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

1

The bell of your laughter, your ridicule,
shames me and pale, enraged,
I strike at your cunt. Appalled
I know I have done this before. You are
the spoiled princess I knifed in despair.
Breathless, I lock my forbidden desires.

The certainty I dread is, awake, knowing
our romance is done. I might leave you,
the lie tempts me, the old woman’s
no, she was fair; white, golden haired.
Is all changed? Am I never again to kiss
that black hair, melt and fall with you

face on face, eyes bruising eyes?
You were no wraith abandoned in the hazel wood:
I imagined those breasts, the entwining legs,
but succinctly - forgetting always,
in the wet rush, that you insulted
servants, that you whipped the horse that wouldn’t run.

2

From the courtyards and gardens the burning herbs,
rosemary, winter savoury, and the smell of sheep cooking;
the city is all one stink - smoke, flesh,
fire. She is in her room dressing and
undressing; has already stacked on
a dozen scents, oils, hairsprays, and her
heart shrinks at the inadequacy of clothes.
Suppose he is in a hurry, undresses me
from the waist down, how will this
shirt look with pale legs, etc., etc.,
how will I look, do I look, how am I ...?

Her distress sweats on her nose, the tears
well in the eye corners. Yesterday she watched
from her high window as the step-sisters
washed intestines, threaded the chopped
insides of the sheep - liver, heart, brain, kidneys -
along the thin skewers, getting the feast
dressed; watched them in their drab clothes,
joking, tugging the gut, carting in tubs
the foul water to the vegetable garden.
In panic she looks at her hands -
are they too red and swollen, like the sisters’?

Will they, despite the creams and lotions,
snag in the silk of her lover’s shirt?
And the appalling dance is yet to be endured,
the lunatic hurdy-gurdy, the drunken uncles,
fingers oiled with lamb fat, patting her,
brushing against her breasts, thighs;
and the dancers, smelling of cigarettes and fart,
and the wet kisses from school friends,
and the children, mad on sugar and wine,
lurching about, peeing under the table cloth,
stealing sweets, fruits, cakes, slippers.

3

Her social worker says she knows she lies,
and cannot not - invents what
you want, what she wants.
A born storyteller, a legend in her own time,
undetectable by the best detectives,
her eyes wide and her blouse a little open
and father, mother, sisters, teachers,
policewomen, forget the accusation:
she has seen King John’s lost crown, and her shoes
were reduced to fifty p. in Miss Selfridge, and there is
something at the bottom of the garden -
a fairy, a rat, a pumpkin, a dress.

Her social worker says she knows she steals,
takes, without noticing, what she wants
so much so that she calls it shopping.
This dress, these black panels of transparency
sewn with seed pearls, she says
a woman saw her looking at it in the shop
and bought it for her; and the lipsticks
must have fallen into her bag. At the ball
the cash she needs for E she finds
is in her hand. Her social worker says
she could grow out of it, of course, and could
the whole family come to the centre, just to talk.

Her social worker says she knows she fucks,
and cannot not, the boys expect it -
how else is she to meet her prince? Her
prince, colder than the burst condom,
the baby she worries she wants,
that prince of the syphylitic, the phthisic,
who once would have taken her in childbirth,
who once would have burnt her -
who now stands in his thin splendour
waiting his time, this time going steady,
the groom to whose compassion, tenderly
she bares all her blood, every cell, every last platelet.