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

At one-thirty a.m. my friend gets through to me on the 'phone
To explain how he missed me at the hotel, I missed him at his flat,
And we make an appointment at last. The cacophonous throb
Of competing juke boxes in the pinball saloons has ended,
The cabarets down in the square have closed their doors.
Only motor bicycles rev and clatter; and all over the city
Still the twenty-one revolutions and counter-revolutions take place
On the walls. I begin to extract a silence, a privacy from
The repeated yap and whine of a dog in a nearby yard,
When not later than two or two-thirty, long before dawn,
This false alarm clock, a denatured cock
Shrills, irresistibly shrills again and again,
Ripping me out of a quarter-sleep filled with the alleys,
The pine, eucalyptus, cedar and fish smells of Lisbon,
Glaze of tiled housefronts, the slippery marble of paving-stones,
Mountainside follies at Sintra that out-moored the Moors,
Conimbriga's Roman remains, the plastic and onion skins
That outshone sea-shells on the beaches at Foz-do-Douro —
Rich, inexhaustible cud for a drowsy mind.
Only dream could have done it, thoroughly pulping the stuff
For its own polymorphous needs, like taking me to a palace
To talk with Mozart in Portugal, then on, with him,
To a summer skiing resort in the Dutch Alps,
Where we're met by . . . But not now. There's nothing for it
But to live, as the poor do here, on credit, making the best
Of expecting the worst, and where other energy can't,
For the moment, be drawn upon, keep going on coffee.
Insomnia, television — they're much the same,
After all, apart from the missing knob.
So, resigned, I wait for the kinder blankness of morning.