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

And what I miss most now is

God.
           He bursts into my darkened corner, with his head high, his
eyes wide. I wake up.
Atoms explode, dust swirls, a blood rush bangs inside my head.
This is the sound of my fear thickening.
He makes me feel

Disbelief
                     in a dead, black night. There are too many stars,
by far, to fit the stretch of sky.
I have left my life ajar, enough for the red fog to come
crawling. Thick, bloody, brutal. All of my misgivings made me

Visionary
                     I am watching stars, the changing, fading colours;
always hiding at the window, fascinated by his return.
And he only comes when he’s not called, bringing strange sounds
screaming and tearing.
I am blown apart

by the impression
                     he has made, of me dancing like never before with
springtime slipping from the winter, lifting, shifting fog.
Taking me ever closer to

Tango together
                     which becomes our way of talking, that brings him
to my door, emerging from an alleyway, rising up off the streets
to find me, to accept my

invitation
                     to fill up my empty rooms, to smash a coiled fist
into a concrete wall. To feel pain as he follows me around the
kitchen and he’s taking off clothes, layer upon layer of silences

removed
                     left hanging on the door with me and my coffee, two
sugars, everyday things which I didn’t imagine and we are sitting
on a patch of carpet, for that first time, watching ourselves in
the mirror.

No, just talking.
                                  Later there is lemonade amongst the
words. There’s passing the bottle like vagrants sharing vodka
and other things, like my hand on his neck where I am entangled
in a St Christopher, who is dubious anyhow but offers him

Protection

Strangling him

                     Dropping him to his knees, nearly naked at my feet,
confessing a life to me, as I sit atop the chair, speechless.
I am shattered. A whole religion comes, bearing down on me

ripping off the red dress

to shreds, showing off my blasphemy,
crashing me apart, with that mad laugh that has me feeling drunk
and drugged, stumbling, his breathing hard as he calls out for
lemonade
moving me to
madness, to scream out

God

to be abused left haunted, to be overwhelmed by the sight of our
laughing and the voice that dragged the morning

down

            to me in my concrete hallway where we kiss. Where we find
daylight hanging round the corners like my blackened hair damp
with sweat and the sound of his footsteps fading and my rushing
for the last glimpse of him moving

Away
            I hated him when he went
Away
            leaving me full of him and lemonade and all I had to give
and

Gone
            for what I miss most now is the sound of your laughing in
the dark. Your big, brute beauty and your blackened, wounded
heart.