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

with acknowledgements to the Chic Organisation

The continual, gnawing dissatisfaction of people patrolling a
     basement
looking into each other’s faces and finding nothing
was glossed by the music. “Rebels!...Rebels!...”
     The refrain
nearly finished us. But now, time for you to breathe, the
     entertainment collapses,-
a coloured tent, the poles protruding all ways, the cloth
     drenched. And here,
sprouting carnivorous flowers of mould, are volumes one to the
     infinite
of the world’s saddest and most boring stories, sagas of
     perpetual disappointment,-
the right one always eluding, a kind of Cinderella syndrome
with an enormous surplus of princes and ugly sisters.....

Speak to the owl, if you can find one. Our ideas have left us,-
they were at the bottom of the glass. And something opens to a
     great depth
like the blue of the sky when birds are lost in the severe alps
     of commerce.
A kind of regressive feeling sets in, like an ache. Time to go home.
Only.....a certain, over-reaching ambition remains, -

to go further, refusing to accept this as the end point, signalled
     by old, deafening clocks,
leaving the chaste houses of parents and professors far behind,
as a thin mirage drawn on the air by sombre children good at sums,-

to be lost from sight, shameless monomaniacs, recognising only what
     we touch -
what touches us - the small tremor in which the world consents to be
extinguished
as a pot of flowers (geraniums perhaps) is extinguished
when it falls from the sill of a high tenement window: something
remains, but nothing you’d recognise. But you exaggerate (and why not?);
you were thinking of Italy or some other place of light, and floral
     tributes
where the legend is: “these people really know how to live.”

You may take pleasure in feeling lost, but, of course, you remember
how quickly we can traverse the long way back, knowing
all the brambles and wires by rote, - knowing too well
those ravines like lying smiles of welcome that would swallow us,
     until
we arrive at the place where the new day romantically extends
its pale and still cold hand with an old-fashioned courtesy like
     lace.....

And it is a promontory where trees have rooted in the stacks
of an abandoned library now barely distinguishable from the space
     around it,
and a staircase leads down from the dust of the central door
towards the distant city, which naturally only seems distant:
it is almost in your hand, - a kind of cubist garden wherein
a crowd of people move at blurring speed, under foliage of smoke,
among pillars built with mirrors, reflecting vast sunsets.

Or is it only the memory rising from such name
as Ctesiphon, or the chessboard of Ch’ang-an, Tu Fu lamented.....
But no, it is real, you insist and the musty names I drag up
     depress you.
Look, the ocean is receding from the streets and squares
and those who have slept awake! It is another legend, another fable,
one that ends happily. And each individual -
their clothes, their hair or the small movements of their hands-
impresses us as the element of a pattern we wouldn’t, just now,
     alter a stitch,
although we know sadness is in it like an ink-stain. The conquest

has been accomplished, and no-one was subjugated. I am, you are
eager for the oncoming night,- its lights, its advertisements,
     the sound of its cars.....
The sky looks like storm clouds: each of us conducts lightning.