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

On the bound,
on a road. Desert country in the darken, wood
dying in the dust sky. A misty spread, a new country after
my half-closed.

I am asleep in the front seat of the car, and you drive through.

In the old country, hell had no fury.
In the new country, in the new country.

In the tungsten future, all
life will be a stripper. Cranking to that time,
driving to it, waiting, waiting,

wake me when we get there.

We will take a hotel room, and silent, I will go
into the bathroom, wash the months of brine
off my body. You will unpickle yourself.
We will be a little wrinkled, lazy, imperfect. Tough to touch. Tough to.

I will take a potato peeler and take off that soft skin of yours, that derma.
The blood coming out of it will be strawberry yoghurt, but only to the eye,
not at all to the eye.
You will forgive my thick that isn’t fat at all, just disgusting, slurry,
piggish, but not to the eye, only to the eye of.

We will find fast food, consume it on the endless hotel sheets, crystal,
frost, drinking a five hundred from a clear, cretins, numb, escaped,
                                                                                             gremlish.
Tight on top of the wrappers, they are greasy skin, and a hipbone and a
                                                                                                  thigh,
a tight thigh, letting go to out of throat. Zulu,
grinning over my shoulder, over your shoulder I am worried about.

We will get used to the metropolitan together. All summer shuttling
station, station, route, station, map, taller, thinner, blacker, manlier,
shuttling, eating, pawning, silver rings, no earrings, awkward and infected,
walking faster, throatier, chalkier, victorious,
faithful, chalkier, hair longer, nails longer, having a vague sexual
interest in the men that wolf-whistle me every day. In my boots,
remembering what a close call, remembering that the chaos is
a chaos but the same chaos every day and crazy, unhindered appetite.

Two guilts, a shark and a jackknife. I wake up fused, without a jerk
but without a gasp, without a sigh. Nothing quite has the tigers to
frighten me now. Part of my own body is evil. Not in this country, though,
not in this.

Your head on its lap while I drive. Your blonde,
your shaggy, rumpled sleep, two roses, beast, shirt,
fire in the blood, driving, play, tigers, bounding through
the desert road is all I need I don’t believe.