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

1. I am rising.   rising from a box-bed.
   I must not wake my friends who are intent on the creation of
   careful knives.
   the north star weighs heavily on my jugular vein.
   I walk the distance of an eye.
   morning greets me like a bluish incision.
   
   
2. Death is fragments of red glass and a memory of water.
   death is the space within a bright day:
   I am eating pebbles, thinking of lightning.
   
   
3. We are full of peonies.   two children sucking perfume in a
   subterranean interlude.
   she calls them candles, they are on the edge of falling.
   their dark waits to collect them.
   
   
4. I am clinging to an expurgated peepshow for fear of dividing.
   I have a box of instruments to guide me but the glacial perfume
   is too hasty.   lavender bites like a queen.   I am grown out
   of my purple cloths and my shoes are dripping wax and watering
   the earth whose root is cold.   I take a staccato pocket-watch
   from its velvet grave.   the flowers appear in time.   I wait
   for a full minute to expire and the face of the watch is red
   with poppy-blood.   kingdoms are laid to rest and the garden
   returns to a mutinous slumber.
   

Here is an instrument of disaster, gloved and ready.   used
last by an ambergris woman who did not mind bones.   she kept
a he-bird under her chair who dropped noisy tears each time
the clock crowed.   she built him a nest in her molecular
garden but he prefers to lie under her skirts.

but I, knowing better
I find him only life-size and take up her greasy pen wrapped in
unrepentant skins.
the names lie close like tablets of heavy weather.
I write my name, like a familiar
I can make the sound of plants with this instrument.   I can
make indiscreet perfumes lie on the room like a paralysis.
and it can trace blueprints over impatient walls.
but after the third day, my neck bares to receive you, lancet
and dead child, under a scarlet roof, over-hearing the sky.