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

Rose late: the jarring and whining
Of the parked cars under my windows, their batteries drained,
Somehow was spared. When I let out our schoolboy
Into the street, it was good; the place was alive, and scented.

Spared too, for the most part, the puzzling tremulousness
That afflicts me often, these mornings. (I think
Either I need, so early, the day’s first drink or
This is what a sense of sin amounts to:
Aghast incredulity at the continued success
Of my impersonation, the front put on to the world,
The responsibilities …)
                                         Let all that go:
Better things throng these nondescript, barged-through streets
(The sun! The February sun, so happily far and hazy …)
Than a mill of ideas.
                                  Sin, I will say, comes awake
With all the other energies, even at last the spark
Leaps on the sluggard battery, and one should have
Prosopopoeia everywhere: Stout Labour
Gets up with his pipe in his mouth or lighting
The day’s first Gaulois-filtre; then stout
Caffein like a fierce masseur
Rams him abreast of the day; stout Sin
Is properly a-tremble; stoat
Vociferous Electricity chokes and chokes,
Stumbles at last into coughings, and will soon
Come to the door with a telegram — 'Operation
Some Day This Week'; and stout
Love gets up out of rumpled sheets and goes singing
Under his breath to the supermarket, the classroom,
The briskly unhooded
Bureaucratic typewriter. See how
Sol winks upon its clever keys, and Flora
In a northern winter, far underground,
Feels herself sore at nubs and nipples.

And that mob of ideas? Don’t knock them. The sick pell-mell
Goes by the handsome Olympian name of Reason.