Author Archives: Damian Garside

SCENARIO

SCENARIO

I woke up from a dream
that was a stupendous
creation
   of pure
sciene fiction terror

people, experts, scientists
or they
might just have
been machines

sticking needles into
my brain to deposit
microscopically tiny
pre-programmed
devices of
nano-technology

instructed to conduct
a search and destroy mission

to erase the possibility
of thought patterns that
might
    contrive to imagine
some scenario
like this.

FLESH OF THE FAITH

FLESH OF THE FAITH

some buffoon
they call and
who calls
himself
a philosopher
slipping between
jokes
   and profundity
fires away

name of the game
dance
    of truth, not
so easy to work out
the steps
   world and self what
they want to say
for themselves
despite themselves
so damn intricate
so hard to
    pin down when
in this labyrinth every
level brings
fresh layer
  of deception

and why
must he always
touch
   his nose?

is that some
kind of tic, sign of
secret brotherhood or
silent spiritual homage
to H and L and
M his
   forebears and yes,
masters

meanwhile I am continuing
this badly scripted
life story
   my tale of desire
full of
twists and turns but
no story to speak
of itself

an iron wall
    dystopian stuff with
digital chip on
the shoulder, chip
in the brain patriarchal
body guards
stretching between my
heart and its object
wherever that
object, whenever it
should
   come into being

that the motor, engine of
everything should
be loss
   and distance, incompleteness
and sadness

great for Slovenian
thinker, South African poet,
though
    getting it down in all
its harrowing
complexity
      could be an industry
might
not
    keep your warm at night
(flesh
    of the faith to
deeply
    hold on to) may
not even pay the rent at all

KEY

KEY

Hey! No trespassing

Do not assume
you have
            right
of way

automatic forgiveness

can fiddle around
in my innermost particles
until
   blue in the face

no, not
on my watch
not on my watch

but hey,
     hang on a momento
you say
    brought a key
came with  master
opens
    everything

can unlock things here
that I
    have grown immune to
that I am totally unaware of

will take me magic carpet
ride mind
to a
   special place

down a
hidden passageway
been bolted since childhood

which is, I do
freely admit
     a very long time

this shifts
       things a bit

or
  to be gracious, shifts
everything considerably

kind of
     alters my perspective
go
full
  Omar Khayyam

trespassing
        no trespassing

what’s
mine
     is yours

and yours
is mine

on
my watch
automatic forgiveness
forever
     and this night

SHRIKE

SHRIKE

first laid
eyes
on
you

you love
imprinted me
like a
new-born
chicken

and here I
am
  stuck in
a novel going
nowhere

sprearing
    useless pages
on a spike
as if
   I were a
horrendous shrike

tiny
   but different bird
altogether

Vlad Impaler
of all
   God’s little
creatures

come
   pull this stake
out of my
heart!

I am
   not a patch
on Shelley’s
Skylark

Keat’s
Nightingale

his
   consummate Hyperion

or novel
of other worlds infused
with these mythologies

GOLD STANDARD

GOLD STANDARD

you are
the gold standard

best
touchstone

asked for a handout
you chopped
my head off

split
the atom

stole
several body parts

oh my staccato life subject
to this debt slavery

roll over credit
what was now
roll over
play dead
or actually die

all for a few scrappy
coins in the offing
kind of
smaller
than atoms

and me
under such pressure to
edit down
this poem

get it in tune, right tone
sufficiently complicit
in every single way