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

If we could just find the missing letters of the alphabet...
                                                                    Ken Smith, June 2003.

1 .
Months I’ve spent re-arranging all alphabets,
wondering what you meant, and then what.

Weeks I’ve chased gromits of dust,
weeding out old pronouns, doing basic maths.

2-1 = 1, though feels closer to 0 much of the time.
We-you = I. Our reduces to mine.

The us is only me and you is always singular.
The future is as it always was,

unknown, but for the certainty now,
that we won’t be together.

If I keep on subtracting, soon one shoe will do,
half a mirror, half a mind, the other half of the conversation gone.

2 .
and so the blackbird’s song goes on,
as things seem to, even without you.

April again, Ash Wednesday, an airplane
lazy circling for landing through afternoon’s yellow-pink sky.

Door slam.

What can I tell you. The light in the refridgerator
goes out without you.

Your side of the bed, such a hole I fill it,
newspapers, letters, scribblings like these.

The world’s killing itself still.
Everything runs out, though we haven’t yet.

Rain. Two weeks solid and still the reservoirs are half empty.
Not flushing the loo hasn’t helped all that much.

Tearing my biodegradeable self into pieces
hasn’t helped either.

The mice are still, if not absent. Gone next door.
Whisperings through the Russian vine, do you have, we do...

The Bleeding Heart’s blooming again
from the nothing winter made of me.

And the sea, I hasten to add, is still sea-ing.
I, still adjusting my breathing to its tides, in and out.

Wish you were here, goes without saying,
and the saying goes without reaching you, or not.

Twilight still is the betwixing hour for me,
light on its way to dark,

my face and thoughts
sinking into shadows.

3.
For once I’ve got the plot,
number 201-9. Harry Goldberg’s number 10.
You’re number 8, Manor Park,
woodland on its way to becoming more so.
The story ends as all do,
with death. The End.
I’m just not sure when or how
I’ll get there, or what kind of tree to have planted.
Yours is Hawthorn.
I wonder what Wild Mountain Ash is like.
And in so wondering, the story continues.