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

First, the bad news: Thursday the 12th. I take
the blame for missing out on some trivia, fearing
carelessness here must prologue the bigger
thing I won’t name. Tomorrow’s decision
will change something; it’s too late to think
of Friday the 13th as an ally.
So tonight I celebrate bad news as if this were a pledge
redeemable at the end: no need then
for tricks with salt over the shoulder
or furtive knocking on wood: that pre-emptive strike
should do it. Yet, who can trust this symmetry?
I think of analogy from sport that fail to convince.
So I force myself back into weighing chances
for tomorrow: the Committee (not so comic now)
who cup hands for your escaping humour, will joke
about the date: will this help? Aren’t these the straws
that stagemen reach for? I won’t go on with this,
I will read a book. Phrase after phrase flickers
into portent: “The fat woman stepped into some mud
and lost her shoe.” That’s me, of course, denied a place to hide
in the past tense. In this Surinam haze
I am an oddity in the party, my place in the car
resented; now in the street I effect this small
gesture of humiliation which one visitor photographs
and another will describe, willing me to read.
Well then, do the decent thing and go to sleep.
I will not lay in champagne like semi-finalists
at the Benson & Hedges, to sneak back, speech crumpled,
with apology to the shop. Fitful sleep, I tell myself,
where failure to remember a classic author
lost me the dream-argument, is but an eating disorder
I can live with.
                      It’s early in the morning (I don’t know yet of any obits
we must write) and I resolve that Friday the 13th
will be a day like any other. Only better. Touch wood.