Damian Garside

DREAMSCAPE

you think this is a poem
in your dreams
it us a recurrent dream

one in which
we lose
each other try
to
find what went wrong

search for joy
escape the nightmare

bliss, salvation
nirvana, integration
anything remotely resembling
even
as shadow the above

question is will you help me
will I help you

or are we just relays, ciphers,
circuits in
the dream machinery?

something out there
seems to be hounding me
and yet
cannot discount the possibility
might be here to save me

whisper softly (turn
on your audio, unmute
yourself presently)

tell me
since all ears

the message as it is (or
how you best guess understand it)

promise on my soul
to keep it locked between us
exclusive
share between us

thing at least to bind us
running through this recurrent dream

even if we wished to
as much as we try
simply
cannot escape from

RECITAL

RECiTAL

I came to
your recital

enthusiastic, hoping
for the best of the best

some of it
sounded smart

some of it
may last

went down like a dream
swept
up your audience

who were
so taken by the spin
of your spoken word

skill
of your voice

this despite the heard
it all before
      painful self-
centredness
   of what
         passed for a text.

MARIONETTE

I was
interviewed by a,
marionette

someone ardently, adroitly,
pulling, plucking the strings
behind the scenes

was from network or
other, I forget which one,
CNN, FOX, BBC
much
of a muchness
if you ask me

someone
working those strings making
them sing
though I would
struggle against
the grain to
call it lyrical

too much
noise, dissonance,
same old same

English words
on life support begging
for death, screaming to be free

I was
interviewed by a marionette
sent
to get my fist
publicly expose me

narrative
confirmed, truth out
the door

left me
to my thoughts, not
good ones either

better by far
had they sent a robot
AI intelligence never
so
well programmed

if had
left
me be
better infinitely more
than entirely

BODY OF EVIDENCE

the jury is out
cannot

reach a verdict
in the streets, in their
backyards for
those with
ears to hear a
body of evidence

strewn everywhere
bodies of evidence
high as
a hillock, still
piling up

vast
as a mountain up
there in its
death
zone where
no human
might breathe

the jury is out
out on a limb
severed limb
of humanity

there
is no justice, will never
be justice

we are all under judgement
all in balance

judges hanging
from every lamppost and tree

UNDER WRAPS

Rutherford split it
in a laboratory
at my alma mater
(kudos
to that)

then
over Bikuni Atoll

air burst.
over Nagasaki

barely tested and
rushed into action
could have ended all.wars
previously if
as
conjectured
had set the atmosphere on fire

be thankful
for small mercies

atom split
world went hush-hush,
furtively fissile

pandora’s box within
a box within box
inside Schrondinger’s
thought-out, Cheshire cat
beaming
wave collapse experiment

in Miss P box (box according
to Madane P (P for plutonium)
the weight of
secret subterfuge
lethality
of
big lie

obviously satanic in its ceremony
dark critical mass

common (and uncommon
sense) dictating

must keep the sure thing
odds-on holocaust
forever
under wraps

REAPER

REAPER
.
I sowed my oats
(whole, rolled, instant)

built an ark in
a time of drought
(deploying modern
hi-tec materials, paste,
carbon-fibre)

set my GPS to rapture to
navigate the
longitude and
latitude of
much
theological mess

sea of troubles
oceans of transition

came looking for your soul
heart of your true being
so pure
and, yes,
so pink

me hot for that
like blazing meteor
as I torch
the atmosphere some
dinosaur checking me out

my soul
much refried red
giant comparatively speaking

hot to the touch, sizzling
Carolina Reaper off
the Scoville charts

as I
negotiate your lips

DRUG OF THE DAY

had my blood
my innocent O neg
syphoned, extracted,
replaced
with King Crimson

planted beds of magic
mushrooms
in the furrows
of my brain

symbolism
being my currency;
mythology my game

was ’69 a Rooster year
and Yasgur’s farm
Hendrix blitzkrieg anthem
and Carlos wrestling
with his
snake guitar
channeling the cosmos
raw, unfiltered

and me sitting in a library
in apartheid South Africa
sweet
sixteen
reading Plato (had
to start somewhere)

desire for a truth mystical
not yet a droll dream

keys
being pushed on
my mellotron keyboard

swirling with tune samples
and snippets of ideas

heart beat be
a drum but could
it do
a hard rock solo?

stuck
on the turntable of life

I watched you undress
slip into bed

wondering
my whole life wondering

was it
beyond me, your
nuance of invitation?

TRUE?

time passes;
words disappear

hard angle, narrow
algorithmic
minimalism becomes

my mode of being

body
shrinking, mind folding
its wings

but soul
now

hears the countdown, sees
its target plain
as day

target, trajectory, flight-
path confirmed

end of
the poem itself
lined up, what

could be
more
painful, beautiful,
final, true?

MONSTERS

monsters are weiring the stories
monsters are wording the laws

you see them everywhere
dictating everything
shameless, no longer
anonymous no
longer behind
the scenes
out in the open
daring us to
challenge them,
which

nobody dares
nobody does

(or
maybe they do
and
just disappear)

look there: see the acid
in their text,
the acid
in their blood,

the hate
is paramount

why (they ask) did
God give us brains?

if not to conquer and
control,
vaporize: kill

ISFAHAN

“The world always decides”
Kingdom of Heaven (dir:
Ridley Scott)

It is hard
to see
the past
through
all the
smoke, mustard and
nerve gas

death mirrored from
mirror to
mirror

same old
lies and deceit
again and again

unless a door opens
and then another
rooms nested
within rooms, infinite regression
a theme in boxes
and dolls

but with you, Tabanda,
a door opened

and looking back
now I am at last able
to reconnect,
reconstruct through
all the disinformation
and outright lies

what was it Rumi, Omar
Khatami wrote
about beauty?
Surely, Tabanda when
they wrote their lines
they had you in mind.

The Sin
of Empire

born into a fading self-
important brutal Empire
close to camps and
fortresses founded
by Rome
(taught us
everything)

forgive me
for my ignorance
not realizing how deep
these assumptions
of superiority really go

how it is here
in the semantics, structured
in the very syntax

and you sitting in the classroom
smiling imbibing my
attempts to
teach instil my
mother tongue

so what if I told you
I have never travelled
to Isfahan
your lately bombed,
beautiful city

city whose name
is such a pleasure
for the mouth to speak

****

I am disappearing
off radar

see stars floating
across the sky

and my memory if you
my so-called impossibly demanding
jaw-droppingly beautiful
student from Isfahan

everything here
you can translate into Farsi

Persian time
cannot be said to be
a short system of time

I think of your war
your million dead
not a statistic, each
a remembered martyr

the Libra medallion about
your neck
glinting for a moment
in the hard
English sunshine

in the Fitzgerald translation
(his own reworking)

Sultan’s turret
caught in a noose of light