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

This is a creative response to the poem “Workshop” by
Billy Collins, which appeared in Magma 14 and is reprinted
below. I have written the poem he critiqued, after the fact.

I drive to the Bluebird Bar and Grill
to drink the wine list.
I swell up like an aerodrome
and notice on the bar stools,
the other drinkers lined up
like a row of sinking dirigibles.
Or is it the wallpaper?

A couple enters and sits beside me.
They are there to eat the menu.
They spit and I dribble. I realize
words are food thrown down
on the ground for others to eat
like a mouth nibbling its own tongue
or a snake eating its tail, a snake
coiled like a garden hose in the dahlias.

I am a fine white Chablis
for a discerning palette,
a Blanc Sauvignon, wine of the day,
the really good stuff. I stand in a sky
with clouds of lozenges while my lips
are pulled open by a drawbridge operator.
He props his feet up on an iron railing,
his fishing pole jigging a hook
in the slow industrial canal below.
Perhaps he will catch words for his own poem.
The canal flows like rainwater through a gutter.
It emits a mint green light.

I drink until the evening bumps
into the stars and the stars dissolve
like flakes of coal, and I am lost
in an obbligato of dark snow,
roaming the decaffeinated streets
like a shadow in a fruit garden,
wishing it were not so.

Wishing I were hidden like a cartoon mouse
behind an arched hole in the baseboard,
sleeping it off in a can for sardines,
the lid peeled back, or sitting at a spool
(for a table) swiped from the sewing box,
drinking real java, a big thimble full. I wish
I knew, like a mouse, the power of silence,
or, at least, a bardic squeak captured in a word bubble
saying something like: “Goofball, Lame Brain,
eat the grape before it’s squeezed or spoiled!”