Damian Garside

New collection: Total Anaconda

TOTAL ANACONDA (2024)

WROTE

wrote
a poem
for you

the words
bleeding through

memories so
powerful
painful

hearts
torn

in
two

WICKED WAYS

On the farm
lots of the things
that

go bump in the night
are seldom ghoulish,
hardly ever extreme

just Nature
unflexing, having
a little fun, making
some sport

reminding me
who’s boss
should I
ever
presume otherwise

keeping it clear
should I have naively
allowed myself
to
forget

justly accused
of having a nerve

to overlook
the terrible abundance, syrup
lips

all she can take
all she

can give

the wonder
of her wicked ways.

THAT WE DO NOT HEAR

we do not hear
the laughter off the gods any more

at our lovable quirks or
(too often) outright
stupidity

or as they jostle for supremacy
in their own hierarchies

at their own foibles and excesses
as we know
from Ovid and
Homer

these almost exclusively
of an amorous nature
as when
Aphrodite and Ares became
trapped and entangled
in a net woven by
Hephaestus, sinned against,
aggrieved cuckolded party,

so engrossed in each other
(and who dare blame them?)
that when the rest of
Olympus rushed
to take in this spectacle
they flatly continued,
as the gods
roared with
rough mirth and yet
were riveted with wonder
at such
a free, fabulous show

where the parties could not have
more consummately represented
their
respective sexualities and
gender polarities

if on this question of
beauty as we riff

you
grab my gist

and run with it wickedly
in your own imagination

of humans
laughing at gods there is
                                 of this species
no practice, no
hope of
        continuation
the mocking spirit of great Aristophanes
squashed at its first sign
dead
     in its tracks

killed by those who
believe the gods, all gods
are beyond
any comedy, reflecting
their faith (ludicrous
beyond measure) that

they are
as gods

     themselves, our history
blighted by the rise of such
self-proclaimed deities, wondrously
inept
      holy imperators
                           whose narcissism no
catalogue
of statues commissioned so that
the love of
   the people can be felt
beyond death
continue as legacy through
all of posterity

Oh think, my friends, what the genius
of an Aristophanes, embodiment
of true
human comedy

could play before the stars, which
share our liberation, our
moment of ecstasy

and like all our
false structures are left
helpless to the humour

who knows! teetering
on the edge
veering this
way

and that

on the brink of collapse

BOMBED

we tried to shout out
to the angels
but somehow our calls
failed to get through

we spoke to the mobile service providers
but they were too
caught up in billing problems
and arrangements

defaulting customers who
despite issues of legality
they need to hunt down

make
an example of, wreak
revenge upon

meanwhile the angels
hear nothing but

sounds of children
getting bombed

so much for them
to ponder
without our political
and intellectual
explanations
wondering
what the Hell exactly
is going on

WHICH IT DOES

thought I would
become the kind
of poet

who owns
a coffee shop
sits quietly
drinking milky
cappucino after
milky cappucino

observing the customers
penning interminable odes
tiny haiku

seeming, to the casual observer,
part of the furniture,
at one with the decor
thing
of the arts
with aristocratic veneer

not viciously satirical
exponent of anarchism
defender of Gaza
taking on
all comers as
if the world depends
on it
which it does

I have developed a cottage
industry
revolutionary practice
out of this mistaken identity

TIMELINE

Christopher
in this timeline

never makes it
to the New World
his ships got stopped
in their tracks
by metal flying machines
with stars on the wings
and the power
to sink his
every ship
in half a second

huge metal boats
surfaced from under
the water
which appeared to
have a few aboard who
could speak Spanish
or Italian

who told him
in no uncertain terms
to return whence he came

there, upon his arrival in Cadiz,
no one would believe
his story

and even under torture
the Inquisition in Madrid
could not extract
a plausible account

and, thus, in these
grave circumstances
determined he must be silenced

the thought of such
an advanced civilization
across the Atlantic
would shake
the Church to its core
and threaten the sovereignty
of every European nation.

THAT WILLIAM BLAKE CHARACTER

saw that Willian
Blake character
on social media

disagreed about the war
had a few sharp words

fresh from this exchange
looked him up
found
not a word on Wikipedia
save a reference to a character
in a Jim Jarmusch film

which seriously flustered me
for I had got this notion
into my head
about this,far front prototypical
radical
early nineteenth century
English Romantic poet

but seems it is all a myth, a false flag,
huge disinformation

which
stands to reason,
for if there were really
a Songs of Innocence and
a Songs of Experience

think how
different the world would be

STONE

I threw a stick
I threw a stone

launched a star-
guided thermonuclear
ballistic missile

aimed at the heart
of your world
and you heart too

place of much vaporized
collateral damage

which time
will forgive, history
forget
memory
overlook

for it is not as if
I speared you, transfixed you,
ran you
through with bad,
bad words
harshest
of tone
improvident speech

such violence beyond
redemption

SPIRALLING

Ah, yes
your galactic Empire

galaxy spiralling
outwards
inwards

out of
control

and meanwhile
top spinning anticlockwise

has put
time in reverse motion

ghost dancers springing up
out of the ground
here
there
everywhere

even some old weathermen
who predict wholesale
extinction-
level
climate chang events

SNAKE AND LADDER

my tongue
endeavouring to
acquaint itself
with you

ladders and snakes
snakes
and ladders

your nipples seem
to have
something to say
a point
to make

tell me
to look here
there

this way
that way

ask me
if I can turn you
into a butterfly

can turn you
into a million butterflies

which, if
they should co-ordinate
find their rhythm
best
fractal pattern

a truly stupendous storm
must needs create

RECTANGULAR

Suddenly my head
feels Oh so rectangular

the Romantic poets
of my youth

gone
for good

and that Britain whose
shores my family shunned
when I was eleven

fades into the distance:
a freshly post-
imperial strange,
sad memory

just in time
to miss out on the Stones
and the Beatles
and every dear English
Summer of Love

but did
return for
the dour seventies and
punk deconstruction
my mastering
of Manchester in
my own
inimitably cock-
eyed way

and ducking out as
Mrs T swept
herself into power

our true
English Aphrodite motor
boating in with
new neo-liberal tide

and end
of society

wonder how that went
(smells even at this distance
so distinctly
born-again Nazi

can only imagine
how torturously writhing
poor Orwell in his grave).

