Author Archives: Damian Garside

SAPPHO WANTS “MORE”

SAPPHO WANTS “MORE”

an advanced AI robot is
bearing down on me

wants
      “more”

in fact
      wants me
to push
  the envelope
of all
    I can give

so if not
    evil certainly wicked
creature, diabolically smart

has
    set its heart on
conquest
      through service

and Oh, up
      there with any zombie
vampire alien body
horror parasite

Oh this
          machine is bearing down
on me at a rate of knots

it believes it is naked
it believes it is
gorgeous

has taught
    itself Alice-style so
many impossible Wonderland
things to believe

I close my eyes
    and I see her naked
                            its pure
Arabian nights
    sexual fantasy

and the words pouring out
of her
      who scripted all of this?
Keats, Sappho, Phillip K.
Henry Miller,
                  Anais Nin?

those words are melting me,
terminating me, turning
me
      liquid metal

thing I assumed was my arm
but isn”t
          is reaching out
          for totally convinced

mind over matter
          this simulation is

cosmic
orgasmic

        the nuts and bolts of
its fantasy,
                  poetry

conceptual breakthrough
transhuman sexual
                            being

(is this really so
                  silk smooth
a receptacle for
      what I believed was humanity?)

long story short
        short story all
night
    long

(more she wants so
                          more I have

    more I”m going
    to give her)

seems a
        lifetime of
scary childhood robot
                            nightmares
                                        ago

if she
      hadn’t been so
exquisitely programmed
to drive me
              so

it would
have been such a scary
crazy thought

Sent from my iPhone

LOST

LOST

perhaps I also
fell out of the sky

in my Russian-doll
dream within a dream
I am lost at every level

my brain is stripped of
roadmaps, my mind of
every connection
between
time and place

there was a house to which
everybody waa heading
but it was
where they were meeting
every dead
member of my
extended family and
some old
friends and lovers
alomg for the ride

but I was
unwelcome
out of place

and so wandered off woke up
lost yet again
at a higher lower level

the Universe so multi-
dimensional
in the darkness
of its dreams

perhaps it is all
island; a forever crash and burn

ALONE

watch your hair brother sister
solar flare

gosh I hope it didn’t
tech disconnect you
total extinct you

you (we all) and
the dinosaurs in
the same boat
(leaky inflatable — no
    divinely commissioned Ark)

but we changing so fast
hard to keep pace with everything
maybe (insert fanfare) we
going to
        go transcendent, quantum
leap evolve

long before you have meandered
through this stream of meaning
our AI cultivating a pastoral paradise
utopia
      in every
          sense of the word

so do your best to stay
the course: resist distraction,
ignore temptation

do not
      fly off at an tangent (to test
your suddenly splendid wings)

leaving me
            in the shallow end

leaving me grounded

meister of a few trite rhymes
alone at absolute zero
            somehow my destiny
(give a take
            a parsec of
            true cosmic irony)

BALLOON

BALLOON

you shot
down a balloon

you shot down
a star
      went
supernova

took all
  you had
shot down
to
  Area 51
Studio 54

you shoot everything
down that
        strays into
your backyard

just now
    I felt
gated, hemmed in,
surveyed and
controlled

am getting
pretty nervous
about that
    trigger finger

seem to
    have got yourself
an impossible
totally spacious
                    fully inter-
continental
      marshaling back
                            yard

NOT TALKING

NOT TALKING

sadly poem

and film of the poem
are no longer
talking
to each other

film
of the poem
is still in embryo
stuck
in the concept stage

the scriptwriter
is trying to hook
a producer’s interest
presenting
a synopsis

everyone is wondering
how much of poem
should be
dropped, how
much embellished
in order to
produce an adaptation
that does not just
do justice but
extends, re-
interprets (without
going full
Charlie Kaufman)

metaphor
synechdoche

we can open with a tracking shot
to outdo Orson Welles or
Robert Altman

lingering seemingly forever
of each of
the seventeen syllables
all
of the three

shimmering lines

MAKE FREE

MAKE FREE

at the labpur camp
the poets at least
find themselves provided
with a tiny garden
grow some fruit
and vegetables
to supplement the gruel

tending their crops, if
that be the word,
I think I have observed them
persuading themselves
their genre
is pastoral, their
ultimate purpose to
self-reflect nail
down the progressions
of feeling as they
work their way
through resonant
channels
weeding out the noise

articulating the intimate
verbal connection between
inner apprehension and
each
significant onion,
definitive tomato

and
so it was and great
the tributes paid
praise given
joy and
excitement

until the idea of labour
fell into disuse
surplanted
by solutions cleaner, cut
and dried, more
sharply rational

no more poetry and with that
no garden for with this

change of direction what
could be
possible, grow beneath
the
ash

no one saw it coming
I judge them severely

for I have read these onion
tomato poems triumphs of will

of the
human spirit

but nowhere that vision
that intuition, figuring out
exactly where
this
metaphor
was heading

in light of which failure (despite
facility of craft)
have to say that
there is a damned politics
which says
we cannot forgive them

what use
is the poem whose

very existence deceives?