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

My head has crash landed in deep pile:
the dark, longer fur of my mountain kin.
I dream it as your back, a wooded dale
through shoulders, and plough deeper toward skin.

My head ignites. They say this cruel resin
that maddens like wrong fruit, this alcohol,
traps you in your past, drapes a monsoon's
darkness over you that doesn't spill.

But I'm already caught, denied a present
the pair of us can pick through, a shared kismet
to preen and groom towards, and if it wasn't
falling drunk each night into this found carpet,

it would be chasing ladies with furred lapels,
inverting sleeping bags, de-tailing squirrels.
Your coat was all the jungle to me: damp,
with tangled vines, caves, hot springs, swamps.

Growing up in it, I thought it boundless.
Your proud, leg-long arms were the only ones
that cared to grip me, bald as most of me was,
yours the hands, that valued expeditions

through my tight scalp. You finger-found those realms
we barely had in common: our ears and lips,
noses, palms and soles; and even some
that only I had haired: my upper lip,

armpits, chest. Your slow language of pressure
took me in, the way the world I swing in
now never could, against your nature.
You answered my unlikelihood with one

far steeper. I felt... I felt... They have a word
for it here - they have words for everything,
but don't mean them. Then this something was heard,
heading towards us, scaring the trees, something

colder, calmer than storms. And you blamed me,
confessed the pink patches on your palms had greyed.
So when they threw the flat-faced Jane at me
I took her on the rebound, let her raid

my unprotected, feeble origins -
this huge family I'm supposed to know
and feel base passion for, these scoured skins.
Her smart father still lectures on it now.