Author Archives: Damian Garside

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE

so many demons, devils,
hobgoblins, djinns, zombies,
vampires, Nazis
and, monsters
              in here
out there
a whole confederacy
quite literally, symbolucally even

to count them
you will need
an abacus, a calculator,
a quantum computer

no end to
them
    and their untimely
proliferation

growing in
number, confidence,
politucal will
marching
in legion

good job
we got bombs, nissiles,
nuclear weapons
goung to need
more, far nore of them,
a geomtric progression

to deal
with this sea, this horde,
to do more, far more
a storm of mushroom clouds
no mere
scratxhing the surface

a monster problem
needing  a monster solution

the final solution
writhing in my monstrous brain
 

CAT BOX

CAT BOX

I was the cat
in Schrodinger’s equation

the old school French
nuclear physicists brutal
in assuring me
(quite wrongly) I might
not tunnel out
could not
tunnel through

and then
the 64 million dollar question
whether that decaying
radioactive isotope
definitely
had it in
for me

keen
to pull
the trigger put
me out
of superposition
see
what I would do

but when
box was opened
lid
was lifted
no dead cat, live cat,
cat
turned into
a jack-in-the-box,
but me
a fairly undistinguished person

if person
be the word
if people know these days
what constitutes
a person

beyond
the bone and muscle,
mucus and gristle, spongy
brain
that has
down to a fine art its
finely filtered
sense of
exactitude

yet stuff by the book
cannot wrap
itself
around

and so we must ask
with Beckett’s Malone where
does all
this scenery come from

and
this lucid stuff
that
leaves us
blind

dance of
possibles, probables,
and every dream of being

if you ask me
all boils down to
this
here catbox thinking

of which
I be spokesman spokeswoman
gender
neutral duly
appointed, as here testifying

MOONS

MOONS

huge eyes you have
big as moons
the kind
of moons

that outsize
their own planets
if such
a thing
were possible

if anything
between us were possible

force
of gravity, magnetic
attraction, quantum
entanglement
    playing havoc with
our detachment

forces, influences,
purveyors
of causality

plucking at my heart
strings (true
cosmic harpists)
steamrollering the
both of us
      until collapsing
into singularity

have no choice
but to embrace

huge eyes you have
big
   as moons already

HOT PIZZA

HOT PIZZA

stuff boiling over
in the microwave

a saga of a story there
in background radiation

you
    mistook at first
for chicken shit
but there
you are with that
noble Nobel gong
around your
neck

showing off
as if you were prizefighter

speaking of which you
and I
   traded enough blows
in our protracted experiment
in trying
to combine the races

brutal repertoire, need
a fencing master
speciality rapier
   to teach
us the
    more nuanced moves
and simple strategies
of thrust
and parry
    thrust and parry

honestly man to man
woman to man
      for every ruffle
in the fabric
of our repertoire
      and artful
continuity

so long story short (and
short one
long
   bedevilled by
much innuendo

here we slice and dice and
roll the base

pizza
   destined for some
serious temperatures

cooking together in synch,
in formation
       flat
surface
   to flat surface, generating
dynamism, building
connection

suddenly in such asymmetry
that climbing, climbing,
Carolina
   Reaper hot, before
you say
   caldera things
might just explode, go

rags to riches, order
to entropy

everything in our purview
given much
     ecstatic Christening
before the end of the day

stuff
    as ever, as never

boiling over in the microwave

PARALLELOGRAM

PARALLELOGRAM

there are some
(maybe one, at
a, stretch , two)
parallel realitues
where we

were lovers
and flowing out of that some
small differences,
divergences
of no real cosmic consequence

but this one is ulterior;
this one
is so so
different

this one
does not look
like our Earth
and we do not
even look
human

though
Earth and human
it well, we well,
both maybe be

and this language
we are, speaking does it have
could it
support
poetry

best thing about it though
from our currently
could not
be
nore massively involved condition

no word
for no
that
defining word

in all those parallel
alternate words
where
     our levels ran disjunct,
separate, distant

shadowing me, shadowing
that one of which
I was
     speaking

sharing
with you

this very first,
last last time

APART

APART

poets, dancers, playwrites,
novelists, medics, priests philosophers, physicists,
biologists, anthropologists
dead in
     no man’s land
not holding hands
cream of the crop

not
holding
shaking hands

some
have no nothing
some just
no hands

hard to
write, make
sign or
signal

hands for holding, touching,
loving, grasping

apart
from
all this

greedy for life

WTF?

WTF?

epic, apocalyptic,
apoplectic

the time of big poetry
has come
and gone

out the window
then papered
over that window
boarded
it up
for good measure

and my good friend
Tommy Eliot, not
entirely sure
whether
he counts as a guru
or merely a catalyst

crying his eyes out
nevertheless
but Tommy think
of ecology
the rains will come
storms to best all
we have so far seen

and then sticks and
stones all we
have, all
we might
aspire to
until magical mnemonics
and formulae
scratching on tablets and

suddenly
all is well with legend
and song
of the new wine dark sea

nothing as yet, unless
ever so implicitly
to denounce
our
recourse to
injustice

evil of greed that leads
to Manhattan Project

enhanced, exalted to
rival supernovae
somehow
there on our doorstep
jimmying the lock
(needing
our consent to
deliver the horror it bears)

aeons before
we arrive at the poetry
ready to
engage
in suicide charges

anything to stop
our complete dumbing down,
our zombification

kill all
the reruns, the voids,
the empty condensations,

go full
dena vu, great return
of sage Friedrich,

mourning the abysmal truth
that no
one now
reads
has original ideas

watches the world
slip out of orbit
without
single

what
the fuck?

GOT NOTHING ON THIS SCENE

GOT NOTHING ON THIS SCENE

strangelets
in my cornflakes

zombie Emily Dickinson
reciting her poem
about the snake
and her poem
about death

now you tell me
there is a black hole
at the centre
of Wonderland (all
that you deemed
absurd comedy in
fact
   supreme gravity)

and Professor Cox
of my alma mater
there in Manchester
speculating on
the terror
   of false vacuum
and the possibility of
absolute zero
   on the surface of
licorice ice-cream

but
   where are they now
who decades ago
tried
    to save our everydays
dish out reassurance

that of classical and quantum
the twain should
never
    meet

and other nonsense all
that stuff that is field, that
is pure
   probability

simply laughing
    tunneling through us

as if
    we are the nothing
pure probability following
their lead
                    heading
in
  and out of fashion
joke on us
     imagining ourselves
solid as we seem

got
nothing on this scene