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

Smuggled across the Khyber Pass in a caravan train carrying God knows what, sent by a British irregular who fought his way wherever he got instead of using some exotic location like a post card.

Dear Sir
I got your name from the phone book
and mean to cause you merry hell
in my experience a man can take almost all
indignity except disdain from a fool
as you most certainly are and to call
yourself a poet takes the piss-pot and
upsets it over what me and many like me
hold most dear and find gives us even if just
for a fleeting second the nearest thing to meaning
in this world in which such as you stand
so tall and unnecessarily thin like an Afghan man from
Afghanistan starved and lean ignoring the mountains
seen in light like copper rising up from the plains
a terrible thirst but at least the heat decreasing with each
foot won so terribly and at such cost to yours truly
now crawling up your front path and perhaps able to enter the
house via the letter box and then along the carpet and then
I wouldn’t like to be you when I get my hands on you.

(As handed to the author by Alan Chety KC, a distinguished ex-Colonial administrator and poet, who received the unsigned letter shortly after his collection “The Wild Mushrooms of Central Asia” was published to popular acclaim).

Postscript:

The water,
always this fine dust or worse in it,
slopes in my trembling hands
and I dare not spill a drop.
The children run away at first
then throw stones and rocks.
No mushrooms here, you damned fool,
not even a leaf to wipe my arse on.
Please send a copy of your book.