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

You sit in the grainy half-dark of five am
and listen to trains, the swallow

of iron over iron. You've grazed the surface of sleep,
like a fly grazing water, repeatedly

pulled into waking by a hiss of brakes, or a girl
shouting at a window across the street.

The chair gives up its solidity to the jostle
of grey molecules and the picture on the shelf

stirs in strobe-lit movements: Flaming June
yanking down the front of her dress. You peel yourself

from sheets, the bedsweat damp on you, and drying
to a thin tissue of skin.The trains keep coming.

And you know, over the wall, the blackened arches,
like burnt-out shrines, regurgitate

upended beer crates and charcoal half-bricks
down onto the track. And the warehouse

with punched-out windows is lit by white
search lights which deify the dead ivy

lining its shell. You watch the window:
one orange street light near you buzzes

and stars bleed into the thinning air.
Your cupped hands smell,

impossibly branded. Like the night
you chopped a dozen onions and the odour

clung in the grooves of your fingerprints,
as an aura, impervious to water, touch,

for a week or more.The street light flicks
off to silence and a dust truck roars

in first gear two streets away, men
hollering with the din of dragged bins.

The grain of the dark is falling
like sand. You seal the black gaps

between your fingers as tight as you can
and breathe in the scent, wondering

at its permanence: your tattoo, two tribal scars
etched into a cheek.

Against all proof to the contrary you will it to stay:
rubber, soap, spit, the musk of skin on skin.