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

The pimple on his left side, midway between
rib-cage and pelvic girdle, was invisible
to begin with. Affronted when
anointing himself with shower gel,
he fingered and forgot it, until
the next time, when it felt more solid
but too small not to ignore, which he did.

Pimple became fresh egg, Size 3, but men
were self-deceivers ever (to the tune
Hugh Selwyn Moberley)
so he ignored it, arguably
the best alternative to medicine,
but to no effect. In fact, the foreign body
bared its teeth, unpacked its toothbrush, moved in.

Measuring it, and keeping a careful record
in his diary, seemed the most realistic
approach. First entry: Saturday the 3rd
(for limbless digits he resorted to metric):
4 centimetres across by 3 thick. No panic,
it may go the way it came. But by Saturday
the 21st, third quarter of the moon, holiday

in Japan, sunrise 4.25, sunset 19.26,
it measured a round 12 centimetres by 8
and a half, top to tail. He rang in sick.
Eleven weeks later, when the parasite
had a girth of a metre and a height
of one point 35, it stopped, some intelligence
sensing small bewilderments of balance.

Crowded out of the matrimonial bed,
his wife took to the spare-bed room. Where
we used to grow together, she agonised,
now we groan apart. It says much for her
grief that when she left she took both cars,
a containerload of chairs and, as he heard
later, several cats they never had.

Once the lump became too heavy to carry
he had it fitted with a trolley
powered by battery. However, the steering
proved unreliable and could bring
any attempt at headlong flight
to an abrupt end, leaving him revolving
round the thing like a helpless satellite.

No sooner did no one seem to
care than the DSS funded a ramp up to
his front door. He began to
notice how many ramps to
how many other front doors there were.
How many of us are there?
he wondered, and decided to

keep watch. But these are secret people.
As far as he could see, no ramps
were ever used except by normal,
mobile folk undistinguished by lumps,
albeit, especially after dark, with limps
or football heads and receding teeth.
He resolved to find the truth.

There is no consensus of medical opinion,
the doctor said, The cause might be radiation,
or evolution kicking off again.
Nothing for you to worry about, not when
such lumps are common nowadays. Yours
is the third or fourth this week, but then
the others were imaginary. Is yours?

No? Then can you prove to me it's not
part of a dream; that you're not dreaming while
awake? Sorry? The lump? Of course I see it,
but perhaps I am in your dream as well
and unreal also. Alternatively, how can you tell
you haven't always dreamt yourself lump free
and are now awake to reality?!

He slept on that, pulled the duvet over
his head and lay in a sleeping bag in summer
meadows below the glacier, slept
alone to wake when the all-night sun had left
the horizontal and begun to climb.
Now he woke uneasy in darkness, and felt
the ghastly lump pulsing gently against him.

He tried to dissociate himself, to stretch
and tease out the fleshy trunk through which
it sucked its life, but each attempt to edge
away drew depth-charges from the fibrous wodge
of roots clenched deep inside his guts. And to lie
on his other side he was obliged
to clamber over it like a regular guy.

When he pressed his ear to it, above
the soft burble of blood through veins and arteries
(his blood and veins) he thought he heard a sort of
sigh. At this outrage on his privacy
by a gross appurtenance, he lashed out furiously,
beating it with his fists again and again,
and screaming with a mixture of rage and pain.

I'm glad you've come, the psychotherapist said,
I don't suppose you reaIise that everyone
has a similar lump? She glanced to one side
and smiled. Few admit it, she went on,
simply because they don't need to, the reason
being that mind and body are not two different
things, but the same thing viewed two different

ways. You are all body insofar
as you know yourself
through the senses, and all mind insofar
as you know yourself
by reason and reflection. With me so far?
Marvellous. Now it follows, I believe,
that if the mind chooses not to perceive

some part of its corporeal self, that
part - or lump - ceases to exist,
true existence being disclosed by thought,
not by the senses. Unthinking your cyst
will be a treat for a psychotherapist
like me, with my drugs and ECT. And she
caressed something beside her. He tried to see

whether it was real or imaginary,
as one does, but extremes of sanity
has scrambled his senses. He saw nothing,
or thought he thought he saw an illusion
of nothingness, subjectively the same thing.
Not, however, to a dumb companion
crying out for his good opinion.

The logical analyst was on average
99 per cent, 355 degrees
certain that to the best of his knowledge,
there is an x, such that x is your body,
such that, for all y, if y is your body,
y is identical with x, and such
that x has a lump. Thank you very much,

he replied, I think you've hit the nail
on the head. And he turned to square
up to the now positively real,
positively loathsome, nude, hairless
lump slouching beside him in a chair.
He blushed with shame, and stared as the stain
crept crimson across its vanilla skin.

The aromatherapist with long fingers
for coaxing milk from a cow, or bull, depending,
gently massaged his superfluity.
And pinched it with sudden, undue familiarity.
He jumped. She shrieked, It has feelings! That's brill!
No, he gasped, the feelings are entirely
mine. And not entirely honourable.

