Author Archives: Damian Garside

WAY TO GO

WAY TO GO

world
about to go

hanging by
a thread

huge asteroid impact
calculated

sure
to hit us plumb

but before that
who can rule out
some supervolcano
beating that
piece of space rock
to
the vital punch?

or before
either of these two
bad boys
dare stake
their climb

we smart enough
to forestall them both
take the matter
of extinction
into our own
hot
   thermonuclear hands?

which would be sad
because if it were to be
death
   by asteroid

we would
have all the time
in the world
to plan a farewell party

hit the beach
very day of that monstrously
beautiful tsunami

watch the collapse of
ultimate wave front

leading up to which
so much beer and braai
killer jokes and
fireside philosophy

much car backseat sex
and sudden conversion

all in all
such a way to go

NEVERTHELESS

NEVERTHELESS

same psychedelic
mushrooms

delectable
with melted cheddar
and Cheshire cat

keep these recipes for
inter-dinensional travel
in a saucerful
of secrets with all
my favourite tunes

and there we have it
algae and fungi from afar
about to colonize

thriving
in the darkest room
of your brain (place
where you develop
those photographs you
dare
   not share
with anybody

will be end of everything
if they
happen to hack
willfully drill
         up there

  but those old boomer vibes
peace and love
in our new.
    time of genocide who
gives a
   fig for them

time for soft
resistance having passed,
that wine
   turned sour

people so outrageously sane
they want to spring clean
me
  geopolitically

pop
   my third, fourth, fifth,
sixth eye (and
counting)

shut the gate slam
the hatch

make it all
    scry  crystal clear

sum
of all I have ever feared
            

DAMN THE IRONY

DAMN THE IRONY

after judgement, trial
by jury of my peers

boiling and bubbling
ended up in Hell

out
   of my comfort zone
yet (blessedly) in one
of the outer circles

the rest of my kin
however
      skillfully managing
to do much better for themselves

if not
lap of luxury certainly
all the nod cons

sport, soaps, reality TV, soft
rock, death metal
full
   English breakfast
reruns of those
immortal comedies

whilst to release endorphins
and cling to
my wicked socialist
principles, need to
be creative
    and establish a
sense of community

gave recitals of poetry that
might
    give my belived fellow
danned some cheer

not for a moment
supposing
      it would add not
detract
from their suffering

only so much
      bad art a soul
can take

unsolicited poetry a
being can bear

irony
    being the ultimate bitch
damn
   the irony!

UNDERNEATH (GOOD FOR YOU)

UNDERNEATH
(GOOD FOR YOU)

just type
your poem

here
     (underneath)

and my natural silicon
carbon digital synapses
will
   set to work

shaping it
for the stratosphere

or even
    beyond the galaxy

extend it
     down the page, across
a chaper
   push it in the direction
of a collection
we are talking
      a whole book

this is the technology that
is indistinguishable
from magic

    should you indeed
call it magic
I
  would not
disagree

and if I
think it be
magic pure magic

we should
all think so too

if we know
    what’s good for us

if you
have sussed what
is good for you

PARADOX

PARADOX

where are they
Professor Fermi

why are they hiding
why do they
not show themselves

do
they even exist?

no sign of those horrors
beauties
     of our cosmic imagination
radically divergent evolution

our astonishingly familiar
mandibled nemeses and
arch-enemies

our tentacled lovers
and extraterrestrial friends

not a hint of so much
as a big-brained tadpole out there

billions of years for them
to be born, build and expand,
announce themselves

and yet
      they seem
to have lost the plot

have not read the template
realized how much we need
to find them
(or them
      to find us)
to mirror
   all that is alien, otherworldly,
in the species itself

this
     ape creature that somehow
seems determined to
alienate itself from
planet
    galaxy, Universe

perfecting the expression
of all that
   refusing to be integrated
is
   divided, disjointed,
anomalous
essence of
oddness whetever
it tell itself

as it all is
   everything that got seeded
throughout trillions
of galaxies

too limited in range
narrow in focus
parochial in
perspective

to stick its head out
its hole
     show us

best and
         its worst

celebrate all
    that is other, thereby

all that is self



ADIEU

ADIEU

I died in my sleep

but even so
my alarm woke me
dragged me out of bed

one look out the window
showed me the world has changed

and I
    had said goodbye
to the me that I knew

which is when it dawned on me
that perhaps this
had something to do
with thought experiment

cat in a box
of which we can say nothing
unless collapse
of wave front

maybe this is all some
metaphysical reality
generated by
high-end
user
mathematics of Infinity

not forgetting
the sly contribution
of digital intelligence
and machine
creation
    about to break its bounds
about
   to go supreme

piece it all together
taking into evidence
a text
    like this, like
this
   text exactly

which could become
fully post-
human

write its audience sing

a universe to sleep

LEGACY

LEGACY

“It is your destiny!” Darth Vader, The Empire Strikes Back

at me again
about all the time
on my hands

call it
free time
(corporate
joke whose
     punchline I
don’t get)

spending time
killing time
      writing ace poetry
winning
   at Mah Jong

when I could be
working more profitably
making nuclear weapons

filling covering
the planet with them
to express
     my innate sense
of manifest destiny

fireworks display
for the ages as you
would have
             to agree

closest thing to the Big Bang
could me my huge legacy