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

Curved     breathing eases his difficult breathing it eased the diff -
cult breath     breath     breath     ease across the curved air
curved the curved air harsh as is his     is his     easily as it was
the difficult breathing     how easily eased it was     the     the air
in a stir     how difficult the air     is     and once the difficult
breathing was eased the breathing eased the stop     breath     so easy
it was to ease     though the curved air breathes at rest it is still
at rest

Incisors

Follow the fair swallowed air
(And under her skirt gently)

Till breath hides
Walls

I am still unable to recall the exact flavour or whereabouts of that room. Where I was born? Sunshine there was, light surfaces, nothing dark, a certain freshness as of newly painted walls and on one a disk of light, and a bed made ready for my arrival. A guest indeed.

Our mouths were both heavy with sand.

A stone under a blanket. A painful guest. For instance when emeralds stretch. The wind in our footprints we adventure onto the tarmac. Cars’ wheels erase. Having asserted our breathing, see - we begin to travel, out and around in our stone fields.

Sofas! And among them big-carpeted girls in their flags of undies. Everywhere hides the breath it hides, it unwinds, itself it unwinds and hides under the sofa it hides, everywhere even the breath is erased.

Her footprints were emeralds gone into dusk. The cold wine hung heavy in our mouths at lunchtime, the aged grapes murmured and rolled around like metal, in your bright clear room. Cold breathed on the shining surfaces. She was sorting pieces of paper like grain, and then she was gone.

It is eventime, the twilight hour
It is, the dusk-fed millions enter.
TV’s flicker like pale dust
We enter beneath chipped capitals.

Hallucinated territories, there are armies with no energy
Till Harriet arrives, breath hides in carpeted so
And screaming screens, each sound is numbered
Breath in each twitch lurks, arthritic fingers shrivel.

Under the tense of borrowed time
You hide the corals, this script is much too painful.
The spice-fed teams hunt all around you.
Each twitch of root is a family friend.

The air is a thin shield of ice they say, sky pales above our street
as evening descends, clouds rise higher and higher into the air.
Everything’s normal here tonight and the wind we become obeys our
rule of breath, the ritual daylight, shall till perfect darkness
topples

Night is twitching under a blanket. The paper ones. Harriet’s energy
(thank God for that), is under the tense of borrowed time. Stars
twitch like a blanket. There are no memorials in this stone, hammered
out lung by lung.

So here at last is the main road, what I have been telling you about, and this is what they will pull down. Here are the houses and trees that are going to go. Little sister, is there room for all the dead? The mourners were part of the scenery it seemed, and although they did glance back to see what it was we were looking at, they then passed rapidly on, taking no more notice. We gazed into vaults, under the immense poplars, always unable to comprehend. No trace of the many births either, here among the cinemas. So here. I shall emerge and say I have nothing to show you, since daily my life is more secret and sinking past yours. I dreamed of how the chimneys fell. The house was taken apart piece by piece, our footprints disappeared, were ghosts of footprints, footprints of ghosts. We should gaze on this wallpaper before we tear it apart. For someone it mattered no doubt and eyes rested on this as they might on a friendly sky. As they might. Two travellers paused in the street, their eyes full of tears. Soon the last of the life will have leached out from under these walls, and this will be a disturbance no longer, although there are cars whose wheels and whose wheels and whose wheels will finish. The people are easily replaced, there is no shortage, in this they are unlike blades of grass or wheat whose scarcity we celebrate in sunshine with images of praise.

We shall not show you much. For instance at the end of our street is a pub, and then the main road. The sky stretches over our bed, a crib of dust, and earth is a surface crawling with life and interest. A light in the fog. Let us return to the city, arise, it starts, where the air drums us up to be born.