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

In the machine shop I could let my Computer Numerically Controlled
                                                                                 machine run on
      and on and on
as I read
the complete works of Tennessee Williams
Charles Bukowski Flaubert
getting up to punch a button
or unclamp and turn over and re-clamp a part once in a while
and then sitting back down
in my leather chair at my workbench with
Dostoevsky
Kafka as blank
tin walls surrounded me and the pulsing slamming and grinding of
                                                                                          machines
became a kind of metronome to turn pages to Melville
from cannibals
to Billy Budd Homer’s warriors hurling boulders
at each other and with the dirt
and grease of the machine and the steel on my hands I could feel
Ionesco’s rhinoceros
trampling men to death on the stage
Ishmael
scrubbing the deck of the Pequod Raskolnikov
with his fists around the axe the sweat
on the palms of Bierce’s confederate soldier with his neck
in a noose on the Owl Creek bridge the heat
of the wheels of the streetcar
named Desire the smoke
out of the muskets in The Red Badge of Courage the hands
of Mark Twain
gripping that Mississippi riverboat wheel I was there
with the men crowded like sardines into that prison bath
in Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead
as all of the machinists around me stared at me puzzled and suspicious
                                                                                 and not knowing
that though
I had never finished the Ph.D. program in English literature at U.C.L.A.
I was intent on obtaining my degree
from Goodstone Aircraft Company.