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

So few the moments we share,
there’s no time to speak of the present
let alone that distant past.
I still don’t know if you come from round here
or what your father did or was.
What used to be the colour of your hair,
dark or fair?

So skimped the minutes that are ours,
as days depart
I long not only for your touch, your face
but also to share those jokes
and anecdotes of former years.
I haven’t always languished
in these moth-eaten ivory towers

of literature, love (and illness)
but galloped in that cruel universe
of improbable jobs and careers - endless -
and even more improbable men.
One such: a night-club hostess
off Piccadilly, with the night-club owner
thrown in.
He gamely offered to support me
if I’d be his mistress

but I gave my notice in within the week.
(Was it then I trained as a ballroom dancing teacher ?)
A world in a week. And like the cliché
and Victorian painting: St. John’s Wood. Take
pity, (would you?) laugh with me
at my sometimes lurid past, its sleaziness.
Though fishnet tights and page-boy dress
at the Lyceum ballroom (Leicester Square?)
felt worse. Remember it’s for unclad minutes
with you that I, unrealistically, ache.

These faint echoes of lives gone by -
pleasantly staid librarian days, too,
you see you got married when I got jilted
then I hit the road with a vengeance, it’s true,
just searching for a feasible modus vivendi
and a possible man with whom to lie -
help me appreciate
the quieter life that’s mine, add a piquancy.
Although feelings for you like a crazed refrain
or exotic frieze still supply
that turmoil, syncopation:
so few the moments we share.