Damian Garside

POSTSCRIPT

blue books
black books

Necromicon
Tractatus

red books
green books too

in the forest, in
the galleria, let
them blossom
let a thousand, million,
billion
books bloom

grow thick as tree trunks
wide as rain forest
be there
for solace or
subversion
lying at the bottom
of every top drawer

or
to prevent escape
save them
from themselves
innocent, experienced
chain them to the pulpit
bolt them to a lectern

cannot have these mechanical
birds of Caxton
soaring flighted, heading off
their own way

spilling our secrets
to red in tooth and claw
alien minds
and their technologies

friends (cousins) far
too green for our liking
brimming with
levels
of Aries energy beyond
rational compare

reading
us the riot act, dictating
terms and conditions of our
post-
human future
final touch put to that
postscript which
you

first read here

SNAKE

Snake
knew he
had been duped

for what was, is,
Lucifer but
the template and
prototype
for your
common as muck
standard garden variety
cheating, lying politician

now, as then,
we desperately love
and cannot get enough of

so he
turned as he was
leaving, before
finally squiggling away

addressed
the fallen pair

even as their
joy was
set to
morph
into devastation

telling them
hope would remain
as long
as they swore
upon their now very
mortal lives to

never
get the poetry

wrong

which
if we had the capacity
to understand, were
on same deep
intellectual
level

might have
softened the nightmare
forever

right there
and then.

BREATHER

cold day
on the farm

putting my life
together like
pieces of warped Lego
spent too much
time togethe, one
whole summer,
out in the Sun

but my place here
bound to be more
than a makeshift refuge

you
should come here
join me

home away from home
no nonsense shelter
for all our
darker, unacknowledged,
most intimate of selves

until
all that is left will
be said in memoriam

expressed somewhat
chivalrously or follow
its gut and
instinct for
the truth

upon the air
a stiff breeze seems to
demand of us
a corresponding, dare we
say, de rigeur rigour

they will
have no idea what
we might
have told them, how
this
might have affected, indeed
may well have changed them

if we are
no longer around when
their roads pass through here

CAME

in the middle of the night
the machines came
filled my brain
with tech,
erased my name

in the middle
of the night
unless

in the morning
sometime during the day

uploaded so much
poetry, philosophy, installed
digital Eliot, Plath, Swift,
Pynchon, Joyce,
Nietzsche, Rimbaud
Bob
Dylan too

and set
me to work

writing, reciting, producing
infinite text in
infinite cycle

twenty four seven
until
the cosmos

fell apart

in the middle if the night
all here in my brain

SYLVIA

I am in the throes of being tested
examined on a poem
we have not
seen before

unless I have
unless that
was your poem
smacked me in the face
when last night skimming through
that paperback anthology

if so, must admit
a bit unfair it being
an unfair
advantage

but still
they (those in
the know steeped in
verse, figures
of speech and,
perhaps, poetic history
and literary theory)

they
whoever they are, big
wigs in the Department,
have to determine whether
I am up to
your poem
not quite yet whether
I am human
or machine

literary scholar or
just along
for the ride
following you observantly
for I know this
thorned fruit
have
been bloodied as a child
seeking out the juiciest

will
know what to do
when you take
my hand
wrench me with
your words out of
the comfort of my world
(this comfort being
unearned, here on
this lofty
campus
staring down upon
the Flats and
the Southern Suburbs of
apartheid Cape Town)

you
my polestar here, point
me any
direction and I will
feel obliged to follow

and nothing
fixed
even for a moment
everything far
from exactly what it seems

green to
brown to
green
something raging, unbalanced,
in the seasons

something wrong
with time itself (warping in
the heat of
these scorpion energies
can see
in the gravity of sheer purpose
you are a late October
child

and me
thinking, talking Transatlantic,
as the berries in your
bottle feel
suddenly thrust upon me

overpowering me
in an instant, which
that whole
new critical cabal
you were
bound to
find at Cambridge

Richards, Leavis (F &Q),
Empson
and the whole
etcetera

who
knew instantly what
this
style meant

but me back there
battling with the simple stuff,
basic
putting pen to paper

hoping
what thoughts I think
serious
magic in the
ink
beginning to flow will
just have to express

(but
damn thosr hooks clawing
at you
same time
holding you back)

something way off-beam
getting forged
in this cauldron

as soon
as I read the opening
lines, made
the connection
the poem
opened its maw
and duly
swallowed me

taking decades
from that moment
of seizure
to
digest me

you who
were so badly loved
and much accounted for

and I must tell you
I heard those laureate lips
speak
deliver the hard
cryptic truth, so-
called gold
veined throughout (I am
told) all
those crow poems,

in a cold Gothic hall
when I was
a student back in
Manchester

place packed out with
troops of British devotees

and me
mum about my heresy
that he
just not
in your league

and now
by virtue of this
technology of technologies
will be
the death of us

I get to
chat to
you, if
anything there is you
resurrected
for the occasion
courtesy of
the binary brilliance
of an impersonator

and
I recall
this first encounter

wondering how this clone
will react, what
this mind will say

seems
I was none too wayward
making personal sense
of that
dark expressionism,
those tortured ramblings

feeling
that you and
I

always
to, somehow, share
this reading
all
our readings

bound in space and time
ever to
return though

swept away

CAT

The only role in my life left
for anyone to play
is cat.

