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

[A serialisation of The Syllabary. A randomly generated version of this continuing project is available at the website above. - RP]

In the syllabary the Y axis is rhyme, the X axis is alliteration and the Z axis is consonance. At each intersection of those three axes is a cell that contains a noise, or a word or a set of words. Sometimes the words within a cell, or in neighbouring cells, have grammatically related meanings; more often they are semantically unrelated: fusion and fission at work.


17.8.3

If ray takes shape and gape takes grape
Why not, said the reaper, have a little rave
 with the rep?
There’s a word for all this
I want nothing to do with it.


17.8.1

The Latin for Matter’s the English for Energy

Res
Res
Rem
Rei
Rei
RAY
E=MC²
QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM.


17.9.1        Riddle me Ruff and Ree

A riddle, a tipsy river, again
I’ll try, but how to be?
How does the King of the Sheepfold
Sort his species, heck and ree?

The dead can have my residue
To bank or bury or sing.
Mine is the kingdom of joy and recognition
 - With no king!


17.9.20      Campaign for Real

Bellatrix in LCD, a pebble in braille
From the island that recurs to me
On its own recondite orbit. In my mind
The word real that derives from the Latin word for thing,
The cortisone that will not let me drift,
A missing line that will not let me be.

Go grind some arabica; scorch it on the skillet.
Watch the indigo dust on  the valley turn like a flock of birds
Real rose.


16.9.20

She’ll tell you when the time comes. Till then
How you live might move her.


16.8.20

Shale had a shape
It was scale, shell and cup
That got scaled, shelled and drained
And thrown up void of form –
Shale shiver. Not even:
No shale in shale oil. Burn it:
There’s barely a shoosh.


16.8.19

Shake!
I said
And he shook
Me –
I should have
Been more
Specific.


14.8.19

Zeke?
How bout you
Mosey on dow’n tell
Abe and Jem and
Jonas as how
Jake run into some
Trouble down at the ford?


14.1.19

Jus slip a coin in the slot of the juke
Of the jig-a-jig box and see those Gullah
Women rotate slow to that
Mood Indigo by the dux by the doge
Polis! Time tae jouk!


13.1.19

The big picture comes and goes
Like a spook in a soukh,
And it’s often wrong, unlike
The drying drop of paint,
The valvular sook of business through the han,
Or pins and needles under a stookie plaster.


13.2.19

In crumpledom I stoke
My syncopated self with breakfast. It
Had kept on missing in the night
The pedals of its pushbike. Run on
Smoke it chugged on sand. Refloat
With soak soak water. What a frail
Spoke in the wheel, my one-stroke engine.


14.2.19

The joke?
That was it.