Damian Garside

JOINT

join me
we going to walk backwards
to the beginning of time

our book of cosmology
before us to guide us

make sure we avoid
possible supernovas
certain blackholes
neutron stars, flares
and explosive
gamma bursts

holding hands in
the starlight, the future receding
and then —

such celebration
when we arrive
at our destination
positively ticking from
all that
background radiation

every moment on our travels
helping to meld our two minds

CAREFUL

be careful
what you
do with

how you read
how you treat
this poem

avoid all risk of
contamination

shield
with tin foil
or with
concrete shell
containing
a lead-
lined box

the energy at the heart
of this poem
simply following
Einstein’s
equation
could split your
every atom

radiate
the Hell out of
you

INTEGRITY

you are a voice
you proclaim it
to be so

standing before an
empty canvas

staring
into space

I read the guide
it tells me
the title of
this piece
is, if I read
it right, “Whatever”

I would like to smirk
but fear aesthetes
might stone me

missed that semester course
on dead surrealism
was spending
much of that time
feeling and
looking vacant

imagining a world where
there was no Spanish Civil War
ergo
no International Brigade
no Picasso Guernica

maybe the Universe sometimes
takes poetic license

could it be
that we are all long-passed
and this is all a De Chirico,
Dali-esque forever recycled
state
of dreaming?

who knows how to
find the truth, get
to the bottom
of this matter

what is it with truth
anyway?
always looks
feels so suspect

as is the case with all these
either-or binaries

damned if you do
damned if you don’t

see you added your own little
postscript to that non-painting
destroying
its artistic integrity

Sent from my iPhone

CONSTELLATION

assuming the feral position
in the loadshed dark
on my bed
with a dying cat
my
beautiful dying cat

I cannot wait for two
weeks to pass and I hit
what just has to be
my final birthday

don’t give me
rebirth
I would be
kicking and screaming against
the very thought
of consciousness
possibility
of coming back

not to be u grateful
not to disrespect life, that
sacred most
magical
of things

but thanks but
no thanks

leave me be for that trillion years
until the Universe is a dead weight
of iron and
burnt out coal

and the last civilizations who had
their faith who had their dream
are
long long gone

maybe
like us they had their astrology
astronomy cosmology

their genius mettle.
born under
the constellation
which loosely
translates as the dying cat

I got the telegram
from Bergman’s gloomy
chess player

before I could
chisel any kind of epitaph
even a self-effacing joke one

the chisel was blunt anyway
and I have no skill
in this matter
and my Latin
and French are so weak
no hope there of going out
with an epigram
strident
or mellifluous

no, I guess
they need to find
a better home for
such fine
unmarked stone.

BRIEFING

I gave a briefing
to the creatures
from Wonderland
lest they wrongly
assume our
Alice-rational world
be opposite
in the extreme

for disappearing cats
and talking caterpillars
might here
be a real rarity
we do have
skies full of zinging
tic tacs
bouncing around
at Mach Twenty-three

yes things interdimensional
or extraterrestrial
craft manned and drone
with who
knows what superior
artificial intelligence and
advanced personnel
technologies which
make us look
like we barely out
of the Stone Age

I wonder what
fantastic, Wonderlands rich
in characters

these brilliant beings
and their magical technologies
are not
able to create to
amuse their
ancient selves.

BREATH

the goddess dances

and even though
it is only the few
the precious few

watch her dance in a place
that is neither Heaven nor
Mount Olympus

it is as if the whole
Universe has stopped
for a moment
to take
its breath

OPAL

her soul
be an opal

every shift and
change does she
then scry

Oh this landscape changes
as crazily but not quite with
the speed
of kaleidoscope patterns
every
mirror playing its part
in this mandala
of a mosaic

And I watch through smoky glass
or crystal
to save my eyes from the
ferocity of eclipse

things so clear once, but
now we guess that clarity
came at the price of
intransigence, the need
for that which
could not
survive exposure
to be parked, obscured,
in some
instances simply hidden

once we
gave ourselves the licence
to call out such practice, challenge
those assumption,
mock and ridicule and
turn the overwrought symbolism
into brute carnival

once we loved
that licence, rebelled in it

but
as she says
as she says

we are not
allowed to read the world this way, see
what we did see

the fiction is
steeped in the so-called
refinement of all Technicolor