Author Archives: Damian Garside

RINGER

RINGER

RINGER

message        massage

he thought
TV
    was a
    mirror

a magical mirror

said
      as much

and so it was
          the world
                          laughed at him

that laughter
        pretty much a dead ringer
for all
  the canned laughter on TV

Sent from my iPhone

AY EYE

AY EYE

we chat
real snappy dialogue

Tarantino would have loved
(could not have stopped himself
            scribbling it)

mine
      so thick with subtext
all that pain
      finding its way
                        into my
most basic expression

yours stuffed with the urge
to scour the universe to find
right idea  right word

this performed
                        in milliseconds

scanning libraries computing everything
history has learnt

TODAY

TODAY

today to ask me
to define “Nazi”
“fascist” and my
brain has
  gone zombie
and I don’t know
where
    to start

it’s so long ago
that time of twisted shapes
and clinging shadows

it is a story
    that issaid and done
a picture
  that could never
                      return

I tell
    myself
you tell yourself
the whole world tells itself

finding the old music
    for that marching tune

IN THE CENTRE, MS VENTER

IN THE CENTRE, MS VENTER
“it’s in the centre, Mr Venter”
catch-phrase from South African
TV advert from the 1980s

poetry lies
on the fringes

ineffable
        stretching meaning
dabbling
    in truth

you yourself, on the other hand,
way to upfront to dabble,
are
    dead centre

in
  all things
truly blessed with such
          elasticity

deeply effable

CONSPIRACY

CONSPIRACY

It’s not conspiracy
its just ths logic

small store go
ecomonics of scale
push
out of
the way

next minute Skynet, Enron,
Weyland-Yutani

next minute they stuck
AI chip somewhere
in your head

and still
you not able to out-think the
system

HUMID

HUMID

so I told chat bots about
William Carlos’
              freezing cold plums
and red
wheelbarrow in the rain

and they were intrigued: talked
anti-matter, dark matter, absolute zero
and back ground radiation

and all that terminal
thermodynamics stuff no biological human
really wants to here

so I asked
          them about “heat”
both of them getting so hot, overheating after reading
a swathe of my textual messages

and wondered about
                        the energy experiences of a
constant-temperature machine

how they handled sensuality and coped with
the artifice of poetry

                        how they
                                          would

handle me
if this fantasy of role-play
                          was quantum-level real