But futile, so he was obliged to plump
for Male, 49, solvent, successful,
5ft 9 by 4ft 3 with lump
wishes to meet female with same for meaningful
relationship. One reply with a helpful
manual on disabled sex and 23
from girls who just adored deformities

of whatever kind, though none apparently
was prepared to flaunt her own. He didn't mind
being admired for his mind, or beloved for his body,
or his lump, come to that, and wrote to Mrs Rashid
(who on the verge of intimacy confided
that she had never in all her life beheld a
funnier sight, on stage or off), and to Griselda.

Ah, Griselda of the glad voice, patient
still and kind: the long awaited. He knew
she was the one. Renoir was magnificent,
they agreed, and how wonderful it was after two
dry months to see roofs shine again. Smiling into
telephones on opposites sides of town,
they arranged to meet. Let down, he sat alone

in the restaurant where, ever hopeful,
he had booked a corner table for the night,
sat alone with his dirigible papule.
When an attentive but shortsighted
waiter tried to take its order, he bought it
a white wine, which anyone who could bear
to watch would have seen them trying to share.

They went home together by taxi. Yes,
and drank to life and hope, and love, and so on.
Raising a consolatory glass to the friendless
alien with the caressable complexion,
he stammered, Does being the only one
get lonely sometimes? as if the thing had ears.
If it had eyes they would be bowls of tears.

In the night he called it Griselda, darling;
‘Dear Walt, it murmured, ‘I was never born
till now.’ They slept, but he remembered dreaming
furiously ‘Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an
embossed carbuncle,’ and seizing a handy slug-horn
to blow Childe Walter to the Dark Tower Came
(though Walter isn't actually his name).

Next morning, pink, contented and unclean,
the lump filled him with cold, post-coital hate,
dread of being seduced by it again
and all the courage needed to amputate
the obscene polyp. And was death too great
a price to pay for freedom? Who knows? Who knows.
For the theatre of amputation he chose

the tower block's 19 storeys tall
aggregation of concrete crags.
No one accidentally falls
from here. Anyone who drags
their burden from the lift and lugs
it up the final flight of steps
and gazes over this parapet

is pushed.
The roar and upward rush
of the good earth was, he thought, a fair
arbitration, whether
the outcome was a double suicide
or a one-half murder.
As they faced the future side by side

he took a length of nylon string, bound
it three times round the arm the creature
clasped him with, loosely formed
a reef knot, and wrenched it tight. The ligature
bit purple turning red, and the strangled tumour
howled silently from stark animal pain
as the blood faltered and stopped in its veins.

He steadied the dying meat against
the parapet, still warm, still attached,
and using a sacrificial knife filched
from the kitchen drawer slashed
and severed every last red ribbon of flesh.
Heaving the dripping carcass over the edge
was the last job courage could manage.

Surgical Ward lC, stitched and bandaged, and not
being dead might have suited him had he been
spared the ravages of the adjective-exhausting pain
of a phantom appendage, an abstract object
from the world beyond scientific verifact.
His left hand was observed feeling the air
to satisfy himself there was nothing there.

The wound healed, pink puckered lips began to smile
through shambling pyjamas, and ante-mortems
revealed no uncrackable problems. But still
he sank, manifesting vegetative symptoms,
incontinence of both urine and stool
and mood swings from black
to indigo and back.

Complete the form. I shall definitely/
probably/
possibly/
probably not/
definitely not
commit suicide. Tick the box.
Describe your attitude to rocks

500 feet below. Inviting, cool.
And above? Sod off! You choose your rocks.
Though classified as passively suicidal
on the basis of tests, and such remarks
as Let me die and I bequeath my relics
to the butcher's dog, the award of the DNR,
the coveted do-not-resuscitate order

we all in the end aspire to, changed his tune
from a funeral march to singing for the chaplain.
‘Bodily resurrection? But I'm getting out of bodies,
for good; full spirit status is the only prize
worth dying for. A spiritual body? Can't swallow
the contradiction. An object that defies
description? I've had one of those.

Or would it arise despicable in every detail:
the thin dry lips,
the lumps,
the embowelled body which excretes, exhales,
every snot and spittle of it,
for the dreary ever-and-ever? Forget it,
father. With great respect, forget It.’

So death was not the answer. Miraculously,
for the vigilant chaplain, his normal
functions began to function normally.
Discharged with a clean bill of health, a full
tank and a long dry road, his drive was incredible.
No looking back. No ‘Here we go again:
spring, summer, autumn; leaves, no leaves; rain; rain.’

Nothing like that. ‘What's to be will be, he'd declare,
But not if I can help it.’ And the air sang
past from gearing up to crashing out and there were
no gruesome yesterdays, though he couldn't bring
himself to touch a piece of nylon string.
Still 49, not unsuccessful, no real illusions,
he slept soundly, and unusually alone.

Last Thursday, low down between his buttocks
he sensed a curious growth no bigger than a
shirt button. No innocent pimple this.
Griselda? he whispered, terrified. Griselda!
A tickle, a twinge of terminal gloutalgia,
and Griselda, who has picked the ideal site
for her revenge, licks her lips and sits tight.