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

The day the booze ran out we tore
every copy of that banning order down,
that doomed decree flyposted across this
overheated, flyblown, stinking town.

At first an aspirin clarity, as if those
were the first unclouded thoughts
we’d ever had, then the slow scald of un-
-quenched thirst blistering our throats.

Inventive, we drank thermometers,
distilled demijohns of pure methanol,
made solvent cocktails that left us
prophetically blind, but didn’t kill.

Sightless, we sucked neon from
billboard lights, a Las Vegas Sling
that lifted us to pyrotechnic heights,
to miracles no alcohol could bring.

Then one visionary soul earthed himself
to the town’s high-tension cables
and we got high on schooners of his piss, like
Berserkers in those fly-agaric fables.

We got the taste for it all right, reclined
in bathtubs with curling toes,
listening to what the stars sobbed and sang to us
through submersed, mains-wired radios,

When the ban was lifted, every bar we
stumbled to seemed muzaked, placid.
Stuff vodka - we twirled zinc cocktail
stirrers in slammers of sulphuric acid.

Which, with votive insouciance
we tossed off neat,
then clasping arms flocked like inebriate, dusk-drawn bats to
the drunken celebration of the street.

Now cancered prostates have done for
almost all our dwindling club,
Homeric piss-artists who had the guts for sable brushes
to light the deathly static at life’s hub.

New generations grow;  when we’re spark-out
on funeral biers, our black-gloved acolytes
will volley shots of liquid oxygen to cheer us
through eternal nights.