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

The hulk of my aeroplane
Boiled and glowed,
My coffin flew a straight, stupid line.
The parachute writhed and shrivelled up.

Bullets ping across my glass coop,
Random hose-pipe death
Ricochets in the fuselage -
Not to be caught in the cross-fire,
Not to be eaten alive by fire
I fling myself at air

A leaf of lead
At two miles a minute
I turn, I spin
In a thin remote element,
Flailing I drown
In no colour, no weight,
At a hundred and twenty miles per hour
Plummet down the endless oubliette,
Icy torrents
Slip through my stretching fingers,
Seconds’-worth of coma
Lasts for an age,
Negative velocity
Sucks me back to the
Black solid Earth,
The pebble flies to the catapult,
The bullet reverses into the muzzle.
I fall at a rim of planet -
The rim flattens out.

Stars hang under my feet,
My boots loosen, they spiral away,
They have their own rate
At which they want to leave,
Friction in this thinness
Burns my bare skin.
My aeroplane, my unattended comet
Flares in another quarter of the sky
Over my shoulder,
Under my sole
She burns
Then she’s extinguished.

A split second after
Earth fills more and more up.
At two miles a minute,
I crashed into pines.
Branch after branch
Parted, relinquished me.
Each twig, heavy with broken needles,
Fractured, dragged at my impetus.

A valley cushioned all the smashed bones,
At the foot of the trees
At the bottom of Earth
The headlong tilt ended.

Pitched into snow,
Came to a dead stop,
But not dead -
Not, triumphantly no,
Lapped in a freezing field
Stars glittering over.