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

I am the kitchen boy
my head built up
close to the sea
the salt has an appetite
the walls more than once
washed away

enticed into the ripples
by the popping o’s of kiss-fishes
a red-haired voice
skims an octave of pebbles
across laced white ruffles
the edge of Neptune’s shirt

Ruddy Rufus with red hair flowing
kissed goodnight the kitchen boy

through the old liquid rocks
of the shoreline
the drowned
visions of the lost city
seen from the clifftops
are subtle as mist
a jumble of domes
spires, towers, battlements
etched through sleep
and out to sea

in memoriam he goes
back and forth;
the salty greenstone carried
sacked in his soupy apron
to the rough-stone seat

sea and air
I say to you
these rocks that melt away
will return
unseen tonight
put your breaths
across these sirens
and they will sing to you

a man wearing antlers
in the woods nearby
is looking for a lost kiss
the ghost of Ruddy Rufus
all a-flow with red hair screaming
who kissed goodnight
a kitchen boy

laughing wavelets lick the stones
formed by spontaneous generation
from Rufus’s dead deluged corpse
countless stones
that fisherman saw
and an enormous seal
rock-arched and keystoned
buoys the greying tide

I am the kitchen boy
circling over a bare patch
where grass never grows

the stones are giants
which sometimes dance...
In this henge is a mystery.

I am the kitchen boy
alive like the Moving Stone
following the light
to warm each face
alive as the Grampus
swimming in the yew
east of the clump
at Wimble Toot

old Ruddy Rufus with red hair
skipping
kissed goodnight this kitchen boy