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

VI

Flavius, if she weren’t uncouth
And graceless you would bare your heart
And never try to hide the truth.
In fact there is some mangy tart
You love and are ashamed to own.
You think that beds can’t talk? Yours shrieks
That you don’t spend your nights alone
What with its garlands, Syrian scents,
Its pillow with two equal dents
And shaken frame’s tremors and creaks.
This tight-lipped act is quite in vain;
We all see from your knackered state
You’re up to silly tricks or worse;
So everything – the joy, the pain –
Tell me. I wish to celebrate
You and your love in witty verse.

XXIV

O flower of the Juventii
Present or past or yet to be,
I’d rather you were generous
In coin and lavished wealth untold
On him with neither slave nor gold
Than let him be your lover thus.
‘He’s charming,’ you reply. Well, yes;
The charmer, though, does not possess
A single slave nor store of gold.
Laugh as you please, pooh-pooh or scold,
Still he has neither slave nor gold.

XLI

Ameana, that slag, that fucked-out chit,
Asked for a cool ten thousand – she’s not shy!
Girl with the crooked nose, the fancy bit
Of the old bankrupt up in Formiae.
Family, friends, get medical advice
And give her treatment as the quack directs;
The girl’s insane and doesn’t ask a price
Reflecting what her looking-glass reflects.

XLIII

Greetings, girl with no nose of modest size,
No dainty feet nor dark alluring eyes,
Nor with long fingers nor a mouth that’s dry,
Nor with a tongue too elegant and witty,
Friend of the bankrupt up at Formiae.
And does the Province talk of you as pretty?
Do they compare our Lesbia to you?
What tasteless boorish times we’re living through.