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

                                                El poema no dice lo que es,
                                                sin lo que podria ser.

                                                                 -Octavio Paz

I’ll take cauliflower
in a bed of miner’s lettuce,

and, if possible, may the water
boil foaming over the pot
on to the floor
scalding the self-satisfied sleep
of the curled grey cat
and run steaming
into the cobbled street

where mules go skitish
beneath the peeking face of the moon
and bowlegged drunken charros
fracture polite family dinners
as they scream grosserias in the dark

as I try to dissuade you
persuade you
unmask you
massage you
with my insistent hand on
your otherwise occupied flesh
to feed me riddles
to ween me of the literal

and may the rains come suddenly
as lightning strikes the church steeple
exploding the chief of police
drinking brandy with his confessor
beneath the baroque brass bells

and may the roof leak
and may all the frogs and lizards
washed from their holes
crawl under our warm covers

and may I trip and fall in the mud
and still want to make love
all filthy and slimy
sticking
to an endless horizon

on the fine white sand
of your skin
along which the repeated fillings
of the old hour glass of discourse
subverts what we touch in proximity:
our actual
                        consanguinity
with the infinitesmal
lifting up from the mud
on a million wings and claws

and may new fruit trees take life
and suddenly burst - seed, bud, stem,
branch, flower and fruit with
Treatises on Generative Grammar
and stochastic Totem kinships
falling from the wild lifting of wings
and may a million pages of love poems
in a new language of pure verbs
grow from the fruit seeds
in the excrement of the pre-historic birds.

And may the whole chain
of Mexican volcanoes erupt
releasing dawn prematurely
from the entrails of the earth,
the sun and moon together
in the bright animal eye,
the scales of ancient glaucoma
at last, finally, flaking off.

So that a new cosmology
must be made in the moment,
including the presence
of cerebral asteroids,
neural star systems,
rocketless space-flight,
linguistic lava,
the holographic brain, body,
the continuum of form and consciousness,
the movement of continents,
the exogamy of sea and rain,
the synchronous rites of tooth and claw,
the weaning from the trogloditical Pliestocene Age
of the metropolis and politics,
the death of history
and the filling of the totemic void,
the birth of Death and
the destruction of the sarcophagus-temples,
the irradiation of power and
the dissolution of banks and jails,
the cybernetics of the flux of sigils
in the perpetual feast and
overflowing vomitorium
of the chalice of the earth
wherein fall the molted skins of the sun;
the occultation of stellar fire
within the masqueraded flesh
within a reptilian room;
the dunce cap hierarchy
of all the crowned talking bears
that dance the waltz
in Vienese dress blues
instead of the tarantula Rex
in drag with foreskin crown.

I’ll take miracles please

I have no choice
except to say so

with an answer
to an unformable question
or with a question
for an unformable answer

and in such silence
let all the noise culminate itself
in a bed full of frogs and lizards,

as the bankers and politicians,
the manufacturers of
guns and rockets,
automobiles and airplanes,
computers, toilet bowls and button hooks
hurl accusations at each other
and secretly try to open
numbered accounts on the moon
only to receive cryptic messages
that say $ doesn’t compute
in equation E=MC2
while the forces of Marxian Technocracy
approach the forces of Bourgeois Technocracy
with each man wearing his assigned mask
and dragging on chains of laurel wreath
his own accumulation of cadavers
in neatly packaged plastic boxes
only to die a few snarling feet from each other

and may those among the great men,
the makers and takers,
the junkies of power,
and the perverts of order
who don’t strangle each other
with the ticker tape of progress

may they automatically begin
to recite backwards in Greek
the Theogany of Hesiod
as we loudly culminate the silence
in a bed full of lizards and frogs

back back around past
ahead and through
the sand as the grains
ignite in the sun light
of the moons face
back thru the unruly brood
of Cottus, Briareus and Gyes,
back thru the lightning
and the Cyclopses, one-eyed
over the furnaces, back
back thru Mnemosyne,
back into and thru Themis,
back thru the mountains
and oceans and rivers,
back to the black night
in which Eros Desire
the most beautiful
and immortal
of the gods who
in every man and every woman
softens the sinews and
overpowers the prudent
purpose of the mind
lay with Eternal Chaos
and brought forth Earth
or as the Phoenicians
sang the song MUD

Turn your ear inside out
and listen to the lifting
of a million claws and wings
from the palpable darkness
within the caress of my hand

I’ll take miracles please
with cauliflower
in a bed of miner’s lettuce
and please, leave all
the bugs and worms
in the salad
Listen
What do you mean
you can’t cook
with my hand
in your pants

I’ll feed you riddles
of a cuisine beyond
of the Raw and the cooked
I’ll ween you of the literal

We’ll eat ashes and honey
we’ll shit the Golden Fleece

Not ever to escape
only to leap into an other
          Real World
as aborigines in the dream
of our own sleepwalking cells.