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

I hummingbird near the peak, clad in a shell
of anti-gravity adits. I devote
one nod to Nan Shan’s white and purple gorges
then put the laser bore to the misty bone.
Tubs at a time, at each boost, are scoured away.
The pepper slides out, dithers into the mist,
those helices of chiffon, east to Peking.
Slowly the burrow forms. The beam windowcleans
before me, dessicating, and soon there is
a ten yard mine ourting to my mission’s core,
the enemy hive inside the massif: (screens,
monitors, gangwalks, dials). I excavate
in my drilling seed. The straps do not chafe me.
I rest at my will. I may be days like this
while I eat from the foils, or vacuum back
to the porthole of light over the canyon
where in off-times I hunch like an ancient man
wondering at the distance and the static cloud.
That’s my one sundown sonata, the cirrus
seeped through the mangles of air, dynastic souls
dreaming. Or somewhere I sleep along the length
of the tubercular groove among my shucks,
sachets screwed up like dead bats, and fossil dung.
I could live years like this, but I have orders.
Older, I reach at last my cove’s last inches,
the saccular membrane round the foreign cell.
The next move must be swift: awl through the end wall,
push a hand through the warm inhabited air,
drop the pellet bomb, and go. Never look back
at the helmet headland about to explode.
Diminish down the dusty runway of cloud,
rejoining them, the traces of the thin dead,
for the past was all, was all. Never look back
but leave the unseen depth of that vault behind.
Though who would know if I entered, barely? Saw.
Since my thought itself would have gone at a glide
back to the old world. Why then should my body,
encapsuled, not follow at its own desire?
There is a last right which shorts in my circuits.
Says: see. I send the last skin away and stand
in the steady howl of the neon entrance
and plunge in. And float down. Over a phosphor
and office calm, almost too ordinary
to bear. The tracking machines and the canteen
and the handsome missile that I must go near.
On that cone is where I shall clamp the pellet,
on that glassy totem, within which I see
an ice-logged cabin. Suddenly, a scurry!
Klaxon and glare, ideographs of alarm!
I have been been! But I roll now in a numb
hallucination. Cannot find how to care
or be horrified at what I see: MYSELF
AGAIN inside the ineluctable spire,
a face tattooed with prismatic heraldry,
still, like a dummy. I treadle before it
above the white coats and grating-clangs. The bomb
slides from my hand, slowly, like an aspirin
descending in oil. It bloats, whitens, too late,
explores and explodes, too late, for it assists
the missile’s own lift-off burn. The new man leaves
strapped to a destination, looking like me.