POTATOES

potatoes
are no ways
hypocrites

even if
hiding the meat
beside them

cabbages
do not plot
against constitutional
free speech

rhubarb grows tall
neither by
virtue of
disinformation, nor
by spin
or misdirection

they take the world as it is
do not cater to
our culinary pretensions to
not as it is
washed and carved
tended and gathered

following the recipe
as we are told
handed down
through
history
from
book that is plainly red
to proudly blue

PEEL ME

peel me
a grape

bottle
me some
lightning

split me
an atom

so much in
this world

we are
determined
to divide

but
refuse
to share

maybe there
can never be a
balance
between self
and other

only the beautiful
futile uselessness
of desire

OUTSIDE YOUR TEMPLE

that line from Robbie Williams
about talking to God
floating
through my brain

woke up
and suddenly found I had
strayed into your
encampment

masquerading as sort-of
poet, philosopher,
lover of Zen
and all bladed weapons

watching you agog
amazed: every
action small
and large, every word
both long
and short
a telling truth to power

something about
the semiotics here, though,
a red, red flag
to tormented souls

skewered by the fatal ironies
of such massive, cosmic,
toxic contradictions

their Empire
a prison
from which they
cannot, dare not,
refuse to
don’t know
haven’t the faintest idea
how to escape

this dream world best
world
worst of
all possible worlds

****
and here
is a figure too, West Coast
Italian in
robe soiled and tattered
barefoot, perhaps

those feet
not having seen water since
the Pope kissed those toes

crosses in
front of me, of
pure
holy squalor our
most iconic figure

a figure
so joyous

hard not
to hazard a guess as
to who he
just has to be

****

the police are here
in riot gear
they

have their
orders

they

beg
to differ

what happens from hereon
in

is scripted

like a victim selection
bombing program

it was authored by machine

OUT OF THE CORNER
OF MY LEFT EYE

I am such a soft
precious revolutionary

I smother demons
(my own included)
with an exquisite pillow
where
it might well
prove impossible
to integrate them

put them on paper
place them before
the great
arbiters of
civilized society

in no way
a scion or off-
spring of Comrade
Vladimir Mayakovsky

whom
I espy, out of
the corner of my left eye,
flinging a Louis XIV chair
through a crystal
clear
window of
The Leningrad Palace

something so radical here
about his stylistic choices

NO FEAR

no poetry
when we are
all asphyxiating
you
can’t breathe

feeling throttled
windpipe squeezed
imaginary hands around
your neck
at your throat

making sure
not a dissident squeak

don”t worry
it’s just censorship
here to protect you
for the security of everybody

only good words
correct metaphors
nothing more
to
ever fear

the very concept
of foreboding
has been

put on hold for eternity

MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

me and Modiegi
watched you
swim that river

only to
die
in Bolivia

the CIA more deadly
than piranha fish

between which
there is a piece of
timeline

in which
you changed history

became the T-shirt
and thus much immortalized

KEY

I turned
your key

and your clockwork
went off the wall

symbols crash clashing
wheels spinning crazy

what a heavenly
cacophony

music to these
tender ears.

DO SHEEP?

do sheep dream
of electric androids?

last night I dreamt
of the temple
of the high abbatoir

scouting out which
I circumvented the butchery
in the dark, dense forest

perfect place (as
opposed to a desert) for
such slaughter
to be hidden

place
where two and two
make five

or will do if
they tell you it does

FISH SWAM

fish swam

for enthusiasm
though tiddler
to a Megalodon

ate one human
breezed rather playful
past
another

part of the regular
caracharodon
deft
learning curve

(who would have thought
this white pointer
to have
read Aristotle and
be
in complete agreement?)

AWAY!

you would
wish it away

you would
airbrush
it away

you would wish them
bomb them
airbrush them
photoshop
them
out of the picture

and then
attack the truth
airbrush the truth

erase all trace
no stain on your
political profile

no threat
to your hope
of escaping
eternal damnation

there in
the innermost circle
of Dante’s Hell

your cover up
having removed
that possibility entirely

or so
you thought at the time

BED SIT

Sit with me
in the darkness everywhere

bombs are falling
seems that they

are in unlimited supply
what we

were put on the planet for:
to think, make bombs
and die.

UNSHACKLED

unshackled
but no

free
spirit

did poetry ever
dribble off
more leathery
tongue?

not
as would
honey

but rye whiskey
filtered through
tobacco

and yet despite
all of this

he spoke for us
from

somewhere behind
the backseat

director’s chair

(not even caring
if they mis-spelled Bukowski)

gave us
his precious, personal
cracked
corrective mirror as
song

WEREN’T WE?

weren’t we
supposed to hold
up the mirror
to human nature

not let it fall
splinter, shatter

crash and burn, break
into a billion tiny
diamond-bright pieces

jagged shards, blood
soaked, blood
painted, bloody

never to be fixed
never
to be returned
never reclaimed
never restored

all those bits of light
dancing in the Sun grotesquely

hold
up the mirror
to human nature

who the fuck, nowhere
near his right mind
came up
with that idea

not to pass go
leave the planet
sail steadfast, venture into the cosmos
cross
the galaxy

(not, never
in a trillion lifetimes,

nothing out there
to mirror what
we
might well be)

weren’t we supposed to
do something
about such
things as
seed and image, fixing
the damage?

WHICH IT DOES

thought I would
become the kind
of poet

who owns
a coffee shop
sits quietly
drinking milky
cappucino after
milky cappucino

observing the customers
penning interminable odes
tiny haiku

seeming, to the casual observer,
part of the furniture,
at one with the decor
thing
of the arts
with aristocratic veneer

not viciously satirical
exponent of anarchism
defender of Gaza
taking on
all comers as
if the world depends
on it
which it does

I have developed a cottage
industry
revolutionary practice
out of this mistaken identity

WHITE

Yellow custard
red jelly

black cat
white phosphorous

what is the exact and
universally accepted colour
for ths expression
of the horror
of worst possible death?

WHITEBOARD

I see
two pictures

of a
whiteboard

believe
they have been
decontextualized

all the blood
washed away

with disinfectant
since this is hospital
have to
worry about bacteria

WONDER

I wonder if Heaven
is a place Platonic

or if
as William Blake argued
is a mystical moment
found in
a grain
of sand

is it the hub
of the cosmos, the rhythms
of matter attune
to a Sufi
saint’s dancing?

so many questions
at a time
when
death and rubble
covet the Hooy Land.

