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

no familiar hand
will be there to close
my staring eyes,
no one later on to sit
across from my coffin
and look blankly
at the beige wall
with the azure-blue cornice,
while the sound
of taped organ music
seeps like air purifier
through invisible speakers

(Maybe I should find
and pay in advance a couple
of professional mourners,
but who guarantees me
that they would show up;
I’d have to hire someone
to make sure they do,
but then again would he
be there to check on them?)
                   *

I’ll conjure up my lost children,
play on their mercy, and have them
come some twenty years later to dig
me up and re-bury, as people often say,
back home, if they manage to find out
where that ‘back home’ could have been
for a life displaced from living.

They’ll put my disembodied bones
in a smaller casket, like a child’s,
my head detached to let the mandible
grip the shoulder girdle, my legs
alongside my arms, my pelvis shoved
into the false ribs (one, after all,
has to be careful with money), and take
me to a land I might have been part of,
though she never wanted to be part of me.

(Of course, after a long journey,
that kind of arrangement may not matter
much, everything inside messed-up,
my skull bruised from hitting the steel
slabs, like that of a blind man learning
to find his way out of a dark room.

(In that land, there may gather
one afternoon an impromptu group
of the Writers’ Association has-beens
holding their umbrellas and shifting
them impatiently from one hand
to the other to look at their watches,
citing my accomplishments, which, no doubt,
will, by that time, have come to naught).
                                    *

Yet, someone, before that, may sign
to have me exhumed (grave plots are,
everyone knows, a valuable commodity
and unpaid rent gets one evicted),
crammed into a box (bigger, I hope,
than a shoe box), my name scribbled
on the lid misspelled, and put, exiled
from earth once again, on some shelf
in the basement windowless room
in which, when on, the light, hissing
and flickering briefly, announces
only the arrival of the landless.