Author Archives: Damian Garside

AND THE GLORY

AND THE GLORY

how it must resonate
with you
helping speed
along Biblical
divine purpose
(but the exact
chapter and verse
seemingly hard
to locate)

marching your way (sorry,
all our ways) across
dead landscape upon
landscape
into the book
of revelations

wrestling all into submission
as they meet
head-on, full
frontal attack
the power and the glory

no moment more
opportune
to jump
the gun

bring about that
eternal pastoral, ingrained
memory that it must be,
of all
   that precedes us

predates all sense of purpose
that we have been
called upon
to execute
    the template of divine
empire, downloaded from above

NATIVITY SCENE

NATIVITY SCENE

time of war
hard to avoid
finding yourself
immersed in everything

images, text,
flooding in
from everywhere,
challenging
those last
assumptions about
how good
we are
   how precious
our humanity

the targeting
of children

the heroic burial
of some
or other
soldier

strangely, suddenly
striking me as
the absolute
antithesis
of the nativity scene

TO SAY

TO SAY

history rhymes
this, being said, be
careful how
you recite

always here
a terrible price

need to
figure out
what you are doing there

reading
   from a hymn sheet
adding to the chorus

the words just pouring
out in fine tune
not a thought about
the whats
and whys

so much structure
in the music

out there
chaos, perfidy, deception,
entropy

serving the interests
of what now calls itself
to assume power

stripping me here
of anything, everything,
all I have got to say

CAVEAT

CAVEAT

do not read to deeply
unless lurking
here

you locate
an




abyss

or stumble across
a

v
o     r  
             t
   e
          x

get effaced

disappear off this page

victim of reading with
just too
      much focus

outrageously appropriate
imagination

if you
got here unscathed
you obviously
                 ingested my
caveat

read with a standard lack
of acuity and
image identification

but for those
readers truly blessed, soul
brothers sisters
who did
         not get this far
to share
this moment

falling, as I do,
by the wayside, amongst
thorns,
           slap bang
in the middle between
Scylla and
Charybdis

as is my
proclivity
on a
    perpetual basis

take my hand
dear deep denizens too

SOLUTION

SOLUTION

“there can only be
a creative solution”
       Gilles Deleuze

when you talk solution
I kind of dissolve

was only 15
in May 68, that most
year of the Monkey

Woodstock music festival
Jimi Hendrix machine-
gun divebombing
the Star Spangled
Banner the
following year

cannot speak French
(the language
seeming
    to resist me
at every turn)
but so
   into that opera house
of philosophies
that medley
of theories

thought it a kind of
light in the darkness,
laser mental surgery

but now
    here we are

won nothing,
captured nothing

intrigued that there is such
a curious parallel
between
     endgame in
my life
and endgame in the world
at large

privileged to
navigate this sludge of
landscape
    having honed
that Barthes template
critical
   apparatus of sign
and code

deconstructing to such
a fine tuned degree

I feel an insider in
the clarity with which
I am
    there with Zizek and
the punchline
of his jokes

liberation there, losing
oneself
     to right genus and
species of rigorous laughter

BARS

BARS

no man
is an island

but beg
to differ
JD

I am
without all
connection

not even
an island

treading water
in the middle of the ocean

giving one last
glance upwards
before I
sink

beneath
the surface
so stunned and
surprised

at how many stars
have suddenly
become
stripes
suddenly become bars

become our prison
for the rest of time

SONG

SONG

a leaf
sent me
its dissertation
on mindfulness

I studied the text
both its sides

a snail
sang me the song
of the fibonacci sequence
I never dreamt
series could
be so beautiful
number
so pristine

and poems of joy
were recited many

by creatures too
small for
the human eye
to see
too large
for the mind to comprehend

a mantra too, chants
most muscular

power to keep
the sky awake, there
to help
the cosmos comprehend