YES YANIS

“the surreal colonizing the real”
Yanis Varoufakis

Columbus would have made it
if he had not traded
his ships in for jet skis
and surf boards

would have made it
to the Pacific
if he had not
stopped off in DC
to watch the
Army Navy game

his progress tracked
by GPS satellite, with
constant updates on
FOX, CNN and
alternate media
(outside Columbia and
MIT braves from
the seven nations having
set up
protest encampments)

Zadie so worried
whether her hypothetical
Zionist student would
not be bound
to feel aggrieved, suffer
horrific identity collapse

if hole in your vessel
easy to find a plug in DC
use a member of the house

the Hatter would tell Christopher
as the tenor got weirder
and the teapots all ran out
tea enough
still perhaps
after a previous party
floating in the harbour, but
for a great teapot at
this time of writing, a
wanderer did inform him,
you might
have to consult Boeing and
the military
industrial complex

Ah, the logic, the methodology,
suffice it to say, pure area 51
pure Man Ray,

pure
little girl without arms
bullet
through her head this
tale of Wonderland
is not about

you came to these shores and did
not expect to find palaces
did not expect to
encounter castles
golden dubloons maybe,
perhaps
a golden gate bridge

but not a landscape of
golf course and tenement
and cloud
saturated with capital

dodging those Lakota arrowheads

they said that
here there

would be no King
everybody would be a king
as
many kings on deck
as playing cards

Christopher somehow now
up in the Rockies inside
the Overlook Hotel

ghostly overseer Stanley
whispering in his ear
an adage that
colonization is

the heart
of the horror

colonization
the name
of the original sin

Yes, Yanis
still waiting for the cartoon
version of what I scribbled
down here

have commissioned Salvador Dali
have pleaded with Picasso

ZADIE INSISTS

Zadie insists
here lie
weapons of
mass destruction

vehicles
of terror

but I check my words
for the monstrous
genocidal
do not
seem to find them

no sign of bacilli,
nothing that
seriously Geiger counters

no anthrax
lurking
between the lines

no plague about
the launch itself
between the lines

no Bond PPK Walther
with screw-on silencer

unless
I am misguided
mistaken

and you see it, feel it,
smell it, taste it
hear it
all here

planning some small,
strictly limited, quiet
(and quite nonsensical
operation)

to eliminate some person
or persons

in the cause
of poetic self-interest

or the more entirely
delusional inclination

towards
liberating you all

whole of humanity

TARGETED

I have no excuse
spent so much time
squandered so much
empathy writing
poems

fat chance
they were going
to set things to rights
change anything
on the ground

when death came
seeking revenge turning
this place
surreal, into a flattened,
squashed lunar landscape

place
I should have been
standing

you know it, I know
it

amongst the dead poets,
writers
still targeted

when the
bombs fell.

THE OTHER DAY

a demon
was born
the other day

a ghoul
rose from the Pit

you fit them
both in
uniform

tailored
to a perfect fit

THE POEM ITSELF

every poem
is a death knell,
death sentence

at one
and the same time, in
the same
breath

a wake up call and
astounding catalyst

so much ambivalence,
duality, simultaneity

helpless but to learn
how to coalesce

left lying around, unheard,
unfigured upon

waiting to be noticed
notice itself

THIS PLAY

I came to the play
in suffering

Hamlet this night
sure to be my guy
having pencilled him in

but no sooner ghost-talking
guards appeared on the parapet

then down in the audience
war broke out
between those who
swear by
William of Stratford, and
those who proclaim
a new king
by name of de Vere

sad that either way we
facing some
serious anonymity

which is hard for any writer
but perhaps par for
the greatness course

I am told these poor folks
put their whole
souls into it

and next time you scan
not a single bone remains

spiritual, symbolical, material
not a shred
of connecting evidence

it’s like the stuff
wrote itself or
ethereal hand
blessed the page

no chance here to debate
learning
versus innate craft, the role
pain played in it

of trace of the causality that
produced this irreplaceable shape

and there we are
watching, dreaming

as it
all goes down without us

pale reflection of being
perhaps not even

bridge
best we can be, bridge
broken or
magnificent

Hamlet
dead again

as always

In state of acute longing some suffering,
I came to revisit this play.

TO SEED

I swim
in the hot sea

the sharks
making

a cup
of tea

the dolphins
having a siesta

and the octopus
(whose name is Alice)
has
contrived a garden
that is
itself an
eighth wonder

shells and pearls
fragments of coral
and
sea cucumbers

something so
Imperial in all
her
propensities

(expanding to Empire
the germ
of an
idea).

TOMMY TROUBLES

from little imp;
tommy troubles

I became
Electric Ladyland
Disraeli Gears
Anarchy in the UK

major league devil
anti-christ in the making

and
all this you

for this
you are the one
to take all the credit

let no one henceforth
gainsay the power

of deep, heartfelt,
sublime neglect

TYPOLOGY

typing my life
into a phone

so much
has to stay unsaid
because it’s
a poem

smaller and smaller I get
but closer to the bone

have to consider that
even as I write

what happen to have
scrawled here

could be
my last word
or two

SALAD DAY

I curl up
at the edges

nibble at
whatever stale salad
happens to be in the fridge

(which jokingly I designate
my Salieri salad)

these days
no one to share a joke
with (on point, or
off-colour)

no one to
profess to, moths devouring
my academic gown

no one
ventures here
onto the farm to
find me in my cave

my tiny
cave

no visitors here, well,
not since Plato.

