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

(i.m. Barry Macsweeney)

It was a flat cap look without the cap
and an easy smile that leapt to the bar
to read the way for a new acquaintance
with insatiable chatter full of emotion
and passion for poetry - a Bloodaxe Collected
was possible next year.
                                   It was strange seeing
the obituary in the press, complete
with sanguine photograph, eight months
further down the line, almost missed
but for a second longer than usual look
at that page.
                  We never met again, had exchanged
anecdotes like wandering troubadours dogged
by bad luck and the wonderfulness of life.

There’s a lot of it around - death that is -
as if a time comes round when everybody’s
tempted to do the Keats and Shelley thing
as a career move
                          - knowing all art loves life yet
is fascinated by its opposite, like tragedy
and comedy - some might say a death wish
for the death mask which means
no more Bacardi & Coke
beheld like a priest about to perform
a transsubstantiation and change it into
the flesh and blood of Jesus, or poetry.

The drape coat you wore that I last
saw on a Teddy Boy was a badge
worn to say something - stand out
from the usual scruffs who called
themselves poets and stood up in leans
and casual shirt to read for the foregathered.
Nice to dress up on a Saturday night
to go doon the toon make the occasion
memorable dress up tae fa’ doon -
as if special guest at an execution.

Nobody knew you’d be a dead poet soon
and I’d be writing this with a drink still
                                                          owed
from the sweep of your anxious largesse.
We both enjoyed the release after the Pearl
poems and others were read. We laughed
to dismay as we joked about Geordies
being Scots with their brains bashed in.

It would take a quantum leap
and accident of birth to be comfortable there.

Like Jimi Hendrix was to rock music
you were the wild man of poetry.
With Jimi it was colour.
With you it was class -
aye, that old cherry
and there were many there who could not take
or understand the raw emotions
as if a century and a bit could pass
and there could still be a chasm
as deep.

For some it could not take that there was
another reading of the act
burnt into the steel rivets
and hands that built ocean going ships
in the sight of and dominating as they grew
from the yard -
long trails of houses
with spines on the back of long
stone dragons that let out clouds
or whiffs of smoke in a false romanticism
like the emblem of the coat and flat cap,
khaki satchel for bait and oval sugar & tea
                                                                tin -
a paper, a book would be a betrayal
so the myth continued to be perpetuated -
a bloke with a Geordie accent who wrote,
even published and read out his own poems
without going near Oxbridge, now there’s
a turn up for the books, expressing passions
that are not polite, the references about
things not spoken about -
now death, there’s a great leveller
bigger than a trivial dance around an
                                                        ampersand.