Author Archives: Damian Garside

DRIVING DOWN TO CAPE TOWN

DRIVING DOWN TO CAPE TOWN

driving down
to Cape Town to
honour your invitation

need to fill my veins
with the fuel
of liquid stoicism

fifty years since
we last laid eyes
on each other

fear a
single touch from you
and I might disintegrate

recalling that moment
where in your bedroom
I declined
   the sharing of the bed
and whatever
consequent pleasure

thinking this meaning so
much less
       so much less
for you

and now
me heading South
realizing
     in light of
this current sweet
                    invitation

how hopelessly wrong
I must have been

OVERSHOOT

OVERSHOOT

the board
is a blur

they are playing
at lightning speed

my eyes cannot
track the pieces
let alone
my mind

make
sense of the moves

need to
slow this down
to a crawl considerably

right now it is
the red-
hot embodiment of
the brain’s
capacity to
chess overshoot

PIECES

PIECES

to be
   or not to be

they will
not tell you

what could be
good move
never
  mind best move

not a whisper
even a
    glimpse or
hint

Knight, Queen, Knight
Pawn

kept under wraps
kept to themselves

just waiting for you to
hit the pitfall, move
without
    seeing

odds so long against
pulling a Kasparov Carlsen
Fischer worthy gem
out of the hat

magic rabbit
of a combination

plan
     (if that
be the word) not
as solid
     as it seems, something
outside all
that you schemed walking
in through sudden
doorway
       unpredicted
       unobserved

asking you how
you going to get
       out of this catastrophe
needing
     strategy, fluidity,
flexability

your
    calculations so
wooden

in Hamlet were chess
this would be the question

ANTHONY

ANTHONY

every which way
you were
a better human
being than me

found time to
send me
a birthday message
was planning for me
to fly from
Manchester
spend time with
you on
Manhattan island
celebrating New York

and that house where you
lived where
everything happened.
(wherever you were
everything
seemed to
happen)

Professor Emeritus (seriously
outranking me) out
there in
Kentucky

postcoloniality, ecology,
the political
landscape of
the South African novel

so kind
to me and I let our friendship
drift our connection
dither

and now looks like
whatever it means eight
years ago
you slipped off
the radar
I know what I fear it
might mean

one of the best
no longer
around
that laugh, that kindness
no longer here

NEVER SO MUCH


NEVER SO MUCH

she never so much
as gave me a glance
in the philosophy class
the entire year

reading Huckleberry Finn
to shut out
the ultimate boredom
of every lecture
(surely it
begs all
    sorts of questions
a philosopher so dull
he kills
  philosophy itself)

but don’t worry
not going to bore you
I have flashed
forward
fifty

and here I am
       again wondering
how I killed it all
when
  she just
wanted love
          needed me
to love her

dreaming the says it all dream
flowing out of our
sudden
    unexpected
perhaps final
exchange of messages

in
which

she picks me up
in her old beige
Datsun
    taking me
somewhere special our
final
   trip together

and My God! this little
ancient car
of yore has
      been Star-Trek supercharged
roars out onto
De Waal Drive heading
away from the University
somewhere
    she will
not say

and now
  to cap it all
this car has reclining black leather bucket seats
into which by
the G force
I am instantly
    backwards thrown

last but
    no way least
the old manual stick has gone
replaced by
mighty
   automatic transmission
and
  most strange big neon red
numbers on a strip with
gear selection
or
   ultimate speed
clear and
conspicuous demarcations

the last of which
          the one burning into
my brain
    is 72
         a big fat red 72
as if be
sign of
  some significance
of my 72nd birthday

but I’m cool
      the dream is cool
beyond
cool

and here dawn and day’s
reality quietly
ends it