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

will i return to san bernardino
following the exhausted drift of palm trees
as they lead to the scene of the crime,
will i return to the valley cursed by mormons in 1859
to learn that everyone is divorced
and going to aa meetings twice a week?
hello my name is san bernardino
                               and i am an alcoholic...
i come upon san bernardino to understand
                               that no one has left
seeking adventure and disappointment,
jeanette is still living with her mother.
the language of san bernardino is the mouth of echolalia
undulating in smog gray ripples
across the split level phony ranchette rooftops.
from here dead or alive,
some of you went to vietnam to be killed
most of us stayed in san bernardino to be buried.
the caress of profanity,
san bernardino is the ancestral home
of studded wrist bands and peroxided hair,
a storage of tank of desert dreams evaporating
in a wealth of used car lots
on machinated e street.

i grew with the intellect of seconal
and the public library,
forging in me the will to survive
                              the worst friends,
when the temperature is 107 degrees
and the marijuana is cut with tobacco,
san bernardino i remember you.

i had phenobarbital on doctors orders
and social workers from kansas
to go through my empty but clean cupboards
san bernardino, i will come back to shoot you
because you did not like heavy metal
and would not let us party on our front steps.
in precognitive fits
i used to jerk off on church doors
saturday nights
so my dried seed would glisten in the palms of priests
sunday mornings,
san bernardino

you should not have tried to convert me.
i was too young but you did not stop me
i sold acid to randy who jumped out of a car
only to be discharged from the navy
with a steel plate in his head.
i am sorry,
all my brothers died to live as sleepwalkers
but you did not stop me.
san bernardino
a city of a hundred thousand half souls
living on the edge of a shadow,
the shadow of a sun eclipsed by police helicopters
                               on patrol.
i am not professional nor do i perform
i am visible, hardly an american
jam still fresh off the boat
seething with desire and discontent.
san bernardino,
if my birth is a debt to be paid with my life
then you can find me,
like so many brothers and sisters in the neighbourhood,
barricaded inside my living room
with a beer in my right frame of mind
and my twelve gauge resting in my lap.
i am gazing past the furniture to my love
our eyes meet we nod in unity
to the television feedback wailing
and wait,
for the white man’s jesus to make good
on the promises that built you, san bernadino.