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

Change away and towards the hours
(with specifically inconclusive demands)
and believe the future has only to be,
with its consequences, themselves, able
to reconcile time with the collectivity
of a death that places the final thought.

That thought, as though prolonged
to become the foundation for more,
is rooted in the shock of the new,
in the demands these hours make on
what can be understood of that death,
by example, in the still of the night.

*

Yet,
when you come to see
just how much of that time
has been spent,
wasted in
trying to keep up
with the changing moons -
fleeing from the knives
that would have you gone -
finding the extremes
of your own fragile elasticity -
it is then that each moment shimmers
across the puddles left by the rain.

*

It is then that, having escaped
the shifting sands so long believed
to be the cradle of worth,
we finally find our feet upon solid ground,
exposed to a foundation of fate we,
ourselves, have made and can build on;

without limit,
without effort,
regardless of the symptoms of change.

*

And, in the mould of a man,
you turn to truths to satisfy the dawn
and begin to piece together
the jigsaw of values remissly misplaced:
their living,
your existence;

your core
to measure emotion,
to explore every ounce
of experience encountered
as you follow the way;

the daylight slowly probing the air.

*

The real danger is well disguised
in a context that measures the future
as an obstacle to be accepted,
be given its place in time, rather than
helplessly manifested in the years
from these lines through to morning.

The real danger is in confusion.

*

Though, you forget,
we are to believe our history crucial,
as if our understanding, of
where we have been -
what we have come from -
who we were -
could deliver an answer
to the question,
stone-like and slung,
ready to be cast against
the coercive rule of progress...

… “Why here, now?”

And even you, I know,
have asked this of life
when the moment has seemed
like a ricocheting bullet;

uncontrollable,
unpredictable,
though confined by its own rich past.

*

It follows that the process involves more.

*

Only, we aren’t to look too closely
for fear of being lured,
of being brought to the rocks
and wrecked,
ruined,
sunk,
silenced by the whims of ancestors
who go nameless and faceless
through a quandary posing as the past.

*

We have been spread
to camouflage the fatigue
and rupture of the superficial -
of the monotonous excretion
of customary outcomes -
of convenient consequences
of no real consequence.

Inspired by nothing,
we have simply invoked
the application of importance
to the continuously obscure,
promoted the myth of participation
where the task, itself, is unnecessary,
performed but to tend a gap in time.

*

But where it all comes together,
while the day gathers speed,
is in the silence of your dreams,
far from the traffic framed behind glass -
its anonymous drone
replaced by countless, soundless whispers
that only repeat the already learned.

For, after all,
nothing is unique,
not even this madness
you have come to relive,
playing the part, once again,
of the tragi-comic hero, lost,
if only finally to be found.

*