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

The first war victim was my desk. A bullet shot from who knows where went through the window of my attic apartment and destroyed my desk. And, exhausted, it disappeared somewhere among the book- shelves. I never found that bullet. I guess it ended up in one of the cartoon books I haven’t read since then.

Not long after, I saw a film on TV about the Russian writer Limonov
shooting from a hill with an anti-aircraft gun in his hand. I could have
sworn that he was shooting in my direction. I tore off the title page of
the novel and stuck it over the hole in the window. It’s still there.

The war has been over for a long time. Instead of marching soldiers,
former heroes with holes in their hearts are now walking the street.
Nobody wants to listen to their war stories any more. When I was
leaving my city for good I took with me just one book, the book with the missing cover.

Every letter that I later sent to my old address, I wrote on somebody
else’s desk. I am a writer with a hole in his stomach.

Recently I got a letter from my former neighbour. She complained that the wind sometimes whistles so hard through the hole in the window that it sounds like a wounded soldier moaning.

Anyway, she writes, the lettering on the cover is so faded that nobody can recognise either the author’s name or the title of the novel.

What was the author’s name, what was the name of the novel, I’ll soon start asking myself. But still, whenever I sit at a desk the same picture in my mind attacks me:

A character from a cartoon book is fighting with cobwebs and dust in my empty apartment. He is shot with a bullet from an anti-aircraft gun, a real bullet. And he screams the same way the wind blows through the hole in the window.