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

A radio set made up of dust and nicotine, or a house he imagines
at the line’s darkest limb, dipped with bakolite; a fridge

left open each evening to warm milk, eggshell; a circuitry
of light that is not quite airlessness, more the breathed in sediments

of burnt paper, the outside’s intimate rasp. Somewhere out there, the
      woods are leaching
up lead and copper. He fumbles in his pockets for a cigarette, then
      matches;

the first strike flares into sulphur. Across the line, the posters are leant
      over,
sapprophytic, the unstoked edges of sunspots. He exhales, slowly;

there’s a staleness on his lips and on the tunnel’s mouth, a dull
      prominence;
its hollowness is the undecoded half-space that isolates call signs;

the crackles of Its spores settles further than sleep. in the silt beds
of lakes beyond the arctic circle, there are layers of brown sedge, midge

larvae, a life in miniature….he flicks ash, unthinking. To him, the passage
of time is inhabited by footsteps, part sentences....their remains, once
      logged

and filtered, may be used to chart ice ages. Elsewhere, something once
      buried deep
is being extracted, ground into its own dark matter; he looks up. The wall
      opposite

seems settled into whatever shadow has taken shape there; in the dark
      he can taste It,
an itch like newsprint or Serengeti; which is no more than waiting

for the next breath. in the distance, a train drifts out of phase, the space
left afterwards fissured, calcitic; the smoke shifts uneasily on his lips,
      leaves traces

of itself to sepal through the air’s creases. The lit end peels and crackles
in his fingers. He feels himself dulled, slid sideways. The curve behind him
      prickles

with delayed movement, scrapings, the intimacy of kiss. There’s an
      increasing transience,
like glimpsed iazz or the residual skitter of dead suns between stations; a
      slight alteration

in pitch, also; the sense of air rushing in too quickly. That is all. This
      evening, perhaps,
will find him outside, breathing In his own medium: wallpaper,

and the oversweet smell of burnt stubble, fingertips. For now, though,
      there
is only the sound of something ferrous, reminiscent; a stilled, faintly
      attuned sweat.