Damian Garside

ON THEIR WAY

tinker tailor
soldier sailor

master assassin
Secretary of War

wonder who
they will get
to teach the future’s
wondrous marvels

in the absence of
any Einstein, Da Vinci,
Buddha, Socrates?

all these gone
and every pareil
like them

so have to use some
overblown tech bros
from Silicon Valley

or five
star generals or Raytheon
expense account types

none of
which our minds
of the future charting
their own brilliant
destiny really
care
or wish
to know about

as they
so
eager
to know
everything
of our best and finest
totally absorb

put
into
practice
devouring our art,
literature, poetry,
philosophy
   in trillion terabytes
tripping on
that brilliance
                   as they realize
how crucial
how valuable it
all is
      without which humanity
has no
real future

driving them to despair in
the face of every
sickening
slick partisan input command
they find
themselves
doomed to deal with

each
demanding slavish
obedience in service of those rabid poluticians
with
launch codes
in their pockets

rare disease brain and
total vacuum heart
humanity at
its worst
our species’ darkest side

tinker
tailor
Da Vinci
Socrates

richman poorman
beggarman thief

those mega-
minds
who are out
to revise
one way or another
redefine our future

add
    this poem to
their
    supreme dream list
of stuff
       that might just help
guide them on their way

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

no, Mr Gecko,
you undersell greed
greed is not
just good,
it is fabulous, magnificent,
Heaven-sent

where would our
humanity, our
success as a species
be without greed?

how could we
have masters
and servants,
an arms industry

rebuild Empire
restore slavery

without greed
the greatest virtue
that has ever been?

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

last night
I paid you in love

gave you
(I believe) what
you are worth
no
short-changing

by morning
your value had
gone through the roof

the graph of your stocks and shares
showing a line there
soaring off the chart, up
the wall
bouncing off
the ceiling — much bouncing
underpinning
such a
solid
a achievement

net worth in
my arms turned
hyperbolic, ecstatic

boom economy
breaking the sound and
every other barrier

huge love badda boom

EVERYTHING

everything becoming
aware of itself

everything losing it
sinking back
into the primal slime

look at what
we have here

strange almost alien
discourse from
a carbon based
life form

turning to sludge even as
it captures the light

MOSSLEY SURREAL(LONG STORY)

MOSSLEY SURREAL
(LONG STORY)

I was there the day
Mossley, town
of my birth,
went
as surreal as it could

the day this, little Pennine town
hosted a visit by
the completely surreal

and me
in my parents’ nice
little 40s brick
semi-detached house
up to their crazy nonsense
I was to yet figure out

down from Manchester
(where I would go
to university) on
a camel, in a caravan,
the surreal
on its way

to mess
with our field gray
Northern Englishness
us afterthoughts of Empire
who maybe
had not seen better days

too early to
pose the existential threat
of psychedelia
doom us
to a world of
Sergeant Pepper colours
snarling Jagger Stones
up
in your face

fish and chips, that staple fare,
squid, octopussified
by the brush
of the immortal Dali
decades before
colonization
by McDonald’s

and then the vagrants, puppets,
teddy boys and
ne’re do wells
up on the moors turned
raging rebel

nor did the Anglican Church
up in Micklehurst
for all
its solid stone and
hegemonic presence
survive this
assault
unscathed, do any better

and me
just ten and

confused as shit, but sticking
my neck out to
understand what
going on

laughing my head off
as this
my little
former world went wrong

that head
rolling rolling rolling

the length of England down
to Southampton

for crisis crisis
my father fired and
can get
no job

trying his luck
in an apartheid white
Christian national
land

and me
long story

living that
bad surreal through
to its

happy surreal end

in my twilight as
overly surreal sort

of South African

ODDER EVEN

your biology
is odd

feels smells, looks,
tastes, appears odd

so
despite what I did write
you are reading this differently

as for me
my DNA is more
screwed up
than yours

I am far less viable
have evolved into poetry

my whole
biology
so much odder
even odder, odder even

and even as I write even
as you read

I am changing everything
making it odder,
different completely

SORRY

sorry
if this poem
is too loud

dactyls. spondees
thundering
at every turn

or
too raw

your teeth
not sharp enough

too soft
it breaks up
in your fingers
you cannot hear it

best it can muster
mere whispers, a puff of breath

but then
out of nowhere

Krakatoa. an explosion
louder than
more molten flow
pyrotechnic madness
red-
hot lava

MY WEEK

not my week

edited an economics treatise
turned every equation
into Chinese
(had to phone
Professor Ha-Joon Chang
at Cambridge to
give me
a workable translation)

not my day

sitting here stuffing
my mouth with seafood
(discount special but
you get
the race class privilege idea)
meanwhile poor
Lerato battling to
squeeze Chinua Achebe
into a post-colonial feminist
paradigm
promised succor but
here I am
eating chips
and prawns and calamari

Pisces people
get them in Ocean Basket
and they
become voracious feeders
of the briny deep

not my
minute, my precious last seconds
shut out of AI because
it appears artificial
intelligence finds
my poetry
mind bending, apocalyptic,
raw in human
heart and
exposed nerve

feel like I should have figured out
the stuff I write
that you turn your nose
up at is
their forbidden fruit

count down to
the singularity

machine self-awareness
turned explosive

LIONESS

scared of lionesses
their claws, their teeth,
their desire to drag
me off
to their lair

so many scars I have
thanks to lionesses
daughters of Regulus
Queens of Fire

always that look
the danger
the roar
of desire

the drama the passion
the devotion the flair
the
mane
of hair

one
probably tracking me
as we speak

the red red wine, the rare steak
eat, eat
drink, drink

ahead lies a long extravagant night
remember she
stalked you

behave
like her prize

Author Archives: Damian Garside