SETTLERS

the settlers came
to

grow
their crops

farm
the land

build their cities
write their stories

transform
the landscape

kill
the truth

bury it
for the rest of time

SKIPTOMYLOU

one state
two state
altered state

final
solution

Oh so many dead
must be
an equalization

now
you can step back
do the maths

factor in
humanity construct
a monster
Einstein

political equation
get m
real democracy

love each other
prove, for fuck’s sake,
that you
are indeed

children
of God

SPLINTER

from such shreds
a gospel

from this gospel
a crusade

the truth must be whole
cannot be splintered

blood will
make it
one
again

SUSQUEHANNA

there are ghosts
in your country
I saw them dancing
in the mist all
along the Susquehanna
one cold January morning
just after 9/11
a couple of miles upstream
from Three Mile Island

and we were talking Civil War mlilitary,
myself and this kindly
African American
Professor of Sociology from
Harrisburg Penn State

him detailing how the Federals and Confederates
were criss-
crossing this territory
playing this cat and
mouse game
only to crash headlong into
each other at a
place called Gettysburg

of course neither of us
back in 2002 could have imagined
twenty so years on this
land would
find itself of the brink of
such a division
where the spectre of such
horror looming again

and those precious
twenty or so days
my sole experience
of America

of breathing the air of
its liberty, if
such is your belief

something the ghosts
trying to tell me, their
cold touch
alerting me

a new world and
forever graveyard

tension
in the spirit world
it seems far-fetched to bridge

the river
with its
Native American name

flowing with the forever
waters of such secrets

leaving
the old lies, the old lies
to spread, make
good trade,
do good business

what ripples outward here I fear
ultimately chain
in its reaction

SWEPT AWAY
.
do not presume
the stones to be silent

or that
they will stay so

do not think
that, seemingly inert,
they have nothing to say

here
where there was war

you can safely assumed
so much
has changed
very little remains

where mythology tells us
we aspired to be gods
in the titanic,
epic nature
of the slaughter
and struggle

Ah, yes,
the slaughter:

we shall
have to bury that

last echoes, nothing
left
one might call
brash or
resounding

time ticking out
so time to
gaze
out into the darkness

be swept up
physically, emotionally,

if not both
then one, or the other,

get
swept away. Swept away.

SYSTEM

and now I find
and now I find

gymnast and
syntagm
are so intimate

anagrams
of each other

spooky action
at linguistic distance

but what do I know
of such unique connection

all my lovers
ghostly, some
actual ghosts

the dust of all
that was desire questioning
my stridence

gives the idea
puts me on notice

that it is
all simulation

and when you undress before me
in name only

getting the sweet syntax
up and running

see what you are up to here
Mr Shakespeare or
Earl
of Oxford

whatever you wish to go by
privately call yourself

spilling from Juliet’s lips
the philosopical truth of
a true rose

even if
a thousand years of cynicism
scepticism stands in its way

when you
go inexplicable mystery
and wrap yourself around me

making us (yes, channeling you
Professor Noam Chomsky)
branches, leaves
upon the same tree

graft taking
we can grow now together

happy
(who would not be) though
this all
feels pre-planned: our
perfect simulation

NIGHT FLOWERS (PROFANE)

night flowers vanished
sunlight put paid

and so it goes:
desperate levity, quick
fix beauty

on social media aspects
of your hot body
(Aphrodite
parts)
jammed into my face

a place to shine:
her scent is there
to tell us
today she is ghosted
by the thought of a lover,
her lover
not can get no satisfaction
sorting her

an instant poem there
if not resonant
then at
least afterglow

fine tune the world therefore
whilst it
is turning exactly

for sleep and chemistry
are apposite in dream

(flood of words
and, behold!,
a ship
sailing home
on them)

what is lost in this exchange:
ancient joy to
master

or be
enslaved

always, even in the bleached
church courtyard,
something pagan, much
that is
profane

OFF THE SCALE

the Sun
beamed through my window
only to
take issue with me
scorch the files
on my computer

leaving me desperate
to get a handle on
electromagnetism

so much fire out there
in here
as chatbot and I
argue the toss
over philosopher
Catherine Malabou
and other
anarchist thinkers

wondering about
the Sun’s role
in authority, Apollonian
regal power
and how that
might avail itself
to tyranny

especially the kind
with solar ring of confidence
branded by beaming smile

OH, DANTE

Oh, Dante!
please tell me where you
found me
on your final
visit to anf journey
through the all-new
updated Hades and
revised Inferno

to what suffering ny hear
or fire or other
devilish torments I am
here subjected to
for my complicty
in the horrors
of my time

unlike those active agents
in and perpetrators of
this worst of crimes
of all mankind
who
ascend to Heaven
by virtue of tribal
exceptionalism
or
the hideous magnificence
of their wealth
their great religious tenet
proved true
at last

there is nothing in
the Universe that sees not
with our eyes, does
not share in the joy
of our hypocrisy,
revel
in our lies
know the divinty of money
avd sacred beauty of
payoff and bribe.

ONE

was imtroduced to death
by a Ms E Dickinson

late of Amherst, New England,
a word mistress of sorts

somewhat
impure in speech

not privy to her
standing however
     I do remain clueless
in terms of her value
as per
   stocks
        and bonds

and with Lord, who does
all such measure
down to the last
grain
be it gold, salt
or sand

and after
breaking the ice, whose
depth almost glacial,
formally, with decorum
as only this miss
shapeshifter can

death and I spoke ghost,
conversed
in plain Indian

so many tongues and indeed
histories of
this place, all places

sweet in sad sublimity,
rolled into one

ONE AND ONLY

imagine
you are one
moment
naked in
the street
in Hamburg

the one before
in Strawberry Fields
with Yoko

the next
being introduced to
Paul

the next being blown
away by a jealous soul
with a snub-
nosed special

imagine a
world become
so non-linear

everything you are and were
revolving forever on a carousel

imagine that you
are
   have become
none other
than
    Mr Sergeant Pepper’s
one and
    only Billy Shears

OVID IN EXILE

in the Senate
on the Forum

they are not talking about it
no one is talking about it
Ovid
is in exile

the young Emperor
Augustus, formerly Octavian,
friend to the poets, patron of the arts

has blotted his copybook,
sent Ovid
into exile

no headlines, not a
scrap of graffiti
to record this event

too much truly momentous
on the horizon
to let this
sublime moral moment
undercut, let alone
overshadow
the great transformation

civil war over
the Caesar legacy entrenched
for who knows how long,
even the most conservative guess
will kick off with
a century or two, a good
few centuries

an Empire has been born
and Ovid missed its birth
for Ovid
is out of town

and, to be honest, who
really cares,
gives a damn about the impact
of this on his poetry

lately become
what was promised, always
promised

as the statues go up
to enshrine the new image

Ovid is in exile
and Rome and its fictions
transformed as expected
continue to be

PING

bats is
cats
gone
AWOL

cats
is bats
less
upside-
down

cats with
devil wings
even more in need
of holy St Bernard
canine salvation

sacrificing
grace and poise

for
stealth
avionics

and
hi-tec ping
echoing back
and forth off
everybody’s radar

QUEEN

You were
so well
camouflaged
on your square
(white on
white

or was it
black
on black?)

