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

   I keep my black velvet cape in the closet
and save it for those times when I go out with a
knife in my back.

   The black musician in the sunglasses was
looking at me all night until I found out he was
blind. Then he sang about all the coincidences
that led up to his suicide.

    I rested inside the jewel in his music that
was passing through the internal organs of another
time. The passage led to a fingernail that was
doing nothing on a woman who was making love to
me. I reached down with my hand to touch her
cunt but I found another hand there, coming out
of her. It was covered with magnificient rings.
This was Rimbaud’s hand for he had become rich.
We clasped hands and it was like touching the
doorknob to the room of my death. Tiny boots
of darkness marched up my arm and into my brain.

    I should ask them to sit down.

    The musician is strangling his music as
it emerges from his horn. This cuts an artery
in the game we’re all playing. Blood is
seeping up at the base of our beards. The
crowd at the stadium is screaming emptiness.
The panic is that each person feels he is
being taken over by the personality of his best
friend. They are windows between a hot room
and a cold wind.

    I clutch the woman to me with great force.
I disobey the rules and move many squares toward
her. Intimacy is falling together. We are
becoming closer. Her face is giving way. I’m
going to kiss her brain. Its long dark streets
have a knife in them that belongs to me.