Author Archives: Damian Garside

CRIED AND DIED

CRIED AND DIED

Empire
he called himself

he was
Ragnar Lothbrok
on steroids

Gengis Khan
with an
attitude problem

at age five
he took down
every toy
store in his
home town

at age twenty-six
the inmates of
a maximun security
prison
broke out
in order to escape
from him

he had the whole text
of Titus Andronicus
tattoed across
his body

and when
the war of final
days was declared

he laughed so loud
he cried and died.

SO

SO

moonlight scattering
its silver
across what
was earlier a
turquiose sea

night
has now turned
dark and forboding

sharks out there
maybe more hunting here
than when
the Sun was rising
or at its zenith

you are not thinking shark
but strumming the chords
of a tune on
a battered guitar
you have had since childhood

somehow
    it strikes up a harmony,
musical counterpoint,
with
   the roar of the waves
as they release their energy
crashing
     onto the white beach
as boiling surf

surf and your song
         so sad of
a sudden

our planet
      really fragile and
we
  have made
it so

a rogue rock
     might do it

vast as a cathedral
as it hurtles through space

pre-empting some
           quietly insane member
of our
species
    depressing some button
launch codes
checking out

and yet
the roar of the waves
hits us with such power
that we
    cannot but conclude
it will last
until
   the end of time
forever and ever

even though (as indeed
the sharks
       might tell us)
it is dying by degrees

5 BEAUTIES

5 BEAUTIES: 5 poems of mine picked out as special by META AI

WITH APHRODITE

I held
a long interview with Aphrodite

peace
love
sex

these we touched upon
sinking ciders by the poolside
(wedge of lemon
jammed tightly into
the neck of the bottle)

in the course of which
frank and honest
and open-
ended discussion

the goddess revealed much
of her immortal self.

****

TROY

am
a reporter on the scene
at the siege
of Troy

rushing for a scoop, meet
my deadline

ask ancient poet
Homer what he saw

in such
     vivid

inner colours
far
   as the eye can see

****

PRODUCTION

on the farm,
perforce, we
put our heads together

everything under the Sun
puts is head together

wheels
    set in
              motion

as
word        speads

and Heraclitus of Miletus
stops by

a number of things
brings to mind

solid argument inclusive: that
all is
     twice, thrice,
there is nothing that
is not in process

meanwhile (forgive the inadvertent South African
colloquialism) not
back
    at the ranch
but in the heart of Johannesburg

they are staging a production
of Euripides’ The Bacchae
have
already
     launched into
the opening scene

which very instant, being
in the audience my
mind
     thirsting for
ecstasy
    veers towards chaos, entropy,
fractal mathematics

as we suddenly welded into one
sift and exchange
that whole Pandora’s box
of memories and
recollections

whispers and ghosts
the very
        incantations that
pull aside the veil, strip
off the veneer

speaking for myself
               but
perhaps all

hardly able to wait, kill
that terminal longing,
                               set eyes
upon the mask
that is
        dark Dionysus’ face

****

HOME

we spent all night
in my tiny room
on
   the huge
                    farm

touching
loving

  playing with
each other

retelling fairy tales
reciting
   nursery rhymes

until

the cows would
                  come home

dawning upon us

the cows
would come home

the cows came home

home home home

****

GREEN

the rains

       the rain
       the rain
        the rain

have given
the grass, the trees,
the plants

a lush edge

the green fingers of
the gods responsible
for green

        have grown
greenier

and me
                      on the margins

liminal
as usual

       feeling both oddly alien
and strangely at home

MATE

MATE

first
the chess
and there you
got me
King jammed
in the corner by
my own rook

your white knight
on a white charger
simple coup de gras
smothered mate

but nothing
like the chess
the sex afterwards

here the conflagration
much more hussars and
dragoons totally
Napoleonic

me and my Josephine
sharing our huge victory
pincer
   movement, double
envelopment
Jena, Austerlitz cannot
hold a candle
to our fantastic
achievement

in the entirety of
military history never
such a
score  achieved

NO FLIES

NO FLIES

no flies on me
but the flies that
are on me

are jewelled, enamelled,
iridescent

and the buzz
they get to  create
louder than
a perfect media storm
where two
idiotic major stories
crash into each somewhere
stupid out
in the mid-Atlantic
shedding each other pieces

as all
establishment voices
in pursuit
    of the savage lie
are so hard-pressed
to miraculously achieve

RIDE

RIDE

found myself in a Wes Anderson world
my house full of things in
bright pastel colours
I bought on line

felt I needed
a radical change of
landscape and how
that landscape insists
that I best deport myself

so
   said a charm
of transformation
   asking for a science
fiction horror scenario
scripted by HP Lovecraft,
artwork
    by HR Giger

and waited to die of
sheer fear
     or survive to enjoy
the ride

INSCRIPTION

INSCRIPTION

I have copies
occur
   in many different forms

have more than three
                       dimensions

I write write write write
if only to prove
that I myself
am an inscription

catch my drift
get my gist
go with my flow

              even as
a greater flow, deeper drift
quintessential gist
                      is what
life
    has me follow
     dictates here

this is what I grasp
all that I have grasped
           from that recitation

practically everything I need
to write, and learn, and be.