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

[A serialisation of The Syllabary. A randomly generated version of this continuing project is available at the website above. - RP]

In the syllabary the Y axis is rhyme, the X axis is alliteration and the Z axis is consonance. At each intersection of those three axes is a cell that contains a noise, or a word or a set of words. Sometimes the words within a cell, or in neighbouring cells, have grammatically related meanings; more often they are semantically unrelated.


14.3.19

Jock
Is short for Jockabite
Mawkish and much mocked
By Jack the Lad (who always was
More Waugh, Waugh than George Orwell).
Not an easy name to wear with pride,
Though it can be done.


14.3.18

Jog: a purgatorial
Uphill struggle
Round in circles
Trailing a scarf of
Sweat behind them:
Sins they’re
Trying to disown.


14.6.18

It’s just a jig, not tsujigiri,
“The trying out of a new sword
On a chance passer-by”,
Nor is it a jigsaw of, say, Salome,
Carrying like an icon
The missing piece of John the Baptist.
It’s a jig, just Shiva dancing
With the islands round one ankle.


14.5.18

I was swaddled in satin and held over the font.
A hand emerging from a surplice and soutane held up
A sugar cube absorbing sunlight yellow.
Jags and sacraments punctuated childhood.
The worst was the BCG, that stood for
Ritual circumcision, the scar
Through which we flinched into adolescence.
A jag was also the midnight blue saloon the polis drove.
And it seemed there was a big cat called a jaguar
Because it was the same colour
And it ran just as fast
And it had claws like syringes.


16.5.18

The dictionary wasn’t much help:
Whoever heard of shag tobacco?
Somebody said it had something to do with
A clump of public hair. Make sense of that!


16.4.18

So he asks auld Shug – and what about
The folk killed under communism?
And what does auld Shug do?
Shrug.


16.4.16

- But I mean
- Aw shush!
- Och orright.
- Next.