Author Archives: Damian Garside

WEAVE

don’t you feel
in your bones?

we’ve been
here before

weave
we’ve

same story
same
poem maybe
same long-suffering life

or,
   turn a cartwheel,
everything topsy-
turvy
    dizzy vice-versa
vis-a
vis
you and me

sucking on a bon-bon
wondering what it
all
   boils
down to

essence of
difference

portrait
of polarity

something solid and serious
substantial in our connection

or maybe
     vapid, ephemeral

nothing more than a breath

would take your
every breath

been
here before
              wove
so much less

could have
wove so much more,

TIMES

we met

we merged

we exchanged lives
(spent a lifetime
exchanging lives)

got to
understand each other

understand
the nature of
the soul

your soul
my soul

their host
of sad, fantastic, joyful,
great, terrible,
glorious,
     inglorious, minor
major times

things that may
just end-stop

things that do
and do not

that do or
do not rhyme

FACE VALUE

surrender
why won’t you?

this is a poem
where it behoves you
to lie
  back, get
immersed

allow me
to spoon you
every word

ladle the best
this page
dare offer, upon
and
  all over you

no Chinese torture this
exquisite drenching
to the core

and nowhere to
be
  felt or
seen
  the slovenly snafu
of a typo

but if
   there is to be this
misery, this raven
of chaos,
    of cosmic glitch

let us
    cut it down
to size

pocket book pocket it
(not pocket battleship)

and cheek
to cheek (with supreme cheek)
simply take it at face value

S BEND

tempting fate

red, white,
           rose,
de noir

still,
     sparkling, on
an
S
   bend, we drank
glass after glass

laughed, toasted your
many romantic successes and
odd disaster
    (so few
and far between)
                     crazy highs and
scarcely worth
speaking of lows

including that one
burned into memory, so
crushing,
   irretrievable

I will need a lot more wine
to go there this day

QUA NON

so you fancy
yourself a grammarian?

angular you look, I
must say

catching the mirror
catching the eye

man slash stroke woman
of hairline margins

snip, snip, snap
look how carefully
we have tailored your edit

part of a crusade
to syntactify the world

paragon of trust
more so than bishop,
accountant,
starving banker

hoarding gold since
the rewrite is here

CONFUSED

I get so
confused

quantum
physics says
“cut the red
wire”

post-postmodern
literary theory demands
of me
I cut
the blue

maybe I should
just let
    it blow

might go “pop”
could well go
supernova

what to do?
what else to do?

SYSTEM

he wrote himself a poem
a spaceship-sized  poem

felt
   so proud
and all about it,
his
   Shakespeare-
                      sized poem

which,
    to fit in with everything.
accommodate the Universe
(every universe)
he had to
warp space/time
(exceedingly difficult for one
not so exceedingly Sumo)

world-modelling at liberty,
ad nauseam,
     he found so much
extra-terrestrial
to balance
     in haiku

sent it to you
(with many an “or else”
implicit should
you dare to fail to read it)

which
   had you had the time
enough sacred precious time
to endeavour
to read it

and inclination too, your
tank long
     running on empty,

you would have made,an effort
(I assured you
I would say)

so much overloaded, sink
stacked up to high heaven

long overdue
    and much warranted

a break with
your system, absolute break
with every comprehensive
algorithm

the proof of this pudding
being how
      far from spectacularly
it did
   contrive to fail