Damian Garside

BURN

your beauty
burned me

but now
we meet as embers

wanting
to touch

but ever
so cautious
terribly
careful

wondering
as skin
glides
whispers against skin

what it was
back then caused
a conflagration

AGAIN

you are
pointing your beauty
at me again

find myself snapped
in polarized light
trapped
in your cross-hairs

watch the Sun sink
give you the eye as
we turn our
face away from him

can feel the struggle at
the heart
of all those flames

to stop, turn back,
adore, stay

IMPACT

you hit my poem
with a stick

felt it
recoil
under the impact

saw it heard it
absorb
so
much punishment

neither to
understate or
state over

saw the poem
get its own back

throw you such
a curved ball
when you rocked up
with a brush
to sweep
it away

DIGITAL

I remember that day
poetry
went digital

set itself up
somewhere just
beneath the stratosphere
up in the cloud

and now we type away
furiously fighting
for electronic immortality

unless at some precise
moment of
union
and synthesis

the rainbow of those words
filling the entire atmosphere

engineer an accord, a harmony,
never
before imagined
on this fractious ground.

APART

APART
(for Gary Stevenson)

let’s play chess
or set each other
some mathematical problems

take a logical approach
whilst the world falls
to pieces
billions of pieces

some of the pieces
truth be told, however,
now having
accumulated a
most gigantic size

perhaps we might
consider them in
their own right planets

greater
by far, than
our own little
Earth that just broke apart

REVIEW

thanks for
your mixed review
of my introductory chapter
to our new
book on poetry
and sociology

life is in essence
a sociological experiment
and, however you
slice and dice it,
the individual is
a latterday
construct, the group
social fabric and
the polis

all
of these come first

for what is poet if purely
individual? what
good
is that voice
if talking to himself?

better the poet stick with the group, receive those
accolades at
the great Nobel podium

or
chosing
ill-advised in
choice of path

wind up wrong side
of the arm of law
and social
power

stuck in internment
or asylum itself

HEART

I paged
through my selfies

looking for my heart
paged so hard and
with such
fervour

my phone’s screen seemed
to begin melting

its vital works
collapse.

THIS VIKING THING

this Viking thing
brothers in the shield wall
standing together

brothers
fighting for supremacy
amongst themselves

shield wall
against shield wall

hard to
wrap my head around
the bravery, cruelty
of these people

flows
through my blood
and yet
I understand it not

IN THEIR RIGHT MIND

saw you on
YOUTUBE being
interviewed

so many books
behind you
sign
and code
of the intellectual
man who
knows what
he is
talking about

pretty obligatory
or, as you yourself
might say: “de rigeur”

and here you spoke
seemingly not
in evasion
of any question

waxing waning
astute and erudite
occasionally lyrical slash
satirical

and me here
     wondering how
you get
   these gigs, how you
are always
the person to go to
person
     for on point comment

whilst nobody
in their right mind
would ever
come here for a poem

DRIFTED

drifted so far
from my
original position

passed the souls of a genocide
thousands of them
in a line
   waiting for something
as if
   put here on hold
stored for
the meanwhile
        pegged out to dry

and me
even in this state
left to speculate what
calamity it might have been
to so
overstretch resources
exhaust established facilities

leave them in
this condition where

newcomers
might see

drifted so far
so very far
from my original position

no hope now
of ever being found, let
alone kindly received