Author Archives: Damian Garside

LONG BEFORE THE FIRST CRUSADE

LONG BEFORE THE FIRST CRUSADE

And legend has it
as they turned from
the stable
   to  journey home
knowing
     nothing would ever
be the same

Melchior whispered
something in the ear
of proud Balthazar

lost
   to history but

it is believed
to express profound
appreciation of
the unique
sublimity of their
experience

what they
felt so blessed to
have witnessed

the Sun
now rising, a
new dawn
an
  awakening

although, of course,
it might just as well
be all
    downhill
from here.

BLAST

BLAST

headshrink me and
stitch my mouth up tight with sturdy twine

lest I whine
make a sonic spectacle of myself

emit a series of dreadful
garbled inarticulate noises
like an animal in pain
or some one
who should know better
proferring a
crude imitation of

someone
with Tourette’s

stitch me up tight
so all the bad words
being blocked
fail
   to jump out of me
strut and
shout
    parade about

go total carnival
dance their worst dance

degenerate into the realm
of lewd, graceless
profanities

exquisitely decadent vignettes
and everything, for all
that we
     declare as disgraceful,
distasteful

nevertheless cannot argue it
is anything less than a blast

(the minds of our greatest fear
clean clipped as
       tidy gardens their

fingers
    on the button awaiting
code command)

SURRENDER

SURRENDER

she wrote her poem
every metaphor
bullet-pointed

every syllable
metal-jacketed

every image
a grenade

when she let rip
a whole belt, an entire clip,

out of ammo
she had nothing left
to attack
           defend herself with
not a word
to work with

her critics sensing this
out of blood
    moved in
for the kill

forcing her surrender
unless
    there was no surrender


EASY

EASY

easy to draw
analogies, parallels
but also hard

here I am in the realm
of the luscious isosceles and
prudent equilateral

at right angles
to you
    dealing with gravity
and the curvature
of space-time

sliding along the hypotenuse
reading your front page,
back page

headlines
and all about you corporeally
the behoves to
be on page three

my life
    spread like toast
with marmalade
like centrefold
like
    money shot

and time is money
need to drag out
time together
         collapsing
the distance
between us

like we together exact
same hyper-sensual moment

hitting that
Venus Mars conjunction
lightspeed

NEVERTHELESS

NEVERTHELESS

(revised version);

same psychedelic
mushrooms

delectable
with melted cheddar
and Cheshire cat

keep these recipes for
inter-dinensional travel
in a saucerful
of secrets with all
my favourite tunes

and there we have it
algae and fungi from afar
about to colonize

thriving
in the darkest room
of your brain (place
where you develop
those photographs you
dare
   not share
with anybody

will be end of everything
if they
happen to hack
willfully drill
         up there

  but those old boomer vibes
peace and love
in our new.
    time of genocide who
gives a
   fig for them

time for soft
resistance having passed,
that wine
   turned sour

people so outrageously sane
they want to spring clean
me
  geopolitically

pop
   my third, fourth, fifth,
sixth eye (and
counting)

shut the gate slam
the hatch

make it all
    scry  crystal clear

sum
of all I have ever feared

in trying to
bend reality in the
opposite direction
            

SPINACH

SPINACH

chopping spinach
jungle green,
anaconda green
deepest
   darkest Popeye
spinach green
than
you have ever seen

and so
hacking slicing my way
through a thicket
of stalks and
leaves

my weapons of choice:
bush knife; machete

every lost finger
sacrificed to the cause
of green cuisine
    to be stored in the fridge
whereupon mailed
to the temple

where sweet vegetation gods
will do their utmost best
to receive
     as tribute, sew
back together