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

Will take place, here, tonight, promises the
Gothic lettering outside. It’s raining
Umbrellas and wet hallstands. Inside
The reek of damp, cat fur and ghosts in mothballs,
A permanent line of leaves laying seige
To the door. The English disease
Is taking over; spore by spore
Ruin and disbelief grow
Like blotting paper beneath peeling walls.
Here, I can only imagine the dead
As soft rain spirits, weary of memory and seance.
Off the main passage, a sullen kitchen,
Greasy with second hand silence, the dull
Aluminium of a giant kettle
Worn thin by tea and nervous indigestion.
Dishes, washed and stacked so many times
Have lost their identity; now they conform
To dampness, and anyone
Who will put them away neatly.

An empty lot of Sunday school chairs
Are in their place, upright and faithful
As wooden soldiers. Nothing I can pray to.
Back copies of Psychic News, only tenpence.
I want to shout, “Is there anyone there?”
But don’t. Would someone materialise?
A caretaker, in disguise perhaps. Mild,
Friendly, wearing a soft brown feathered hat;
Thin moustached (possibly dyed), apologetic
For the mess, who recites backwards
His personal history of the universe
To anyone who will listen. I can’t take sides.

Faithless, I lie in the past, like the dead
On a slab; above me, the healing blue light
Welcomes me to the afterlife.
The supernatural air is sorrowful,
Crowded with the unforgiven
Whose long righteous fingers practise

Their ghost love, the magic of the ages.
The healer, in pearly nylon overalls,
Clipped wings, and vowels, and matter of factness.
(Here is a grubby tenderness at work.)
Her hands are small white fish,
Swimming in the subterranean X rays.
We could be in Hell, or Venus: her hands
Are mortal, small sacraments of Nivea
And ritual, and human love. They cast
Out demons, the cold succubus of reason.