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

Once I wrote a letter to a dead man, I put it into a shoe and let it walk to a graveyard. The man didn’t write back yet I’m glad I at least gave it a college try. I don’t live in a completely mad world, you know. Once a boy took me to a graveyard and tried to kiss my mouth. A car passed and its light looked like fire on a headstone. The boy took me home, perhaps he thought the man would finally speak. Another boy took me to the same graveyard a year later. His car was filled with smoke. It’s mandatory for all Americans to have sex in a VW bug at least once in their lives. It gives us some kind of perspective about the power of sacrifice and the devastating nature of reproductive rites. In that cemetery with that second boy, I did my patriotic duty and then said goodbye to the boy. I saw him only once again, three years later. He drove a different car, but people who were buried hadn’t gotten up and moved. In a way the first goodbye was all that was necessary.

Where do we put things? That is perhaps the most important question. What must it be like to be a man, to put oneself somewhere? I put all my things away, I don’t like to see my things. If I were a man would I be searching for women, just to get myself out of my sight?

Every woman should sleep with one man who lived across the sea. In doing this she will learn important lessons about the nature of men. One lesson is that men like to hear the sound of their own voices, men will listen to themselves speak in their heads instead of hearing what a woman is saying to them. Another lesson is, despite their nationality, there are few men who know how to take advantage of the fact that humans were built with legs. That’s a woman’s gift. Finally a woman will learn that when men fall to sleep at night, something comes into their rooms, crawls into their ears and takes out of their heads the most important things of the day. Anything important is gone from a man after he’s had his eyes closed for more than five minutes. It happens at night. Perhaps men who sleep in the day are different. I don’t know. I don’t know any.