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

Delving deeper on and higher up,
anti-tropical nurses tend to camouflaged grazes.
Denying female contact for 2 and some weeks, a donkey
Packs up midway through town, coming back
down from the highland mountains in fits and starts, more over
Moving in peace. Jammed, head-on, against decorative Mani wall’s end
bright & cheery cafs,
from the conniving western world. Her face may have intricately originated,
many moons ago, with the English patient’s frustrated charm dumbing a
     sound.
Mistaking her Irish accent - joking with her she’s Australian, no?! - cut
no time.

The thing was, she was the first of the 3rd person to speak
factually forgetting her muiti-syllabled squabbling - I
just looked dead on into her lumpily-invigorated maze. Half dead
dowdy and proudly smelling like an ‘under renovation’ crude oil refinery - I
was still treated to half-sung tales about exciting Uni. Studies (boring),
plus trips to China’s great bricked wall, and back.
Nice … asking what I’d been up to, I
grudgingly smiled, laughing-aloud, ‘I’m a shop assistant in Iceland!’
But I bet
she knew my lame slant was no joke.
Bidding good-day, she passed. I’d blown it.

At introspective tangents, mucky babies stupidly swept
whirling sandpits in their own squinting eyes. Lowering myself to copied
Eastbound standards. Lunch came first ... but oh, her dreaded hair

Freed-up, as some travelling companion
professionally challenged amateurish ‘meaning of life’ explanations, I
Lonesomely trekked iffily on the school-backing ridge,
in search of that egg-shaped, yet better, face. Cheery
welcomes to immigrant natives exasperated cut-down cold shoulder.
I wasn’t alone, zigzagging 10-to-2-dozen up the sheath-tight trail
longtitudally across the next expansive valley. Forsaking tight village
     depictions:
no wasting snowscenes to have yelping dogs offensively
nibbling at buckled doorknob. Wondering ‘what’s on the bored, Miss Ford?
and why she wasn’t as taken with me ... as I would have, spitefully, her.

Fancying shitty pigeons may make grufty millionaires of dropout
Friends, but where was gentle, undemanding company when God had
his considerated heart by-passed and restructured. His gaining destiny
sumptuously had other ideas. Sweeping
regrets (that I didn’t nick her corking homed phone number)
stormily into crystal clear dust.

Inevitably, still thinking about her ... tripping over,
fag-in-gob. And defensive gangrene, under foot.