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

1
Enthroned in his cab atop the huge yellow Compactor
(bulldozers might be its kittens), chomping a burger,
Buster is monarch of all he surveys:
a refuse tip to horizon where Lincolnshire
flinches. He gropes rolls of gut for his mobile,
downloads Great Beckham Freekick Goals, then starts
the spiked wheels churning. In the rancid mulch he thwacks are
Shakespeare’s Works, old double-beds, dead kittens.
Buster has been around a long time.

2
Buster was hiding under a bush when Falstaff
flopped feigning, and the Douglas ramped off
for other quarry. Bellies up, they squinnied
at the Prince and Hotspur exchanging dunts,
till the latter fell. ‘Spare me such grinning honour,’
mused Falstaff over the corpse. ‘Back of the net!’
yodelled Buster, always a patriot.

3
The first million years were the worst. Watching stalactites grow
in a cave. Buster, never in shape for the chase,
was thrashed with a mastodon bone for being useless.
Glaciers bulged and withdrew, gouging landscape,
and no-one invented shops or the caring professions.
What would he like for his birthday? He daubed it beside
their wall hunt-voodoo: a Ferrari.
‘If God,’ said his mother, ‘meant us to move like that
we’d be born with wheels, not legs.’

4
Pissing in the fireless grate of a drasty inn
Buster rued pilgrimage. ‘Shoures soote’ forsooth!
He was drenched, saddle-sore, bored numb with their tales.
The prissy Prioress; that pimply Pardoner
who’d sold him rats’ bones as holy relics.
A thump sent him sprawling: ‘Your turn!’ boomed the Host.
‘These three Irish plumbers met a Paki ...’ The toff
who’d talked him into the trip didn’t lift his quill-pen.

5
Buster knew nothing of art, but he knew what he liked.
Not acres of dimpling boys on the Sistine ceiling.
Nor carting the Maestro’s supplies up, pisspots down.
Nor their food ... When he quit the Italian job
he left an eye-level graffito, Mad Cow,
frothed lips ballooning, Eat Our British Burgers!

6
Buster sat out the Armada. Shipboard stockfish
had left him no stomach for it. Not to speak of
the sight of their sails, those long-range cannon.
Kindling fireships you’d never know how the weather
might blow. He tossed his cap high on North Foreland
when it wellied the Spaniards out of the park.
Then Sir Walter sailed home with a pallid tuber:
after that it was chips with everything.

7
When Buster came round from the drubbing his mother gave
him
for eating the goose that laid golden eggs, she sent him
to market. He came home with beans.
She chucked them. One sprouted right through the clouds ...
You know the rest: when she kick-started him up
his weight brought it down. They were sent to the workhouse.

8
Then there was the wife. Why do women have legs?
‘So they can walk from the bedroom to the kitchen,’
leered Buster. But this one, you never knew where she was.
Or who with. Bringing back watches, gowns, periwigs.
‘Red-card the trull, ref!’ The Beak sent her off – to Virginia.
But just as he settled, feet up and six-pack handy,
a key in the door, she reeled in ginned and bedizened,
his trouble-and-strife: Moll bloody Flanders.

9
Buster was fifteen, hardly yet quite bald,
when they sent him out to build Empire.
‘Sun, sex and sherbets, son.’ He had bad memories
from the Crusades: too fat to aim bows
so given a pike against mailed Saracen horsemen.
As well halt tanks. This time he was cannier,
when Zulus darkened the skyline, he shot his foot off.
Got shipped home to a desk-job in Recruitment.

10
‘Blood, sweat, toil, and tears.’ ‘No thanks,’ said Buster,
switching the wireless off. Our darkest hour?
Boom-time for the black market.
‘Nylons, lady?’ Clouds have silver linings.

11
Space? It takes the weight off your feet.
Buster won six golds at the Moon Olympics,
but declined orbit missions, telling his mates
in the Rat and Trumpet, ‘You can’t pour pints out there.’

12
Dante has Buster sunk to the ears in his element:
filth, with the gluttons in Hell’s third circle.
It could be worse: the boiling-blood-bath for Violence
(too much like work), and as for those like straws
within nethermost ice, you can’t fault Buster on Treason.
‘Did we win the World Cup this year?’ The poet ignores him,
tags on behind Virgil, the voice of Reason.
‘Right, but there’s plenty more of me where I come from!’