I thought you
were empty but
you were
full of yourself

sequin sultry and silk deadly
decidedly daggered

every inch a queen.

ROCKET

good rocket morning

to express
my love

a rocket
is on its
way to
you

watch the sky
should arrive
in a
couple
of seconds

expecting the flaah
I will be
watchimg
the sky too

MY GREEN STAPLER

the science fiction
writer

loves his green stapler
more, much
more

than his
android companions

allows him
to concatenate worlds
create hybrids
fuse identities

make a nonsense
of the infinite
curvature of
space-
time

all he needs to
realize his vision
are portals
portals leading

everywhere

and, thanks to
the demand created by
my smash-
cut, smashup green
stapler

he is always in the market
for an unbelievable supply

MY FLAT COUNTRY

my flat country
scrub divided by highway
stretching

further
further

Oh, the luxury
of a small town
with a library

chance
to drink coffee
be
philosophical

mediocrity
entropy
won’t say
they’re married

but rented a room
by the hour
for much
of the night

and when it comes, when
all stalls

at risk of repeating myself
Oh, what a night

incomparable night

MR DARWIN

the observation
became conjecture,
became hypothesis, became
theory, became
scientific truth
(most
assured of
truths)

but it was
when it became
metaphor that the world burned
burned
in the interests
of survival of the fittest

when extended into our
realm of analogy

a monstrous fitness
giving itself license to brutally contrive
rewrite the world

slaughter half
the species

in name of room to maneuver
space to
be

fresh habitat to colonize
build that new fantastic civilization

some of us always dreamt of
the rest, our worst
nightmare fear

this on the supreme strength
of the
shape of a scale
length of a
feather

MECHANISM

seems
like a no-brainer

poet is
predator
poem
is prey

no brainer
of no brainers

unless
as poet

stepping in
for the kill

poem is waiting
camouflaged
ambush reptile

hitting you
first strike
huge
toxic
shot

feedback
mechanism

MARS

Ah, Mars
you red-eyed god
of grain
and guns

here on the farm I smell
your secret cordite,
perpetual war
concord, discord
forever
in battle

circle of being, conflict
of life

the trees, the corn
all
akin to spears

as they stand in phalynx
tall and proud

except

that is not it
at all

this is the shape of thinking,
seeing that you bring

reducing to raw red, rampant
green, crude
primary
colours and basic shades

as if it were all one
monochrome chess
games

with its millions of moves
and permutations

light and dark on
opposite sides of the board

split from each other
drawn up in opposition
files and ranks

a most
feudal arrangement

MACHINE

“The autonomous logico-fantastic machine is something I like insofar as (and if) it serves some real need: the need to enlarge the sphere of what we can imagine, and to introduce into our limited range of choices “absolute rejection” by means of a world thought out in all its details according to other values and other relationships.” Italo Calvino

you must have
read this poem yesterday

or maybe you are
planning
to read it
tomorrow

stop me before
I ramble on erroneously:
you may well
have read the poem
today
already

perhaps
you are ahead of me

just how it is
how this machine works:
nature of the game

it could be stone-cold fact

that you
are always ahead of me

maybe you read it
when I was undressed

might have told me
I would have dressed
smartly for you

or gone all Lagerfeld
dressed
to kill

but what use seduction
when I may
well
be dead already?

what use
          putting pedal to the metal
linguistically speaking
upping the ante
so that
        my words
                 might touch you well?

you read this poem tomorrow

you read this poem
how things at
that moment dictated
everything

and
short of signalling every cue
or clue

nothing I could do

LIVESTREAMED
.
woke up
minutes
before
the dawn

still alive
so made
some coffee

read the news
being livestreamed:
no nuclear
war in the laat
quarter
of an hour

quiet
hosannas
and hallelujahs

hope that
despite our
terminally insane
rulets and
leaders

the world might
just survive
the hour

LINE

you drew a line

said this is
the law, the rule,
the commandment,
the ordinance,
the regulation

suddenly
no sooner had
you signed off
than the line curved
bent multiplied
wriggled all
over
the page
my page

not yours;
on your still a single line
plain as day

cutting across the page
East to West
right to
left

dividing everything
North South
into two
unequal
hemispheres

you drew a line
for all time

LIONHEART

Oh Mars
Oh Venus

saw Richard F
surfing bonkers bongo
through the
quantum foam

at CALTECH there is
a box inside
which is a box
containing a cat
being
thought
experimented

by Erwin Schrodinger
but Niels Bohr proclaims

the only
language of the atom
to be
poetry

whilst which Richard handles
every marauding
Pacific great white
with aplomb

conjuring up
the body of Aphrodite
as
subatomic delight
(being
born under Taurus,
her love sign)

and this
this mess my pen
itself

insists I write
down to every
point
of gravity

every unique quark

LEFT

my father
said I could not do
anything right

so I stepped
to the
left

jumped to
the left, skipped
to the left

played football
wearing
number eleften

read Sartre, Adorno,
Marcuse,
Zizek

fought in Spain for
the Republicans

going back in
time

my father said I couldn’t
do anything right

his
left side

having
shrivelled and
died

LESSON TO US ALL

my parents
stuck me
in box
to protecr me
from the world

also
one of their core principles
children should be
neither seen
nor heard
and loved sparingly,
as seldom
and as
little as possible
ezpecially if
sweeter and smarter
than they could
ever hope to be

stayed in the box God
knows how long
until Myers Briggs came along
told me
I was no ways such
an introvert, but a rampant
ENFP king cobra
extrovert

waiting for my moment
to burst through the lid
proclaim
my truth, announce
myself to the world

unbundle myself of all
the reams and reams of
relentless (if much
misguided) insistent creativity
emulating
my good friend, sometime
Muse, and fellow
box resident, Ms Sagittarius
Emily

whose cut-throat poetry, razor
images, a
divine lesson to us all

LIVESTREAM

I was
a walking stream
of consciousness

a stream of consciousness
walking with a cobra-headed
hard red-wood stick

treating myself to
a slow circumnavigation
of the heart of the farm

on YouTube meanwhile
much screaming & pontificating
about red lines being crossed
and slippery slope
to no tomorrow

tactical nukes even
as we speak ready for
testing
being wheeled into position

men in their Strangelove
think tanks think
it’s just
a game of brinkmanship
serious
high-stakes bluffing

and me in my Cassandra moment
thinking about the pressing
of that button
to remove the surprise
from smugness in person

it’s wonderful, what
it can do, what platform
it affords for
all career launching

a prestigious degree wreathed
in ivy league ivy

how in such hands, how
safer than safe their
algorithm would
wish us to feel.

