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

You’ll buy a warm loaf from a sweating baker.
I’ll cook bacon with eggs from chestnut chickens
in the olive grove twenty feet away.
Perhaps we’ll go back to the beds
we’ve pushed together.
Things won’t be perfunctory
and will last longer than usual.
We’ll have tea with the PG Tips I’ve brought,
then float in the ludicrous blue pool.
We’ll eavesdrop on banal conversations,
look at each other and snigger.
In a scruffy taverna we’ll eat Greek salads,
the feta whiter than my washday sheets,
specked with herbs, slicked with green oil.
In a dark shop I’ll buy unnecessary silver earrings
wrapped slowly and artistically by a smiling craftsman.
We’ll probably take a drive in the tiny vaIeted car
the tour rep calls Yer little Cipicento and
swim on a deserted beach.
We might collect shells for our water feature
and I’ll drown in one of the five paperbacks I’ve packed.
The sun will have coaxed freckles
I’ll notice as I dress for dinner
somewhere we won’t have a row about choosing.
I’ll eat a melting Keftico; you’ll order chicken and chips
without shame.
We’ll have a second carafe of village wine
and talk about the children because we feel we ought to.
You’ll buy the same bottle in a supermarket next day.
Maybe I’ll squeeze in a baklava,
nuts and honey gumming my mouth
divinely.
The waiter fuelling my fantasies will
bring complimentary peaches,
a lurid liquor we’ll shudder over.
We’ll lie under a fresh sheet with the shutters open.
The wine will travel badly
and after a week back at work
we’ll be sluggish and wistful.
The photos will plop on the doormat.
Our faces will be pink and silly,
smoothed out,
bear clear evidence of
idyll.