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

Went home to Yorkshire for Mac’s wedding - good and drunk two days. Thirty pints in as many hours plus champagne, sherry, etc.. Part celebration and part the temporary expulsion of certain bastard truths lodged, as ever, within me.

Midway through this came discotheque, stroboscope and her. Eighteen, and already an amazing sexual history that had brought her, there and then, suddenly to me. She’d the names of guys tattooed on her arm and twenty-some pricks tattooed down the annals of her cunt - where, but for a bed, went I. Two of them would never again, having ripped up their bodies between steel and tarmac that left their pricks/bikes/faces rotting on some strange highway between hell and her flesh.

The one had held her down to etch his own name - now dead echoes in blue letters. His stand-up, shop-front fucks. “He was married and so violent he scared me, but the other one - two years ago and I still cry for him. He was always looking for something he never found ...” and I could see metal twist in her mind as she spoke. Bones ripped through skin and we had some more to drink. My tongue in her mouth, hands on her tits. How can a body and face stay so beautiful when they hold all that?

2 a.m. and a million miles from her maidenhead, she held me in the cold March air. Scream of a bike as it turned and turned on a name below her shoulder. “Come out Monday?” “Ring me - but you won’t.”

But I did, and that’s what we have now. That’s the body I’ve yet to take, and will next time I’m home. There’re jokes in the letter waiting for me to post. They’re o.k. sealed in an envelope, but there’s fuck all room for them anywhere else.