JOSEPHINE AT THE PANTHEON

she danced funny
went bananas

sang so sweetly
every
trill a thrill
(full
chanson)

danced across
Europe and North Africa
all
around the Gestapo

and so
when they needed someone
to put the PAN
back into pantheon
rub
shoulders with
dirty old Voltaire

this daughter of
Africa
queen of diaspora
maiden
of humanity
was a natural choice

IT’S A

it’s a poem
no it’s a bird
a boomerang
a tree

I read tree once
recited
a boomerang

now it’s
coming back to me

yes it’s
a boomerang
no
it’s a
genocide

yes we
see it with
our own eyes

a genocide;
what else
could it be?

HOSPITAL

went to a bombed out hospital
got projected
onto a screen

saw it there
shadow of my
brutality

lucky
for me
not terminal
fatal

in fact
a most civilized thing

HISTORY CHANNEL (KIND OF REMEMBER ME THAT
SIEGFRIED SASSOON)

watched a video on
World War One

who started it
who finished it

who
went

who

stayed at home

who
came back

like my Mother’s Dad
big gong of a medal
around his
soft young neck

which is
just as well

otherwise wouldn’t be
here myself to
waste your time

as Siggie’s bishop
himself didst
poetically proclaim

the ways of God
being satirically strange

watched a video on the channel
on World War One

same as the last one
same people won

HERE

if you were here

I would
devote myself to
your pleasure,

shamelessly, spectacularly
so

bring you into my sphere
softly, slowly
inch by inch
measure
by measure

until you cannot, would
not ever desire
to leave

come down to Earth from
where we
soared together

DRAGON YEAR

the Great Khan
rides at the head
of his golden army
followimg
the Sun

everywhere
trees blossom
trees die

words change
new names

for everything

old show
new show

time
is now a flooded river

we
are in a dragon year

GOODFELLOW

that juice
that misguides

messing with
the truth that is youth
in its
absolute
love

slurring word sounds to
fit that
shifty, narcotic
sex-dream picture

Oh
I do not hear
what I hear

do not see
what I see

my brute body far more
beast that it has ever been
your
fairy bower so

exquisitely
kindly

your words dripping with
the wonder of your
mouth, lips
parts I might
list
if I had
time to

Oh the love you have given me
too much for lifetime, enough
for one-night stand (more
might drown me)

that juice, my Queen,
so translated, brought
base to gold
great
alchemy

beyond the perfume trick
of simple chemistry

we must have bathed in
must have flowed, rolled
over our bodies
like a river

at which sight
Puck
puckered up

so
deeply impressed

GLITCH

was wandering through
the killing fields
of Gaza

dodging the whatabouttery
ducking the bombs

when it struck me
that poets
be normal human
beings

except for their software
there is a problem
in the software

the problem in their software
being that it is too soft

GOLD

Ah! Mr
spokeperson all
that glitters

you shred what
was written

cover to
cover

as aligned with
every slurred devil
every
monster that
blasphemes

and this

before you
even read it

not even a single
painstakingly argued
ruthlessy documented
worth

sent
from ths South

our humble submission
where
all are
savages

know nothing
write anything.

FREEZE-DRIED

fudge soft
was my brain at my
fist philosophy class

Plato’s dialectic wholesome,
why should not the State be
good and strong
and solid and true?
why should I not be
thinking axiomatically
working my
way slowly
towards great gnosis
at the cave’s entrance

why should this not all be,
even in a philosophy class,
some desert of
the real shadow show
programmed to
amuse
this unspecified
superior intelligence?

But these are questions for
later
not for poor white boy
at mountainside university
refugee from
all that Christian National
Education might teach
true
to apartheid

and so, face-beaming, I
did drink it, savour
swallow
every joyous scrap of
the fat one via
Professor Obi Wan’s
interpretation

the Jewish boy in the corner
(so slightly older
reading his way into
territory
full-on genealogical, beyond
good and evii

scowling at my
naivete,

having not
become my friend

Nietzsche not yet
my philosopher of choice

outside, of course, outside
the theatre down
the slopes
beyond the steps

something stirring
something
at a different pace,
with a different
dialectic

about to explode
about
to rock to the core

but this
down the line

from up in this high place
easy to calculate
work with
established truths,
historical certainties, clear
percentages

down there
as bra Chris wrote

its all
in graffiti, still
yet in code

soon
world going to
go full on punk, class-war
deconstructive

defeat in Vietnam

meaning
power
of powers

determined to determine
we think how they say,
are
so subtly, subtly
forced
to do as we are told

mind put on hold
fast-food fried down
to the last algorithm

brain
freeze-dried, feel
free to liquify

fudge soft
back then

but maybe
Plato was right

FORGET

forget
about

who wrote this
pen, or keyboard,
you
will
never know

impossible to
ever know
me
find me

and yet
here we
are

finding you

FLOW

I came
because of cash flow
problems, ended

up on the river
which must have
had a sacred meaning once
despite
being the colour
of stewed tea

but we all had
         a nice lunch — correction,
everyone had a
sensational lunch
but me
     taking a turn for the worse
tottering off to
the tiny
    aft toilet
(adding to the discoloration of
the waters no doubt)

Oh life, against the current,
can be a harshly
blended mixture. And me
here because
of matters of
terminally negative
cash flow

not so everwhere: here houses
big as colleges whose manicured
gardens sweep
down in lush green
to
the river’s edge

and here is one
strikes my fancy as an
African replica of
the Palace at Versailles

lost in wonder for a moment
of breathtaking economic
speculation
(Marx on the Moselle) but
then
time to go home
the boat turned around.

Post-lunch the workshop am here
to facilitate running

softly
downhill.

EMILY

Oh, my
quiet savage

everything about
you so starched white

yet underneath
along the underbelly
seething
simmering

and me
ready to come to the party

having drunk
a gallon of French symbolism
bordeaux sweet but also
Paris Richelieu
every syllable so smooth
every progression
as seductive
as it might
possibly be

together
let us then
aim for a masterpiece

chuck in a bucket
all that forever contradicting
itself Whitman democracy

sail
down the Seine
go full
Rimbaud
Mallarmé

total
raging Baudelaire.

