Matt Simpson
Thirty sixth birthday poem
Midnight. The central heating cools
clicking like turnstiles. Lecture still
unfinished.
What weird company I keep
earning my bread. Shelves of Literature
ordered chronologically.
Take one year: 1922 - the anus (sic)
mirabilis. The year Proust died
clutching his Alice-in-Wonderland cake.
The monumental year of MOD-
ERNISM. Four Great Works in paperback.
With ulcer and a wonky eye
Word-casting Merlin-Joyce
obstinately epiphanising
to keep the nasty Jesuits away.
And ironical Tom, the literary cat,
shoring against the ruin of
his whiskery sensibility
these fragments of the Western World.
And Lawrence on his Pan pipes tootling off
to Italy; and poor Mrs. Woolf
in one of her semi-transparent envelopes.
An hour ago two drunks
passed my window. Shouted Bloody Swot
and cursed the Chinky Pictures on the wall.
My father in his last illness
asked for reading books.
I told him I had nothing that he’d like.
Page(s) 73-74
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The