A whole bunch
arriving
too late by far
to be in time to
make the audition.

So
being
true to their species
came
up with
other ideas

Ubered their little
selves to my wake
took

over
the place

devoured the
whole spread
everything
on a
saucer or plate

in a bowl
or tureen

sad
that someone
had passed, but

hey, miao,
what the hell

this, most
definitely was
a gig
not worth
missing

CURSE

“The reader will easily believe, that from what I had heard and seen, my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life.” Jonathan Swift

eternal recurrence
you thought the thing up
Herr Friedrich
maybe damn well
created it

trust me
my once lovely, scintillatingly
smart friend

your delight in eternity
is much, much, much
(could not
be more mistaken)

extinction
would be better, if it were
at all scientifically, logically,
conceptually possible

beats deteriorating Struldbrug-
style down
to your
last atom

and what then, dear friend,
what then?
should better ask Professor
Cox since his office
is considerably closer
than that
of Neil Degrasse Tyson

is just
down the corridor and
across the quadrangle
close to
where I did use to
hang out in
the postgraduate club

sad for you
sad for me
sad for us all, sole
individual consciousness in
our own
bubble in the multiverse
completely
and entirely

core of
everything here, bit
part player in
every
other alternate universe
and this infinitely

Oh, dear,
chosing to be alive
hardly could accuse
you at
that moment of
inception,
mind not on
its feet yet,
of, to say
the least, not choosing wisely

and even now
as darkness, deterioration,
start their
inevitable encroachment

you have, to labour
the issue, apparently
not thought
this
thing through

figured out
the implications, realized

how brutal
it be

this
insane cosmic logic

wondering
who
the winner here

must be some method
in the madness to

the creation of
this curse

WHISPER

quiet ending
soft landing

no need
for parachute

no one
shot me out
of the sky

duelling banjos
medieval mandolin
they
tried their hardest
did their best

but not a tear as it turned out
were you prepared to give
not a word to
whisper
let alone cry

B MOVIE

B-52
B movie

clock this:
you can shoot down
a drone with
a BB gun

but not with a trillion
dollar missile system

and me
being English, just
a stone’s throw from Cheshire
county of killer
longbow archers

and
able to recite all those great
longwinded band of brothers
speeches given
before Agincourt

and hearing as a child
the great theological debates
as to whether it
was Clapton
or Hendrix who was
the true guitar God

wished upon a star
I had been born
under
Sagittarius

like Milton, or Beethoven,
Dickinson, Blake
or Swift
deadly with words if not
with chords or
forearms

but I do sleep
with a blade
behind my head

a cheap Chinese knock-off
of a sengoku jidai katana

TOLCHOK 79

got clockworked by a plod
me and my droogs we did

just for
kicking a ball around
next to an old bomb site
around the corner
from
Maine Road

behind which, in the distance,
the brutalist concrete Sauron towers
of Moss Side
speak gloomily, epitomize every
class-driven mistake in social planning
(and now
we know for a contested fact
how easy these
vulgar monoliths have
the capacity
to burn)

and all of us
United fans
the five of us
living in
a tiny
terraced house
under the shadow
of the floodlights
just a stone’s throw

so we were
playing
celebrating
(me getting my Masters
droogs passing
their exams)

but then he arrived, breath of
freezing air,
stripped that street of all its
June sun warmth
instantly
shunting us once, twice, off
the street,
threatening with (absurd as it sounds)
jamming the four of us into
his tiny British Leyland plod vehicle

taking us down
to the cop shop, Star
Chamber, Guantanamo, Devil’s
Island
to a place beyond the stars, or down
in the basement cold storage locker
of the Overlook Hotel

face
pudgy, near featureless,

harbinger of whatever V of Vendetta
police state future
Thatcher revolution
waiting in the wings (waiting for
the killer pass
out on
the outside right
position)
back to the
future, no hope
of world cup revisiting

so
fat blue referee in
car far too
small for him

bundling himself out
shoving himself
up in our
faces

one fat dude with
thge power of State over
life and death
and yet

could see from his face

one step too far
knew

all on his own
this side of nowhere
tactically clueless

no cavalry
to call in
rush, a la, Big Horn,
a la Peterloo, Starmer Met-style
to his rescue

having
pushed his luck
exceeded his mandate,
torn the heart out of our moment,
killed our day

no more
intricate dribbling,
magical ball wizardry
for us to
attempt
imagine we
had mastery

just the trudge back home
chance for the
justice
of a people’s tolchok

gone
out of touch
fallen by the wayside

risked the red card
crazy courage
found wanting

guess like it is
for
everybody here
then
and now

closer by the day
the Britain I was born into
to fate of dystopian state

determined, as of old,
to close down everything, close
down spaces,
no space
to play, no
place to be free

got to
take to insane conclusion
the logic of enclosure
no space to write, no
space to be

and me
picked out from the gang of us
on account of my twangy
hybrid Mancunian
Souf Effrikan accent

marked for
interrogation, on
the spot cross question
explaining to him

who I am
what I am doing here

dissertation on satire, learning
my trade at the heart
of his fiefdom

bit by
bit

becoming
street smart about
finding a
special acumen,

learning the lethality
of every potential linguistic weapon
getting the
distinct hang of
how to dismantle everything

got
clockworked by the plod
once upon a time
me and my droogs
we did