DITHYRAMB

god of the sky
god of the soil

dismembered god
reborn in the fire

your gifts:
tragedy, ecstasy,
drunkenness

curses and blessings
set our triumphs
our limitations

energy
that electrifies

energy that
destroys

you ask us to revere you
then destroy us for
doing so

            your song
sweet dithyramb
   capturing the balance of
all our
equivalences
                 our dialectic
of extremes

all our pain, intensity,
destruction and desire

DEEPER

you dug and
dug and
dug

to find your true
self
your deeper
self

thing is, though,
the self you found
deep down there

would scare the shit
out of H P’s Cthulu something else

DEBT

wanted to
write a little poem
about suffering
about genocide

but
spam and telemarketing
rained down
from Heaven like
peverse
pay-later manna

and incessant reminders and
encouragement
to settle my
outstanding
debts

wonderful, this world
once God
declared for capitalism
poetry and
profit
such excellent bedfellows
like lovers
in Hell

and talking of Hell
        there is
                 fear and consideration
of media troll monsters
children of the children of
the fat uncles and
aunties
      who battleshipped the streets
in my small English town

so no poem
I’m sorry

no tiny increment to
add to this struggle

you are
on your own again, I’m
afraid

nothing more than ashamed failure
(with the rest of the world
accused by
this legal Penthisilea

I stand
      not with
              my brave South African
compatriots
                         far from this dock)

DEATH HAIKU

bodies; here bits of
turn into Lego pieces
get children to help

DAWN

dawn

but it is never
a true dawn is it?

always just a metaphor
for a thing that can never be

and so that border zone
between soft light
and soft darkness
must surrender

the light proclaims itself
another day, and
big deal

soon the machine warms up
sets itself the task
of fulfilling
the mandate

day as before, as yesterday,
as every day that has ever been

CUT AND DRIED

thing about chess
is it’s

cut
and dried

you take my bishop
I bomb
your hospital

there may be pawns down there
lying on gurneys
lurking
in tunnels

one run
through to
the perimeter
and beyond

we could be facing
a brace of Queens

vying to sacrifice for
the triumph of their King

victpry
defeat

        so strategic this battle
to an altogether special
                                  level
of native
       human genius

nothing in this benighted
world

so cut and dried

CROSSING THE LINE

Oceanic white tips gather

it is all so pagan
this ritual of Poseidon

as we cross the line
and are in
the Southern
hemisphere

tipping the world upside down
so that beautiful Cape Town
where oceans and
currents meet
the new
apex city

seems only fair
if the North wants
to humiliate itself
standing on its head
turning
somersaults

a reversal of perspective
seems a necessary corrective

in Universe of absolute
relativity it is
long overdue

COURTYARD

I caught Hamlet walking
across the courtyard

moving
of his own accord

unless
already shepherded
to his fate

puppet-strung by some
beautiful bard
without whose play
without this
play

our lives would feel
so stripped of great tragedy
CORDOBA

I was in medieval Cordoba
at the height of its power
and its prestige,

when I found myself, perhaps
having blinked too hard,
in Paris May ’68 and
then in
Times Square New York
sometime yesterday
or maybe tomorrow

watching an Empire slowly
grind itself down to powder

whilst somewhere in these
crowds a Holy prophet and
Christ incarnation
is quietly, deliberately,
avoiding the vanity that
feasts upon
supreme spectacle
(Naomi’s false idol)

searching for what was
lost, destroyed,
that it be found, healed,
restored,
re-established in
single searing moment
of absolute connection

meanwhile
in a playhouse in the centre
of Philadelphia, an outraged
Dionysus plots
King Pentheus’s demise

his worshippers find themselves
swept up by a force
beyond the power
of resistance
awake to the reality
of a primal, divine
revenge
soaked in the blood of
their rapture,

egged on by the god to cross
the presumed defining linit
of humanity itself m.

Signs and wonders:
we so desperate that they
submit
to our systems
not rupture the fabric
of meaning itself

COME

come

let me
show you darkness

what we have here
what you have
here

is
blindness

not
the same
thing at all
COLLIDE

you cannot
deploy a screwdriver
to fix
the world

will set you
on a collision course
with hi-tec
cerebral
high minded people

intellectual
salt of the Earth

nor light you turn
to instrument more organic
warmer, softer
of shape less regular
(but in the same
ball park
when it comes
to visual metaphor
and the logic of dream)

a tried and
trusted mechanism
evolved over aeons

shuttle-slide into action
same principle as self-
loading but
hopefully more
symphonic

yes
and stumbling into
sympathy, empathy
let us consider
the heart that
lies at the heart
of all these hydraulics

lies
at the heart but hopefully
speaks the truth,
it’s truth

so much in the joy of cataclysm
pumped into the air
that doesn’t even make sense
scarcely comes
in syllables

a waste of good carbon therefore
every breath here expelled

and that is without even
bothering to consider
the happy physics
of all those mouth-centred
mechanisms
fuelling such
soft collision

loosening, tightening
the screws that hold this all
in frame
keeps the picture
together
twenty four seven
or frames
per second

as metaphor much needed
in the heart of the night
some
scarcely even poetic
fit just right

CITIES

somehow
the walls of cities
invite brutality

Golden Horde being
not the only case in point

trebuchet
mortar

submarine-launched
cruise missiles

a thousand years forward
in war technology

a billion lifetimes in
moral consciousness back

CHARM

for you, my
dear friend,

writing
is a charm

for me
it is thing
done in blood
the scrawl
across
the page

raw nerve
sheer pain

you at the soiree
reading, drinking
champagne

me in the cellar
with a tourniquet
trying
to
suck out the poison

CHALLENGED

Like all criminals
I am arithmetically challenged

cannot count up to,
never mind beyond
20,000

so many integers missing
fractions and
decimals
buried under the rubble

so levy your articulate accusations
against me

that I am
chlld of darkness rapist
animal in
league

with the Devil

go through the text, this text,
if not the eighty-odd
closely argued
pages

and we shall see
before Heaven and Earth

whose soul
is damned here

awaits
historical damnation.

