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

With a hold all full of water
they check into the - ‘Unique’
- A haven for the weary
and the fading travellers
in bankrupt stock of time
After carefully unpacking
the salvage of obsessions
in a room like all the others
they lie the body out to rest
but relief of sleep is shattered
by a loneliness of monochrome
seeping through the blinds

In the evening they go down
to drink the brim of sun away
- to flush the glut of faces
jammed tight inside a bottle
into the gutters of the town
And for an hour they forget
the inherent state of enmity
of their colliding voices
- the boxing of the shadows
in their cameo of obscurity

Every morning without fail
they are wakened by an orphan
calling from a sharp edged mirror
hammered on the hotel wall
Disreputably conceived within
the wizened silver womb
deep as the peeling world
taking place behind their back
he rises in the face of opposition
to remind them of their crimes
and the lines of dead men
left standing in the bar
like mica forests motionless
in nights of callous stone

For once upon a hole in time
across a littered field
of broken fingered angels
pointing at the question
of the passing skies

They watched the embers
of their father raked aside
and saw the windblown ashes
turning into flights of birds
drawn like jagged arrows
at the target of the sun
And ever since that moment
of disbelief and dream
they’ve been following on foot
with winter always on their heels
Inseparable strangers
of one heart and two minds
meeting in unearthly hotel rooms
Old familiars in the business
of self deception and contempt
lost and slowly sinking
below the line of sight.