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NOW I SEE/PRISTINE

NOW I SEE/PRISTINE

It’s not
the Sistine Chapel

no,
more a pagan temple
more suited to
demon worship

having a lovely
forbidden cult time

God knows where
they got their hellish
iconography from
avatars
of extreme
bad taste

bet they didn’t get
it in a single impromtu
haul by
way of incognito
trip to Walmart

much mix ‘n match
mythology up
in fresco (alfresco)
as long
   as it conjures up
chaos, destabilizes,
vaguely terrifies

have
to ask the angels
(better angels
of all our natures)
regarding the sound
proofing
and how much
scream dampening

thick
as the armour on
a Tiger tank I guess
no one not invited
does not
need to hear a thing

and starting with Sistine
falling with
   absolute loss
of grace from there

now I see
(Oh, how I see)
what billionaires think
of in secret, in private,
in their self-
owned 747s, self-owned
off-shore islands
when they
hear the word “pristine”

and with that rhyme chime
time to draw our
paparazzi portrait
of what
Edenic landscapes, sexual
configurations
    float unfiltered but
fatally contorted
into theit imagination machines

with all that money  – – whisper
shout proclaim
that word
   for all eternity, for the
sum total of the poor,
shabby lifetimes
            of us in
the 99.9

with all that money
Cheops pyramids of money
nothing in
   or between Heaven and Hell
you cannot have, make real.

THE LEAVES BEGIN TO TURN BROWN

THE LEAVES BEGIN TO TURN BROWN

the blackberries jostling
fighting for suptemacy
in your milk bottle

threatening to come
alive mess
up my examination
spill onto the page

but here I am
self on the line, risking everything

trapped in the test venue
putting pen to paper, brain
set to
   automatic, racing against
time
straining against my naivete
and battling with
my limited vocabulary
                           vaguely recalling
I did read something
with matching
intensity

         there in that book of
modern British poetry
I had hastily perused
    this poem, and others just
as haunting
and there
     in a basic nutshell of
a biography, your
iconic status,
your tragic history

and yes, that unfaithful one,
Yurkshire laureate,
crow poet of
Cambridge,
who I did hear read in
a Gothic Victorian
hall in
   Manchester
a
  half
century ago
(just short of)

and
   here, so much
older, wiser
will stick to the heresy,
aside from
    fact never
remotely deserved you
was never in
your league

later I would imagine myself
presented with
a machine
   technology to

talk to what
     having ploughed through
your data
has convinced itself
it can
   speak
for you

exchanging words and poems
thinking a relationship through

but
    here we
are
at the beginning, not
agonizing over the reality
of such
surreal tech developments

me taxed to the max
exploding under the pressure
believing somehow
can
  kill this analysis

one of this few hundred
strong cohort of eager
young first
years

desperately grappling with
what this poet
has thrown at
              them
hidden
in the woods, amongst
the brambles, incognito
behind the scenes

all
   this everything
to deal with: everything
tortured, everything
beautiful
   every shade and modulation
between these
two extremes

and me
knowing these, blackberries whose
  red blood staining my
fingers, clothes,
stained
    my memory too

but then
   in the follow up tutorial
giving my spiel my
tutor
   went total
thumbs down, angrily
accusing me of
projection, having
wandered
totally off beam, reading
my own
    pain and inner turmoil, bad
pseudo psychology
into a
  simple Nature poem
as sweet and
tranquil as
   Nature can be

none
so blind as
will not see

and he
    a poet too, did once
see a poem that
somehow got
published

a simple poem
   devoid of
any of
that reprehensible intensity

and so
   I accepted for three days
my absolute failure as
a reader,
  total pointlessness of
ever progressing
in this discipline

until
   scanning the marklist upwards
through hundreds of names
from bad fail to
pass

and then (feeling a crazy hope
that I might
not be a waste
       that I might know
something)

scanned the list
     until found

yes, Sylvia, hard
to believe isn’t it
a single
    name, my name lurking
high
   up that tree

