Author Archives: Damian Garside

MASS


MASS

leaving before it
all gets sweaty

leaving
before it all goes
bottom up

as if
   it were impossible
to get exactly this bad

as if things
  could get worse
than extinction level

you mumble this in your
corporate-trained best
political voices

as if
for years, millennia in fact,
you haven’t been trying
                        your best

hitting the highway away
out of town, out
of this dimension
                      before
there is no
read to speak of

all of cosmic mind thanks
to our level of care
and consideration

rolled
up, and
squished into an agglutinative mass

SIDELINED

SIDELINED

trying to sideline us
even beyond the margins

trying to close us down
crimp this space
so we can’t
say
   anything
to each other

conflating what we
have here
     what we here explore,
revise, deconstruct, analyze,
extend,

with what machine-handle
wood block slogans
you are ratcheting up
in that
      pre-industrial cogs and
wheels
machine you exaggerate
in the history
of philosophy
and psychology
that you call a brain

bringing us down
to your level

level not just flat, one
dimensional

but steamrollered until
the molecules that
bind
     hold-together
cannot give any more

SCIENCE FICTION CHRISTMAS

SCIENCE FICTION CHRISTMAS

I wish you
a Philip K Dick
science fiction
Christmas

a Nexus 6
sent to the Tannhauser
Gate
    to pick up
your present, shipped
there from
the high castle
of the Adjustment Bureau

situated in a pleasant spot
near the Martian equator

whose exact location
I cannot totally recall

but do
     remember when you
pick up
your gift, to show your
stigmata
     which we shall examine
carefully to establish
clear identify

       through a scanner,

darkly

all androids dreaming of
what Santa will bring
                  them this night

as they
electrically sleep

the paychecks and payoffs this year
none too extraordinarily great.

LAST

LAST

this should be
my last poem

the process
has become fraught

protection permeable
hostile takeover imminent
constant suppression, much
infiltrating

you look at what
is on this page

ask: is this how
savages, animals
write these days?

and you fighting with every bone,
      every breath
for consensus?

so many conceptions, contending
definitions at play

out of this problemmatic
few crossovers, no
idea miscegenation

things you
believed getting tunneled under
tunneled through

and always, still
same overriding question

is this how poetry, a single
poem should look
    and then what about

humanity, in what image
a single human?

WHY ON EARTH?

WHY ON EARTH? 

poetry is
the soul of man
the breath of life’s being

and those that write
our unacknowledged
legislators
    just happen to be

so far, so good,
but now lets just settle for
a change in tone, of pace

ask
   why, Oh why
are you still writing?

and why on Earth
did you start in the first place?

BRIDGE

BRIDGE

they found a tunnel under
the Garden of Eden

a German archeologist
excavated it

seems some contraband may
have found its way through
a labyrinthine network
to places where its
presence
could not have been
more destructive

to the great mythology of
what went down here
who
was to blame
and what it means

adding to the neverending theology
and spiritual analysis

for which resolution we actually also
need the bridge

a bridge has yet to
found in the garden of Eden

we can only begin to imagine
how finding one will
structurally change things