Damian Garside

NUKE

I sense
your guard is down

at long last
it is the moment for
which I have been waiting

I am the dark secret of the stars
about to manifest
in the high street
in your back yard

targeting each and everyone of you
since they first broke my code
found my formula

I am your consummation
devoutly to be wished
I am
your longed for apocalypse
in fissile person

I am everything you wanted
the embodiment of everything
you promised yourselves

I have
always been your fate
rather now
than too late

I am what was written
what you tell yourself
is the truth of scripture

am
your special place
what was always
inside you

and now I find you sleepwalking
brainless, dissolved into shadow

believe my task is done
have done my duty
can now rest in
beautiful silence

bury my power
for another few million years.

IN A STATION AT THE METRO REVISITED

IN A STATION AT THE METRO (REVISITED)

the apparition of some fire-bearded poet named Ezra Pound

enough to shock into freeze frame the entire Metro crowd

POET IN THE RAIN

the rain sizzles
poet splitters
a few syllables
dissolves, melts

flows somewhere
as liquids are wont to

meanwhile
(for a billion meanwhiles)
the cosmos carries on
business
as usual

same old laws
that birthed us, did
us in
upon which we
came to depend

unless
things changed, shifted gear,
found a different trajectory
whole new
direction

could
have fooled us

no one around to document, observe
no one left to tell

IF THE OCEAN

if the ocean
is anything to go by

abundance
of life forms can
be no garden
of Eden

that sincere English gentleman
categorizing beaks, making
all the measurements

seeing a big picture no one
had previously seen
purpose working
across a timescale unimaginable

dead on lucid
the mind evolved to see this
peering into the inexorable
mind and
heart of life

throwing all those arbitrary
constellations into an
extremity of quandry

playing havoc with all our
tales and fables, deepest
metaphors of design

CASCADE

sometime I don’t know when
feels beyond anywhere

where cosmic logic demands
we should meet again

let us
live the moment on it’s own terms
forget the past

forget all that crazy quantum stuff
about parallel universes
alternate histories

not even how it might
have been had we
got things right

where
with beautiful timing
a right word was said

the rest
thereafter just

cascade
after cascade

LOOKING FOR OUR OWN BUKOWSKI

we rule
the world in rugby

so why should we not
rule the world, the Continent,
the galaxy
with our Bukowski’s

was
the premise of a reality show
and now I am hurtling
in a van
fresh from the airport
looking to find our own Bukowski
combing the bars, scouring
the shebeens looking
for a soul out there in
as yet ungentrified Cape Town
able to
distil door and
alcohol into poetry

to drive us rhapsodic
with his laconic drawl

will we find him?
will we find him?

trying to get
hype-machine into
top gear to
drum up a hype machine
inflect those all
so precious ratings

thinking of the format
as we drive
thinking of every
future episode

pots of gold at the end
of this wholly contrived
quite
amazing rainbow

can see
those lips moving in
my mind’s-eye camera
as we chat even now

JUMP 29

jump baby jump!

the market’s
crashed, your
wealth’s gone

your
whole life a miscalculation

the whole debacle
an endorsement
an indictment

plunging through space
everything you
did
believe

everything my gut
told me is true

THE BOMBERS

sadly, yet again,
the bombers are off

to bomb
humanity

one size
fits all

nothing else
they could
possibly do
so

might as well do it
blow to pieces

(so
far beneath us
we cannot see it)

the image of self
we hate
to its core;
do not believe

RECEIPT

got long
memories

still vivid
still fresh

but even if we didn’t
even in everything
was forgotten
and forgiven
as you say

even if there was such
a concerted heartfelt effort
to get them changed
have
them erased

we buried it deep
we have the receipt

what you took
what we got
in all those transactions

down
there somewhere

we kept
the receipt

will
fill in the blanks

TWO POEMS

JIM TOLD ME

Jim told me
to turn out the light
when the music is over

he told me directly:
he was very clear on this

meanwhile a CIA assassin
is heading up the Mekong
tasked with liquidating Brando

everybody channeling
Joseph Conrad or Aldous Huxley

this dream of forever Empire
what a dark music
it would seem to play
discordant song it
so
beautifully sings

same theme
in its every repertoire

****

S’TRUE

in the zero savings villages
(like this one
where you see me now)

transformers pop like
rip-off globes

but you have a story
for me about multipolarity

and Empire gone
full bore infernal
can
see no wrong
where genocide aligns
with interest

but then its bombs
turned boomerang, return
to
sender

dressed in a bow and
box of tricks
to repay
with generous interest

which all is just crazy
ridiculous
gospel
true

s’true, bru
and so befok

likely (with
the death of sanity)
to strip
your mind

so let me just call
what I have a pack of lies

not suffer
your comfort to
collapse like a house of cards into

final
irredeemable
consternation

logic of Empire so
native to us all

****