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

sometimes         maybe when i lick my lips
i can still taste the sadness         and i can still smell the heat
of those darling days
when everything was blurred and yellow

like waking in the middle of night        when my father was somewhere else
and looking into the mirror tirelessly         hoping that something good
                                                                                    would happen
opening my mouth and praying that i wouldn’t need braces         wondering
                                                                                   when it would be

when my mother         sprawled out crying         on the living room floor
        after trying to keep my father inside
he having finally given himself up to the green and yellow kitchen
with his fist at his can of beer         and wondering why
        she just wouldn’t let him go

and the times i had to throw my arms up in between and hold him away
because i was afraid to see her         on the floor again
and all of the:         you see, you see what you’re doing?
and all of my father’s bruised fists through the walls         (there were holes
                                                                              all over the house)

and when the mice took over         coming out from all the cracks
        coming out from the stovetop         coming out of the sinks
coming out from behind the refrigerator
and how my father taught me to shoot at them with rubber bands         and how my mother
        had me swing at them with rolled up newspapers
                that i woke up early on sunday morning to buy for her with a cheese danish from the
                family place bakery on the corner of richard and ferry
and how when i hit them they jumped up into my face         (i never
                                             thought a mouse could jump that high)

and my father yelling at me when i missed         and when i woke him to please kill the spider on the
wall      lying there with my poor mother in the burgundy night      my poor mother lying there in the
        burgundy night
and the shivering mornings alone with him         when my mother finally
                                                                 didn’t want to come back
and having no breakfast or no milk for the wrong cereal
and having to listen to his pleas for me to stay with him         when my mother would not

and the swelling nights alone with my mother         lying together on the hard wood floor that he had
        just put down the year before
now bare      in the empty house      illuminated only by the television screen calling out letters
        trying to solve the puzzles on the wheel of fortune
eating cheap chinese my mother made me go out in the night to pick up      passed the corners with
        their dealers dogs and whores      just so that she and i could share something simple together...

it doesn’t take very much for me to recall
after all, it hasn’t been very long
and everyday i can’t help but look into the old mirror

and i can taste it when i lick my lips
and when i pass my hand across my skin         i can feel it where the swells have grown
and when i smile         i can see it in the cracks and chips of my crooked yellowing teeth.