Damian Garside

IN THE MORNING

feeling buoyant
energized

thought myself
on my last legs

looks like
I was wrong

and so
many things to love
about a
new day
about the morning

let’s
take it
from the top

I love so
many things
in the morning

I love the smell
of Robert Duvall
telling me he loves
the smell of napalm
in the morning

alongside a river
that winds through shadow
to the dark heart of man

I love
fire and death in
my morning newspaper

nothing like
a dose of savagery and misery
with my bacon, eggs and
pancakes
toast and tea

but to
mellow out a little

I love my songs soft and
sentimental, expertly crooned
with Sinatra panache

catching me by surprise
as they drift across the airwaves

calming
me down straightening
me out

making me
comfortable, approachable

deadly in my
sublime treachery

like Garbo, the greatest
of all double agents, quiet (and
marvellously) mad
magician
of Allied spies

woke one morning
concocted the most
delightfully outrageous fantasy

to deceive
Hitler’s Reich
lead up the garden path

do something for humanity
in the morning
overlord of
all mornings

DARWIN 4

I like
to think of myself
of a Victorian naturalist
shot out
of a cannon
into the future
through
space and time into
distant and
bizarre
Goldilocks Zone

to find
myself
taking a stroll like
Imperial British Gentlemen

walking on the
surface of an
alien planet
they
happened to
name after me

freshly equipped with
all my conversions

retractable legs, compound
eyes, downloaded intelligence
and full
hover capabilities
carrying me across the
needle-spine badlands,
the acid seas and lakes
of mercury

looking for
the planet’s raw nerve,
scouring every niche
for signs of
life, impending
intelligence,
hints of the biological

foundations of
new civilizations and
their
inevitable cities
of deep, incandescent pain.

SING ALONG

why write
a poem

when
you can
take
a photograph?

why read
a poem
when
you can
take a nap?

nothing beats
listening
to hip hop
smoking
a cigarette

I have a mind
to ask you
to write and
recite

a rap
on that

but
please don’t ask me
to sing along

HIP HOP

why write
a poem

when
you can
take
a photograph?

why read
a poem
when
you can
take a nap?

nothing beats
listening
to hip hop
smoking
a cigarette

I have a mind
to ask you
to write and
recite

a rap
on that

THERE IS NO

there is no
poetry to survive
the six million

poetry dies
a death
each genocide

spicy left-leaning
socialist philosopher
from Frankfurt
made that
point with
finality and
killer succinctness

no landscape
ever worth writing about
once
the bombers have been

tanks
churned their way through

ploughing through fields
that never
can
be ploughed again

until
that horror, that pain
burned
into memory

is
thing lost to time
can no longer remain

ARACHNE

I implored
the goddess
for an advance
to cover my needs

willfully mishearing
she proffered advice regarding
my need for brevity,
to come to the point

write the scenes
in strict succession
creating characters
who could not
fail
to convince

and thus, my fingers
immediately responded
inspired divinely

exploded at once
across the keyboard
worlds
apart from my usual plod

pinging away, spinning tales
rich in revolutionary output
soon impinging
upon a critical mass

whereupon
I dreamt such

a perfectly sound and logical
left-brained dream

much scissor snip snap
and fabric flowing
output growing

and the clothes by no
means invisible but
fit for an Emperor

consummately tailored
yet desperately clinging

whilst
     the goddess acknowledging
my supremacy in
the very shape
    ot this transformation
ss I
rappel, abseil, become
finest
      weaver of treachery

suspended by
the divine strength of silk,
my silk

and you now dangling, reader,
hanging on for dear life.

CAVALIER

let them
bulld a chapel

weave corsages, prim
nosegays

see
where my finger points
out into the distance, just
on the horizon, vague yet
stark
beginnings of a scaffold

yet this is
just presentment, this you
can relegate Shakespearean style
to the vagaries of a bad dream

Lucasta’s posies have
little surface connection with
a lunge into hedonism,
living
by the sharpness of
rapier, dagger,
long sword

which words
sst themselves, deliver their
own bitter, toxic,
raucous fruit

out there forces
starting small, becoming titanic

great the heart that
survives this ice, amidst
all this
cacophony,
yields pandamonium

CYPRUS

something boiling in
the water
off
the coast
of Cyprus

a gorgeous monster
created from foam

lethal one kiss
of kisses

the beauty of which, wonder
of wonders that
love goddess,

simply
destroyed me

CURVATURE

wholly complicit
she

observes how the light
dapples her desk

take a
counter to her
and
she will not
stop ticking

good sign!

neat how
just a word
from her physics Professor
can break this reverie
bring her
back to reality (so-
called)

him within which
expounding at length
on the cast-iron
laws of
repulsion, attraction;

the sheer number
of white-hot articles published
hourly, daily,
emanating
out of this machine

testament to how
slowly the Universe
has slowed down
(no quick
big crunch less
than than
lovingly speaking)

still locked
and loaded, explosive,
keen on expanding

whilst the warmth
of that afore obliquely
hinted at
solar radiation

runs up her arms
pours down her neck

leaving her
ripe for anything

feeling never before so
cute and
astute, philosophically awake

ready to
deal with dark energies,
dark matter
across
whatever distance

strip
back that veil

trace (her
very first blueprint)

the soul of her curvature,
all curvature
as it makes its way

BY A MILE

the
power of
poetry
is something

to be reckoned with
not to be taken lightly

as the sage put it (holding
on for dear life
the abyss
looking into him
at
the edge
of all sanity)

what does not
kill me
making me
stronger

and by that logic
what a truly invincible word-
warrior I must have
become

to carry
so many scars

have borne
so many
wounds

for each
scar

the slashing cut
of so so
many
rejection slips

a thousand poems
a thousand failures

that miss
by a millimeter

sail past by a mile