Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

He sleeps
He is awake
All at once, he’s painting
He paints a church and he paints with a church
He paints a cow and he paints with a cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with a bull’s dismembered member
He paints with the squelching passions of a little Jewish village
With Russia’s vast countryside and all its pent-up sexuality
For France
Matter-of-factly
He paints with his thighs
He has eyes in his backside
And suddenly it’s your portrait
You the reader
It’s me
It’s him
It’s his fiancée
It’s your neighbourhood grocer
The cowherd
The midwife
There are tubs full of blood
Where the new-born are washed
Delirious skies
Mouths of modernity
The Eiffel Tower turned corkscrew
Hands
The Christ
The Christ it is him
He spent his childhood on the Cross
Every day he commits suicide
Suddenly he’s no longer painting
He was wide awake
Now he’s asleep
He strangles himself with his tie
Chagall’s astonished to find himself still living

     II. Attic
Stairs, doors, stairs
Then you’re there
Covered with visiting cards
His door opens like a newspaper
Swings shut
Not unpleasurably you catch your breath
Chaos, lovely chaos
Aesthetics stretched to its limits
Photos of Leger, a painted wooden parrot
Works in progress or aborted
Empty bottles of every size and shape
We guarantee the absolutely purity of our tomato ketchup
States a label
For a window there’s a calendar
And o the high drama once snappy cranes of lightning not so                                                                                      far
   overhead start unloading the sky’s barges and skips
The rain falls in torrents
You could be out at sea, a thousand leagues adrift
Yet inside it’s warm, even somewhat stuffy

Russian cossacks
Dusty icons
Suns like meat going rotten
Sleepwalkers Goats
Winter and insanity
Djinni or smoked fish or broken-down shoes
Suddenly the lamp and everything else turning double
Quadrupling
The thousand and one empty bottles
Morose delectation
Chagall
Chagall
His ladders of light