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

I remember a time I ran out on the beach.
I ran to and fro and in the sand there were only my own
footsteps.
I kept running; I didn’t get tired.

A good table, far from Siberia.

I am very good at appropriating other people’s
memories, in order to find later they had always been,
as the one undressed says to his undresser
it was already yours.

I open a bottle of champagne, a better bottle than before,
and apologise again.

My arm is gripped by another with fear
For his memories.
What am I to do with a stranger’s memories
without which he can’t go on?

What are those beautiful memories to him now;
they’re not worth anything anymore!
                                                      He says,
if he could, he would put them out with the garbage.

This concludes with the entrance of them dressed up as                                                                                 memories,
bowing to the left and right.
                                        A farewell performance
and all it raised is for them only.

Come see, aren’t they sweet?

I’ve drunk champagne all my life.
The glasshandarms intertwined so that I couldn’t tell
from which glass.

With what intention?
To make what retrieval more difficult?

                              An old photograph
of a busy street where I too walked at that time,
look to see if I’m in it,

whether my face doesn’t happen to look at me. Look,
that was me, that you now know for certain what happened to                                                                                 me
           afterwards
makes you look a long time at this photograph.

Use time to stand in a line

and look back through the line
as if the eye openings stay in the same place

and the bodies can be turned and stretched
until all the openings coincide,

but there is no convincing beginning like a convincing ending,
like: but I spoke to him yesterday.

Look, like a photograph, and my face
isn’t in it any more.

I bought a box of chocolates,
the first thing I bought in a store,

and I paid for it with coins I had picked up from the street.
On my way home I dropped the box
and those to whom I gave it didn’t mention about the broken                                                                            chocolates.

I wanted shoes I had seen.
Those who gave me money first thought they were too                                                                                 expensive.
When I got on the bus home I forgot the box
and when I came back to the bus stop it was gone.

I got money for new ones right away.

I got a present.
It was exactly what I wanted.
Everything I might tell
and for which I might be asked I would tell.

If I had more of them I could open
a gift shop
and if I knew someone who would wait in the store all day
for a customer like me

while outside light and warmth make sick children scream
with pain,

dry the grass in the gardens but throwing water
over them now would parch it.

Another present I forget to give myself,
it’s not even that I had decided I should be able to do                                                                                     without.

How does the skin feel today,
like amazing nakedness?

We know each other so that it doesn’t matter.

You didn’t have to ask,
it was already yours.