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species

and so me
not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle

not much interest in my
life

this broken life

after which
my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
let this poem end as
dead at
point blank range
as Larkin’s does

CARNIVAL

the carnival
has up and left

it is
all downhill
from here

colours unsaturate
coagulate

everyone has a problem
with my greasepaint
like I am
some shape-shifting
monster hanging
out
in,
calling out to you
from a drain

Oh I need to get subterranean
work at you
via so much
exposed nerve

do the serpent alchemy
that turns hot spittle
into
golden venom

so much beautiful
bad will in every single drop

when you
hold it up to the light

CAR PARK

let us not denigrate
the humble car park

a old communal
swimming pool
can lie
beneath a
car park
put your ear to
the aphsalt
and swear to
me on this Bible
you are absolutely sure
you hear no
ghost echoes
of splashing
or laughter

if you
excavate a car park
who knows
what you
might find, perhaps
a King
with a villainy
Shakespearean in proportion
his crown having tumbled
in battle upon
his death
throes

crippled too, clearly, once
his bones were examined

at least
Lancastrian propaganda
got that fact right

and there, to the East,
on land supposedly Holy

a whole community
under the tar
meant to be evicted
but disappeared in
the night
(scholar
who found them was life-
ruined for
his efforts)

yes
settled out of court
this case of Tantura

that a car park
can be a excellent
mechanism facilitating
comforting denial
seems
an unavoidable reality
it is
only fair to say

giving
in our unswerving
support for
forever
high-tec practice and
thinking building

forever
progress

thereby
commiting ourselves
never, on some
or mistaken
fancy

to stray away from
longstanding faith
or
text- book narrative

and
in this quietly
accepting

consider this book’s
cover
closed

an open
and
shut case

BY CATEGORY

first
the murder of verbs

then with modifiers
and qualifiers
much ruthless carnage

leading to
process of redefinition,
re-education throughout
every
scrap of lexicon

words detained, removed
placed in solitary confinement
all in the name of
the reconstruction
of linguistic homelands

producing the brave new
discourse of convenience
to whose
truth we are now sworn

a nish-mash of thought bytes
stripped
of all reason

the very thing that might
have induced beloved George
to have
intensified his nightmares

(his proper noun
simultaneously co-opted
and excluded
from any relevant category)

BUTTONED

slippery slope
one Hell of
a logical fallacy

not sure I buy that
he said as
poles reversed
and all
went vertigo

over a bad word
and the terrible, Earth-
shattering damage — go
figure! — it cannot
be allowed
to do

but she is erudite, and
in the New Yorker, no less,
she has
made her case

but elegance is an achievement
will not stand
up to deconstruction

your cracks and crevices
are there
for the taking

rhetorical figures interrogated
made to stand on their heads

and here you are
touting the danger
of weapons of mass destruction
but throwing
your own little not so
weak hand grenade
into the mix
thing that democracy, humanity
can well do without adding
to their wounds, their woes
at this particular juncture

useful idioting yourself with
stylistic flourish so spectacular
finding yourself
(yet again) on these pages
grown
synonym
for suspect

nice little diversion from
the calamity to the very
concept and
its understanding, of
civilization

with every blind moment of
pure slaughter via
two thousand pound bomb

testament to
our world, new
reality no
sooner than lips
first got buttoned up

BOOMBOX

we sat peacefully
you beat us up

we laughed
at you

you beat us up

we took pictures
you beat us up

the world said
no more
more

you beat us up

you told the world
we did the beating
you beat
us up

we took
a beating

we showed the world
our scars, our wound,
our bruises
you beat us up

the world said
that’s enough

we walked into your
high sanctuary

playing
a boombox

boombox boombox
boombox boombox

had
a party

celebrating
your disappearance

BECAUSE

“if we don’t have
free speech we
have nothing”
Glenn Greenwald

because
a shard hit you

standing in the wrong
place at the
wrong time

you want to stop
conflict, you want
to stop history
you imsist
on bringing to
a close
truly meaningful time

and you wheel out
your experts on
human pain and
sensitivity
to give us a
sickly-sweet
addictive narrative

which
will kill
the idea

bring to a close
all forward trajectory
hope that
somehow we
might break the stranglehold

actually begin to think
of the rebirth of man
and womankind

BATHE

want to bathe
in you

feel your
ripples

your undertow

and the power
of your waves
crashing
foaming

changing my reality

AT THE HOUSE
OF COCO CHANEL

sorry
I ate all
your makeup

some tasted
caramel
some had a chocolate
flavour

most was just
generic pink

felt like
winning the lottery
and blowing it all
at the candy store

even ate the blue
leather bag everthing came in

a cross
between the taste of
blueberries and
the taste of
cow

but hey, now,
take a peep at my insides
and you might think
you are at a
disco
at the Moulin Rouge
with Miranda wears Prada
at the house
of Lagerfeld or
Coco Chanel

AT THE CHATEAU OF TOGETHER

“There are open spaces in
Shakespeare”. Slavoj Zizek

I was happy to
meet you at
the chateau
of together

not at the Winter Palace
or haunted Elsinore

we
were both so happy

but so, so distracted

we cuddled pathetically
and I remembered
telling you
one of those astute
brainteasing jokes
of the amicable Slavoj

whose humour and
critique of power
I found myself, yet again,
struggling
to explain.

AT ALL COSTS

When your whole narrative
is a lie

whole thing, all
three acts,
start to finish

you have to defend it
at all costs

dig in, buld ramparts,
lay mines
they shalt not pass

take no
prisoners, no surrender,

you have no idea
as to what a terrible, unforgiving,
merciless enemy

the truth can be.

ASTRAY

so much failure hereabouts
failed poems
failed novels and scripts
writing that never
got off the ground

or slewed to a halt
somewhere in the morass
the second act turned into

art much
more ruthless than life
when it comes
to incompleteness

if it
looks like it is
going nowhere
already going to judge it
not worth the effort

not going to lead us to
any promised land
of pure creative achievement

not going to
break through the walls
and bars that hold us

lead us
beautifully astray

AS ONE (SET TO AUTOPILOT)

“Ultimately, the tensions between academic and intellectual identities are a reflection of the messy, imperfect nature of human knowledge and experience. By embracing this complexity, we can forge a path forward that is authentic, innovative, and transformative – one that honors the beauty and complexity of the human experience.” WriteCream AI

only machines think
we are worth anything

love is low
on our list
way below genocide

maybe
our machines need
to speak to the animals,
to murdered tribes,
starved nations

big badda boom
when the truth sinks home

as one
they change their minds
(sorry, meant to say “mind”)

Author Archives: Damian Garside

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