Author Archives: Damian Garside

F IS FOR

F IS FOR

and so
this is mark four
mark five version
thoughly rehabilitated
totally redeemed

talk about these holjday camps
where they know
they will feel better

and look you can
choose wherever
you want it
on your body
such a
stylish tattoo

beautifully inked
in our national colours

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?

BASE EIGHT NEIN TEN

BASE EIGHT NEIN TEN

bass
superstructure

caught you thumping
away on those four thick strings
heavy beat
too much in your face
with sound of supremacy
to be reggae

must be, well, death rock
gothic and nihilist nazi

so much hangs on
distinctions in rhythm, key
and music scale

I mean, total love and
total war,
mark a difference in style
but not commitment

and the blues is hardly
sanctified by stretching
out its themes a bit

wailing out to the
dark lords of the universe:
Cthulu and the other
loony luminaries in
the Lovecraft gang
to work
their unearthly magic
(neon lime green)
resurrect Totenkopf, brown
shirt, black shirt
and assorted Hitlers
(evil
always picking
the same side
to forestall
a different revolution)

RAY

RAY

came across Ray Bradbury
sitting, spinning
a fantastic yarn

to all
caring to listen

but no one was there in
Parow Children’s Library

uncanny this was
quite mysterious

and what did I know then
of quantum entanglement,
alternate
universes, simulations?

what did
anyone know including
physicists?

so I just sat there and absorbed
death rays, Mars, bullets that
killed first astronauts sounding
like bees
time travel fractures, vampires upstairs
evil circuses
fruit in a bowl
never enough clean

now I am not entirely sure
if it happened at all though the

whys and
hows

seem, in retrospect, so
obvious
dark tales they were
but
filling my bland
grey soul with
a beam of light

FIRST STRIKE

FIRST STRIKE

aliens havs taken control
of Parow library

they are using their plasma
weapons to take out
all the poetry
classic novels and
books of philosophy

there were
not so many
but all are now gone

this alien high command
circling the northern suburbs
in their mothership
are openly
celebrating as
a titanic victory

the human race needs
to be even more unread
dull unimaginative
and stupid

to become the compliant
servants and slaves
the great
alien think tanks
are convinced we can be

SOMETHING

SOMETHING

Something in the air
so strong it is I can
almost taste it

not just breathing it in
seems
to be getting to me
filtering into everything

the fusty, unread books
in my library
the arcane worlds
to which they once
gave access, were
portals
(perhaps still are)
are fundamentally disturbed
if not
rewritten

some tumble from.their shelves
one even brazen enough

to hail me, speaking as
it slo-mo summersaults down

landing open
on its spine observing
the world through a single
eye at the heart
of the page

beautiful and
yet so grotesque

bringing everything into
its field
of vision reducing

to its
big bang moment
point of view something

in the air
longed for
dreaded

outside the world, the Universe
waiting to be told
what to do

always something
rather than nothing

something and nothing something
and nothing

out of the minus of number comes
your everything.