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

Following me around in the laundromat was a man with a miniature
silver cane. The cane had a screw-off cap on the curved end so
it looked like it was really a 12-inch cigar tube with a curved
cigar inside.                  The man was wearing a bowler hat and his face
looked old, maybe 40 or so, his skin was all red. He was always
smiling whenever I turned around.

I couldn’t find a washer to use. As I moved from machine to
machine, the clothes I had kept getting smaller and smaller
until finally the clothes became the size of a very large clothes
sandwich, about 12 inches long. I left the laundromat without
ever having washed them but I noticed they were clean anyway.

Outside I got into a Rolls Royce and began to drive straight up
the steps of a movie theater. 2 Doormen and some people dressed
in evening clothes were by the doors. One doorman kept motioning
me to drive into the lobby.

I tried several times to drive up the stairs and into the lobby
even though it was very bumpy. Each time I arrived at the door-
way though, I would become part of the film inside the theater
and the projectionist would run the film backwards so I’d end up
at the bottom of the steps again. While I was driving up the
steps and being projected back down again, I noticed that the
doorways of the theater were vaguely Moorish in design.

When I stopped trying to drive up the steps, I knew the movie
was over and there was no longer any reason to go inside the
theater. I glanced over my shoulder and the man with the minia-
ture cane was in the back seat, smiling as usual, and holding
his cane up as if it were hooked onto a strap and he were
riding in a bus.