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

You stopped a kiss and he'd paid for it.
His beer and smoke in my throat
when you, acrobatic on his bicep,
stuck out a small pink tip of tongue.
I was slapped a little, but not much,
for refusing a fresh-off-ship john,
and there were others, the port watch,
four-hundred strong and tired of men.
Best picked off early before the watered pints
made them sick and confidential,
a dead weight of drunken morse.

Later in a room cheap enough to see
the pattern of next door's wallpaper -
rose trellis and roach splash -
I sponged the pancake off my bruises,
ran myself a Dettol bath.
Lay like white clay in the water
drowning the sound of other rooms, other rows.

And now I could think of her
my little Boston girl, diagonally cracked
across the landlady's china, sensuous on old maps
my siren shape-shifter who softens men by
changing from virgin to breast-feeding dugong
high notes and hymen to sea-cow.
"This is what you do to us", she sings.

Before the water cools I call you.
Recall the feel of salt sticky hair,
your darting minnow's tongue
wash myself hard with a mermaid's glove
come endlessly to your cries of love.

Tomorrow, less interesting each time it arrives,
I will follow, again, her iridescence on the tarmac
down to the chain strung harbour,
the taut links threaded with her hair
that bedlam noise of bird and whistling ship dicks.
I will track her to the shape washed up on the shore,
a mermaid's purse, exhibit A,
in the absence of a body.

Between the buoys the horizon is a flatline
and I know myself to be damaged, in that place
where gulls lose wings to the plough
and the lisping brook replaces the surf's pound.
I am hurt inland and will join her soon.