dream

not
    for me
but
  for you
  maybe

maybe these
wonders
for you

or your children
or your children’s children

if you
    have
            a lifetime

and they
have any
    kind of
existence at all

FURTHER

FURTHER

You are so far away now
and so substantially your light has dimmed

it is only possible to observe you
through acutely magnifying
optical devices

soon given the speed
that I am travelling
relative to your crawl
will have aged
you aeons

and my fellow travelers
will be drinking my good good health
with the advent and
on the occasion
of
my next birthday,

FIELD

FIELD

find me in the quantum
vacuum
for if you do not, if
you fail to
then I will find you

will watch as you count your
store of hours, minutes, days
getting spent

blowing kiss after kiss
to blur, to spoil,
cloud that mentality
of linear trajectory

and when the light comes
wave after wave like
warm sea washing over you

know that it is I
who once was something
different entirely

know that it is I
realize it is
me

soft surge of
energies can
cannot be

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)