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

Amazing grace in a thousand churches I have wept.
On my knees in a thousand churches I have made
my confession. There is no health in me. I have sinned.
So they say. So they say you said.
Parents and priests and teachers.

O Lord have mercy on me. For thine is. The power.
Since you are my saviour. In spite of
I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs from
Under thy table. And do you love me or
judge me whose nature is always to have
and yet whose mercy is so strange:
kneel in penitence in order to receive.

Our father who art in heaven let us be repressed
according to thy name. Condemn my heart to
silence with follow not its devices.

Outcast status slave status schizophrenic pain
too long dead and buried me.
I feed the famine of my deprivation.
I starve the whale of my sick desires.
I have an eating disorder a sign of the times disorder
my mind is disordered there is in my mind
a terrible disorder. I try to determine,
determine to try, identify and release,
name the demons.
One by one I cast them out.
Christian baptism, a childhood in churches,
apostolic theology.
Not guilty me. Begone. Trouble me no more.

Silences the babel.
Real Jesus returns just like always.
Come with me, he says, go higher,
my burden is light.

There is static. Clamour. Snatches like
dying batteries. Recede and advance.
Vacillating on the cusp
which tense which time
how to drink from the cup of bliss
he comes again.
If any man would come after me
let him deny himself and take
up his cross and follow me.

This cannot be happening
disconnected out
within or without, in the midst thereof,
no.

This is not the kingdom.
This fantastic riven world.
This precedence of evil.
Something is rotten in the state of God.
If Christ has died to set me free
why do I have to die to me?

This is not the kingdom.
The mustard seed is sown too deep.
The needle in the field of wheat.
The itching at my side.

Here I am claustrophobically restless,
weighted down by the familiar crush. (1)
It cannot be
that the tracks of his cross have run
out here.

Here I cannot.
Seconds merge.

Here I cannot be myself.
I know why. (2)

He comes again and says
I have come to give you life in all its fullness.
Inside the empty tomb? I ask.
Oh ye of little faith, he says.
Death undoes so many, I reply.
I an not dead, he says.
A matter of opinion I should
have thought, I reply,
incredulous with the irony of truth.

Dance with me then, he says,
and the gift he gives is the key in my hand.

How come you will not come to
show me the way out of here -
I have obeyed you this far
living Jesus, I ask, expectantly,
lacking a lock to open.

This then that follows this is amazing.
Everything goes dark. (3) There is a great
clash and clatter, like objects falling from a
shelf. Stars are amuck in the universal
fringes, losing gravity fast. The sky is falling.
Trees hush. The chariot swings low.

There is thunder the grinding of wheels
as the gem coated axles turn
I receive the transfiguration of my sight
fly faster than the speed of light from
here to eternity where I come smack bang up against the
cherubim and the flaming sword.

The guardians of the gate.

The baying and the heat drive me back but
I can smell the flowers of paradise.

Fireflies dangle and tantalise above the green rim.

This is harsh grace, he says, that
whosoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

I come back to my senses with a bump.
I return to the vanishing point of my own existence.
The place of exchange.
Abandoned world for love and I, and I,
all that God requires
is to fulfil my desires?

Do you believe in yourself enough now
to scorch the cherubim and swallow the sword,
he asks, honey eyed and smiling.

And the key, I reply, incredulous
at this incredible irony.

You hold the pen in your hand, he says,
delete the gatekeepers as you
cross over the threshold.