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

Inside the falling in love
Shelter of your radioactive arms
I awake and stretch naked atoms
Which rub together and implode.

Clocks tick discreetly
In semi-darkness
As the city’s dreamers
Dress contours for work.

Subterranean psyches at the bottom
Of the week’s hill.

Clutching the prozac
The breadwinner’s wife butters toast.

Between the ages of nine and five
I drove a red lorry
Now I stumble through rooms
Thirty years of dancing
Have brought me to.

Monday morning and a few drops
Of fine rain massage the cheeks
Of the neighbourhood.
I blow fresh music through
The tremoring body of a saxophone.
Someone plays percussion
On the other side of the wall
As the mouthpiece squeaks jazz.
The first traveller of the day
Comes in through the kitchen window
Bringing news of a red headed cat
The cat has inherited a simple game plan -
When not sleeping adopt a creature
From a friendly species and feed.

If I had that kind of talent
I would walk my four feet
Up and down the boulevard
And busk charisma.

I glance through the window
Take in the raincloud
Unpeeling itself overhead
The red cat looks up
Not overly concerned
At the sky’s darkening colour.

Wind has blown rain
In from Africa
Why it would want
To visit here
Is anyone’s guess
But already smiles

Have gone underground
Pushed back into faces,
The cabbages seem pleased
Now nearly fully grown
Children are packing
The years away
Another night
Neatly folded into darkness.

On the city’s naked streets
The first shoes climb out
Of the weekend
Into the foothills
Of a November sky
The millennium is only weeks away
And the spaceships fuelled
With blabber and gas.
The story that slips from my veins
Is wrinkled with laughter.

I make some coffee and stir
Some thoughts around
Some of these are later
Born by hand
Others dictated orally.

The black blood
Of my dance partner
Is hot with congregation

Pregnancy is brief
And populations collected.