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

This boat is not big enough
These sailors will not really serve,
I have given them all my wallet, all
my identity, I have been for them perennial
sill, as moonlight I have washed
and have abandoned them, but my lower body
was not great enough, for when I unzipped
there was just a big dog's dick, a bottle of
mustard and some stars, I needed a 15th century cupboard to
meet my desire, I needed Gargantua to ball me, vines
and fountains to be banked against my tongue,
for the power of the moon does not dissolve the frame,
the frame will stretch but the boat itself is not big enough
and this is agony, to see the stairways and cellars where the semen is portered in urns on the shoulders of giant crabs, to see these dark
lit channels where infants are backstroking under
the rumble of slaughter and envision
my mother with her long scorpion quill
asleep in her armpit -- at dawn I crept into her room a meek
but curious zoa, I lifted her heavy arm
and erased myself on her black erect stinger --
it is agony to be a great body and also be a man,
I have been in that buttock church other men have not entered
and I have seen the reduction of its glorious pillars and nave
to a few measily kidneys in a barren refrigerator,
the boat
my body
this world
is not big enough,
my spirit would include Peggy and Havana,
it was when I reduced myself to committment
all my gladiators appeared, but no longer were they armed in phallic noses,
they demanded I degrade into what is divine once more,
yea they stripped me yea I am washed
lugworm under the steaming valves of real hoses, the knuckles
of my angels were not reduced to work me over
but to batter me to pulp and thus to affirm divine vision.