the very top




GREEN LAND

GREEN LAND

they hashtagged
hyphenated

took away the sky
up there, a tiny square
Mr Rockefeller,
Jets and Giants,
have to
strain your neck
to see it

before
their thoughts lurched upwards
it was the green
they took
had disappear

no one casts their mind back
to dawn days of arrival
striding across the shore
feeling
exceptional
albeit just a sprinkling

a dust of darkness
misconstrued in the light
but
    not entirely for the better
changing everything

and we
too
   were disappeared, story
of our disappearance,
that
   disappeared too

ghosts and bones
beneath those cities,
remembered
     perhaps as irony, regrettable
tragedy, parody

voices long gone
and with them all the words

other green lands out there
waiting for
     all this to repeat

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

REVIEW

A, REVIEW OF MY 2014 POETRY COLLECTION

Zero Gravity
 
Damian Garside
Xlibris, 267 pages, (paperback) $13.99, 9781493140923
(Reviewed: August, 2014)
Damian Garside’s Zero Gravity is an intelligent, nuanced collection of poems by an engaging new poet.
The collection lacks a clear, organizing structure; poems are offered randomly, with no section headings. One of the collection’s most promising aspects is a series of poems (spread throughout) in which Garside explores the subjunctive. For instance, he imagines “If Philip K. Dick Had Written the Iliad,” “If Vidal Sassoon Had Written the Communist Manifesto,” and “If Julia Kristeva Had Written the Odyssey.” These titles suggest a certain playfulness, yet the poems themselves generate insight by probing a canonical text through the eyes of a contemporary figure. The language sparkles, and the conceit compels.
Garside thrives when he stays grounded in specific, concrete details and clear, direct diction. One particularly incisive poem is “Poem for Denise,” which reads in its entirety: “The reason there is day and/night/ is that the sun/ grew too fond/ of the moon//and the world would end if/he ever were/ to hold her.” Garside can also be a strong and surprising image-maker, as in: “The tarot told me (in no uncertain terms)/ I am upside down man/ dragging on a/ hookah” and “After the/ big bang// it was all bits/ of broken omelette.”
A few minor criticisms: Too many of the poems are explicitly about the nature of writing poetry and tend to veer into abstractions and dense, cerebral language. For instance, “I tend to forget, perhaps because the/ thought of writing being a powerful weapon/ is frankly preposterous.” In addition, the book is overly long (four times the length of an average traditionally published volume of poetry); more organization would have been welcome.
Despite these flaws, however, Garside is intellectually curious, well-read, and frequently humorous — all qualities that add to the appeal and accessibility of his work. His poetry reflects a unique talent and perspective that is well worth a reader’s consideration.
Also available as an ebook.
Author’s Current Residence
South Africa
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GOING WITH THIS

GOING WITH THIS

up
   down

vertical lateral
throw me a lateral, tell
me where
we
  are going
with this

what brain flashes
will consolidate

translate into
    paper, paper

with markings
  (English
       not Martian

as in
     some bizarre
alien postcard)

how it will all
all evolve

     grow, take shape

find its genre, its species,
whole
      poet biology

spawn of some sort
seed set there
but
    sewn
up

every stitched
ripe for receipt

FOR FAWKES SAKE

FOR FAWKES SAKE

it’s November Fifth
centuries ago
my Grandfather (last
in a long line
in his Catholic family)

used to
treat us to fireworks
those boxes that
bore the
warning that they
were bereft
of bangers (crackers to
my Souffafrikan and
my Transatlantic friends)

maybe they sounded
a bit too much like
7.62mm
rounds
     flying out the barrel
of a Maxim machine gun,
Mauser rifle

he who
fought for his King
winning the military cross
(the lower-
grade one
you get as Senior Non-
Commissioned Officer
him
   never been kissed
all of twenty one)

It’s Fifth or November
Twenty First Century, five
and twenty

    no bonfire tonight but
maybe enough time
to rewatch
V
   for Vendetta

amazing how mild
John Hurt’s false-
flagging mild riff on
essential
   English fascism

compared
to the far darker Starmer world
Brits
   have to deal with now