Damian Garside

DARKO

don’t Darko me Donny
scare the life out of me
with a ghoulish apparition
from another timeline

give me a guided tour of my death
via clip of found footage

no lullaby me with
a poignant, quite haunting,
lovely temporal loop tale
where I discover
those crazy intersections
that show
my parents and siblings,
the whole gang
are all me

I am thing spread across
at least generations, possibly
generations, aeons,

already
far into the future
I have visited every star

maybe, as you spell
all this out for me, demanding
I do sacrifice myself
to restore
cosmic integrity

it soon becomes apparent
that I have succumbed
through
sheer paradox

or, harder still
to absorb,
it will
bright as day dawn on me
I do not exist, never
existed at all

THE TANK AGAIN

you climbed
out of a tank

thrust a flower
into my hand

I guess to cherish,
followed
by a pamphlet
and other
material to read

gave a speech
that spun
like a top
whizzed all
over the place
bomb blast of
non sequiturs

I smiled, signalled
the right sign,
showed
acquiscence

although
it was
the very last
thing I wanted

watched you climb
back into the tank again.

FROZEN

I am a
plastic action figure

to hazard a guess
you who position me
might call
me Napoleonic

here we
are now crossing a river

the bridge I am on now
may not be still standing
when we return

but
led with acuity
there is no possibility
that it
all
go wrong

that here in our ranks
supremely confident of glory
we might
be rebuffed, die
in the snow
become some
carnival of death
broken and shattered,
for all
who might follow
a most cautionay tale

but here we are
marching, one massive
armee together, when
the dice
they get thrown

will all
spring into battle
do our
soldierly duty

loyal
to a fault
to flag
and Emperor

ready
to give our
little lives
in combat

freeze in the snow, starve,
or die
otherwise
unnecessarily

slowly, quickly,
in manner most horrible

returned to
that big plastic or
cardboard box
where plastic soldiers go

without thought, without
afterthought,

without thought at all, feelings
or memory, waiting to
be called, frozen in
stance
soldiers
to the end

TREE

I instituted a tree
(delegated the actual
planting to
a gardener certain
to impress you,
impress
itself upon you)

attended to its
growth studiously

observed it sink roots
watched it soar bit
by bit
branches
scraping the sky

no
riddle here

I am sure you
know or at least
dare guess why

twisting, turning,
spiralling like a gene gyre strand
stuff
to be read
off all its leaves

seed that I started, sowed,
out of control

A GENTLER TIME

a gentler time
when tectonic plates
scoffed at and shunned
the very idea
Earth’s hot core
was still ripe with satire,
high science comedy

this, long before,
no floating feeling
downtown Pompeii
benign
shadow of Vesuvius

who could guess it
mountain volcano
tell the difference, spell
out the betwixt
and between

everything
gentle peaceful at
the gladiator school
in the working class quarters
from high to
low,
paterician and slave
in this quiet day
amongst days
(one more
to chalk up to
glorious Empire)

we dug them up
preserved as
spaces
shapes
holes in the ash

snapshot of how
they lived, selfie of
how they died

killer punchline:
the truth
of that comedy
not to be denied

OCTAVIA

can give eighty
eight reasons why
we should
read, you
and, read, you

could name
them all

but let
me give, one

such imaginatove chops
Sister!
might even
call it an
interdimensional exo-imagination

steeped in wonder that
swallows the head of
horror and
vice vers

leaves an egg
in my reader flesh
summoning me to
subnit
to the rule
of your authorship
with a flick of
your
world altering xeno-
biological sting

HIATUS

was writing
up a storm

but then
wrote the word
“hiatus” and
so had
to call for a hiatus
let things
grind to a halt

wondering if
this block were a portent
of dementia
things in my
body running down

therein
a connection to how
thinga woek
then
by law
of the Universe
fall to pieces

put more accurately
(deadly so) erase
difference and
distinction
crudely equalize

ESCAPE

in this time of insane
darkness
let me plumb
the darkness I own
and what owns me

do this first, see
what I can see there
take with me whatever
miniscule light
I can find, I can spare
to explore this abyss
determine
what exists

ascertain whether
when it comes to
this evil madness everyone
is talking about
yet
in its thrall, under
its spell

I am indeed its mirror
perhaps more something
deeper
more causal, creative,
wholly implicit

****

and here we are
deep inside this structure
must be
a mausoleum, a tomb,

considering
that I
for better or for worse
have completely
overvalued
my place here

wondering if
I were not

just
a flash
of something

a sort
of a spark

or, it
there is continuity,
a pinprick
of light

frozen for an instant,
momentarily freeze-framed

left bone alone
to contemplate the darkness
around me, moving through me,

not the worst
of all possible worlds
as last moments go

poor souls I catch everywhere
as they die, deaths recorded
by every
kind of medium

pulverized, annihilated, or
plunged into the nadir
of all hellscape

surrounded
by fire
no hope
of escape,

FEATHER BRAINED

the clouds must
be feather brained
if they presume I cannot
stick my arms out
put my fingers
into them

clouds being
things writers, poets,
most focus, on,
can be said
to obsess about

but these clouds here
now
within my reach
I am currently dabbling in

are averse, starting
to build up animus
give me
shade

dark, bleak gray
ruggedly raucous looks
aimed
in my direction,
coming my way

CADMUS

were given the instruction
to be bounteous and
multiply

as for beauteous
were given that manual too

and now you see
our seed proliferate
our deeds profligate

spreading
the open market of
our rationality across
every horizon, vista
to vista
high and low

and those teeth
we planted
how fertile they proved
to be

star seed springing up
mirror demons more
than ready
to come to blows
force the issue with us

breed,
split, chain react

teach us how the ultimate
physics of our protection
crazy virus of
our
desperate war for
preservation

will be
the destruction, the death of us