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

To self-indulgent, poetry.
Stepping outside this morning, a drop
Fell from the gutter on my pen,
Subsequently diluting these words.

Or who could want to hear about
My boring love, myopic eye
That blurs the world of kings, examines
A portly spider tickling its navel
With the arms of a Hindu deity.

    Geranium petals, finger nails
    Of little oriental whores,
    Scattered on summer stone.

This mole beneath her hair in the nape
Might be a deformity were she not
Lovely: is a deformity.

    I stop my car to let a girl,
    Carrying a dog, cross the road;
    And think ‘Girl with a Dog’, but wonder
    If in fact art is better than life.

Stain the stuff lightly with umber,
The eyes and foliage wash in
With running brown, and scumble breasts,
Thighs, belly, with a famished brush.
Closeness to life depends on the scumbled hand,
Distance from art upon the running eye.

    Early morning: my cat at first refuses food,
    Wishing to be reassured, no doubt, after the night.

Distinguishing in the glasses birds
From autumn leaves by an occasional shrug
Instead of the waving and revolving,
A greater glossiness of speckle
Even in the continuous rain,
I know I unfairly evaluate
The world’s life, placing first myself,

Whose curiosity and love
Discover how birds make out in winds
That strip the boughs and shake my house.

    Does a big nose go with playing Bach?
    No more than a collection of Van Gogh
    Postcards with the breasts of fourteen.

The chromaticism of ’04
That almost anachronistically
We heard encased in whalebone on small
Gilt chairs in rows in gas-lit rooms,

Became the unrelieved agony
Of composers idly shot by soldiers
While taking the air at the end of wars,

Then cascades of notes in the right hand
Against old tunes composed for money,
Improvised beside the sea by negroes
To woo little ears nestling in poignant hair-dos.

    I saw a lady in a car
    Stop the machine and sound two pips
    At which a little milkman quit
    His meaner vehicle and, leaning
    Where she had thoughtfully let down
    The window, kissed her lips.

    I walked on jealous of that swain,
    Touched nonetheless by the resource
    With which he’d left his sturdy heart
    With bottles at her exalted door,
    Making their passion mythical
    Simply by being coarse.