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

Hello, my enemies, I won’t reply:
my love affairs with postmen are over
and I’m sealing the letter box shut.
Ink vanishes on recycled paper,
telegrams arrive after the event;
so I’m going where the mail cannot reach
the fuck yous scrawled high as a wall,
where my eyesight will glow like graffiti.
There’ll be no clean sheets of notepaper
to screw into balls and lament the waste,
no need to kiss goodbye by typewriter
till the exes fall off the page onto
my unread knee for want of a reply.
Hello, defaulters, let’s share our tales
and watch the hallucinations rise up
from lost weekends; we won’t remember
a thing of the good lines or the bad,
except not remembering either.
Our eyes will close like manuscripts muttering
flickering rhythms down the hairs of our coat,
dribbling dreams out of its thin lining,
the spit upon the road left to dry.
I’ve had enough of the chewing gum
of words and the pure yellow poetry
I’ve dusted on Sunday afternoons for
the truth and never found anything in
except suicide notes dated Monday.
I’ve cut off that literariness like tripe
and distressfully tried to make the bits
that remain take up the whole of the page;
but it’s left no self-conscious, risk-all,
word-game space to play in excitingly.
Hello, out there, I’m about to show you
silence on a flag-pole, a morse code
out of the blue, danger without a word;
steam open the envelopes marked private
with your smoke signal and when the sun shines
in the morning, tilt your mirror in reply.