Author Archives: Damian Garside

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

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

    
****

RENAISSANCE

then did the tree cascade

burst into fruit

a poem, two,
three even there
to be
found
on every leaf

none of them great, none
very good

it has to be said
       (or perhaps just whispered)
      

BLISS

here I am
conjugating the verb “blister”

where after
took a trek to the zoo
to escape (Mama taboo)
the schtick I was
taking in the zero point
quantum field

and you in your G string
playing the devil’s chord
entertaining
string as your
theory of everything

blitz attack it were
(forgive my dialect) when
you came
to seduce me

our ramshackle bits
that we might juxtapose
somewhat
surreal or
even psychedelic

shipwrecking me in the tropics
slave to fat climates

exercising your leverage
haughty in the knowledge
that woman
is subroutines, is
ex machina, is Grecian
statuesque chemical
factory
cosmic comedy, existential
tragedy
disjunction waiting
to happen

lured into those gardens
sheer abyss of bliss

fusion
is out there beyond the borderlands
of anything
possible

time beyond time if
we could but find it

place of riddle and parable
stamped in the image
of all that
ventures with trajectories

that
(for want of wings demonic
or distinctly angelic)
is suffered to stumble, crawl,
shuffle, hop and swing

sharp and lithe end
somewhere between
plain
writing stylus and hi-
tec Nile
crocodile