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

Brace yourself for the crossroads
where a new garage is flashing
its strip lighting at the defunct gasometer
and the traffic gobbles your embryo thoughts.
Pretend the rush of tyres on tarmac

is the sea foaming on shingle as you follow
damp pavements where newspapers
mutter sodden attacks and rooks
fight over a chip in a greasy bag.
Walls and closed doors cut you off

from human endearment. Suck the comfort
windows offer. Behind this: a woman
kissed by apricot light as she writes in
a folder; nearby a sofa, its gorgeousness
wide open, its jutting cushions full

of suggestion. Behind this: chandelier droplets
luminous as laughter and faces mouthing
in a ring of togetherness. How to winkle
your way in to honey voices, hands
which will ease your hungers? Useless

to flutter fingers – they ignore strangers.
Should you press the bell, concoct a story
which gains you entry you’ll soon find
the talk is thin as tin, the food
cloying, the clatter intrusive. Once

the sense of fulfilment shrivels you’ll give up
polite attempts to leave and force
a window, land in the smack of December
among the empty necks of bottles
and crowds of silent leaves. Geese

calling as they flap in formation above
roofs will remind you of the salt marshes
you dipped into during the summer: miles
of reeds porcupining mud estuaries,
and you’ll recognise how rarely you’ve managed

to immerse yourself in the space you need.
Grasping the uncertainty you always wanted
to escape – that childhood when mats
were pulled from under your feet -
you’ll step out whatever the wilderness.