Damian Garside

TOGETHER

together
we saw Avatar together

learnt how to fly
across our new world

but this Universe
starting to split, fragment
fracture

and we too divided as
everything ends up becoming

no visual paradise
to upload ourselves into

and now
we are on opposite
sides of the galaxy

this our
sole moment of
pure dream

ODDS ON

bet you
don’t encounter
too many wobbly
xenomorphs
out there

coming here to conquer
and convert you
teach you
the truth
of their
unbalanced philosophy

so many equivalences between
our worlds and cultures

including our deep
religious faith
in four-
lane highways and
reality
TV the black hole of

consumption we
were created to be

GRACE

by grace of
was saying grace straight
forty days
and forty nights

had to survive the flood
by surfing on my plate

could have
said it as
an epigram
spoken it
as haiku

no
saving grace
as every unsavoury creature

made its way to gorge its
greedy seven-
deadly self

turning our feast
into a mockery

as
bone-headed
as it
graceless gets
and raw
a ritual rhapsody

THE GODS OF FOOTBALL

the gods of football
turned against us

they scripted our defeat
up there, in the stars

No. They didn’t.
I checked with them
and they swore that
they hadn’t bothered to watch
were much
more interested in
the Burrow/Mahomes match up

than teams committing suicide
via the failed execution
of a diabolically bad plan

CLOSE

maybe
space is a mirror

no stars out there
but what is in here

and you and I
inside each other
searching like
archeologists
for
ancient
love

shared
stardust

gold forged in a furnace
whose heat so yellow white
blue
hot
we can never get close

WELCOME

welcome to the intergalactic
vessel Aristotle

headed towards
the galaxy Andromeda

the flight time is estimated
at three hundred
million years

we hope you enjoy
the flight

in the event of our
capture by
an alien civilization

please read the manual stored
behind the seat in front of you
detailing the entire
history of exo-, astro- and xenobiology
in science fiction
from HG Wells to
Philip K. Dick

BIDE

In an aiternate
universe

Hamlet
is feigning sanity
biding his
time

no drama
so not a whiff
of suspicion
that
when he takes
his revenge
it will come
from nowhere
more brutal, final,
than
Niccolo Machiavelli
ever did dream.

FF

Fast forward me
ro the edge, to
the end of the Universe

so that
billions of years old
relativistically speaking
I can immediately plunge into
writing my epic
that rewrites the rules,
allowing for
contraction of space
simulraneous reversal of time.

DEAD PERFECT

no one, nothing
has ever moved
across this dead planet

I feel we can safely concludd this
though more scrupulous
scientific analysis
might
say something different

and yet
here I am
in the picture

there is a world out there somewhere
in an expanding universe
dead perfecf match
for this one here
before us
now, of
which we speak

the planet
looking back at us
seeing, not seeing,
perhaps
even conceptualizing

there
being physics in
these rocks a serious mathematics

in the current uncertanties
regarding a history of life

and speculation about
what might well have
been a purple sky
before
something
may well have
absconded
with the atmosphere

STAR BRIGHT

sapphire blue star
at my window

and you with a dish full
of technicolour mushrooms
figured
even with
the blessing of Vega
this is
just too early
in the morning for
over the rainbow

but the magic in those fungi
such that
a tin-
brained man can
solve such
complicated equations
as any red-eyed billion terrabyte
wizard
locking the pod bay
or monolith
on the Moon