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

In childhood I saw nothing natural:
even the girl who took her knickers down

in the wendy house was sponsored. Later, frogspawn
was handed to us in Greek, and boys

were marginal to Theocnitus. Life
became an obscene footnote

that drew attention to itself
by having to be in Latin. when the Captain of Boxing

said Thus with a kiss I die, his upper lip
recently first-shaved, prickled my lip

through floodlit sweating Leichners.
it was the wardrobe mistress astonished me

with instantaneously oscillating
hummingbird hawkmoth kiss:
you could prove it was impossible by physics.

remember the body
is a temple of the holy spirit

Havelock Ellis behind the desk
and a trumpet gramophone with wooden needles.

we sang the Doppelganger
in unison, twenty of us.

I astonished the headmaster with my eyebrows
at the high notes: so manche Nacht

im a-a-a-a-a-......A......a-lter Zeit!
what else could the judge do but give us the cup?

Emily Bronte tapped on the cubicle
where Odling Smee lay naked

or walked the corridors with nothing but a house tie
round his penis. lute music

was in the original entablature
and fine balloons hand made. when the Air Vice Marshal

arrived in his helicopter he saw
boots lacquered with ladies’ nail varnish

and a drum beaten by an indian prince.
but it was the boots

we spent time on, melting and setting fire
to the polish, then letting it fall from a height

the only way to get a perfect sheen. when Walker
was debagged and blacked in the privates

his captive organ nose, buffed with Kiwi.
is it surprising I’m amnesiac

and have no sense of direction? Lockites
was built in a crevice under a rockface

a habitation for anchorites
exiled to the Home Counties, where the head boy

clipped his toenails far into the night with an instrument
and later became Bishop of Fiji.