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

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Once I used to study languages dead for millennia,
Losing sleep over the other-worldly verbs:
My voice broke on the fall of a line-break
As it tried to keep up with night’s bolting car.

Once I was a confidante of midnight, a rival of day’s plain-speaking,
I tried to curb my gestures and rein up sight:
But still I took a flame-red stallion to water
And I’d dive into his jet-black shade.

I shivered in fever heat as I walked onward,
Toward things that hated me – the coffin, the mausoleum,
The day of judgement. And the earth swam under my footstops
Slick as an ice floe on the deafening waters of spring.

Now my lips are set hard, and my eyes like paper:
So dry. Once a week, with my hand on an armchair’s spine,
I teach university students to write their verses,
Unhobble their rhythms, and close a thought with a rhyme,

Make the voice fly up en pointe, clean out the odd passage
That jangles – the sound of Anon filling in a lost line –
Bracketing earth-bound passion not metamorphosed
Into words, in the margins, I press down my pen.

So, with a glimpse of myself reflected – a demon
In the depths of a polished gold mirror – I ask no gift:
Put me in a closed coffin and burn me to ashes,
Or fix a dragon’s jaws to the top of a stake.

     *

You can go on holiday now, you can dabble in verse,
Or buy yourself a red coat with buttons in shocking pink:
You can make good money, or bad, or worse;
You can do the Lotto, you can take your friends for a drink.

You can get your house seen to, get your car fixed, or your teeth:
You can demonstrate, stop the world going down the drain;
You can say what you like about politics, or the police,
Or sit and look all morning at the falling rain.

You can rig up a darkened mirror on your own window-sill
To tell your fortune by the stars, draw down the kindly light:
You can pack up a parcel with a purple wax seal
And send it to Chile, or doodle with ash off your cigarette.

Now there aren’t any rules and we’ve torn up the script
You can do all that, and more. But what’s the point?