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

From his fifth floor window Dirk gazes across the High Street, over
             roofs of chain-stores,
the ice rink and stag-horned crowns of park trees, past the ring road,
             the playing fields
of his old school, toward the affluent-ish suburb halfway up the hill,
             and he shudders.
They’re all at it, he muses. The whole damn town is gearing up for it,
             this carnival

of banality, this Biennale of Crassness. The sense of dread is worse
             at night now,
his dreams invaded by needle-fanged children, savages with bright
             red, plastic
noses and crimson afro-wigs, colonised by mendicant clergymen
             with bucked teeth,
tin-rattling trollops in feather boas, non-specific medics in lab coats
             with stethoscopes

and scarlet-spattered joiners’ saws all hooting, pointing, laughing
             till he wakes,
jerks upright, drenched, at the phantom schlunk of loose change
             shook in tubs.
The only Relief will be, he thinks, when the whole charade is over.
             His supervisor
scowls at him so he adjusts his PC monitor and starts another game
             of solitaire.

It’s not as if he didn’t try, but when two years ago he had the plaque
             made up that read
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE, RETARDED
             IS GOOD ENOUGH,
it was deemed not in the spirit, requiring of an official reprimand
             which he accepted
with a surly, unconvincing approximation of contrition, not Oscar- 
             winning stuff

but hell, he has the memory to treasure, of his colleagues’ faces,
             dumb-struck
like so many cardinals, he thought, presented with the Holy Father
             hoicking up
his skirts to display his latest gender re-assignment surgery scars.
             The boss
packs up her bags and notices, out loud, how it’s unusual that Dirk
             is last to leave

and when, finally, he does, he scurries across town by way of Tesco,
             picking up
essentials, like a case of budget lager, instant dinners and a quart
             of Bombay
Sapphire. Down the road the inmates of the local Tech are finalising,
             with their
customary sensitivity, arrangements for ‘A Grand Slave Auction
             for Africa’,

Fat Willy’s House of Mirth has seen a run on Elvis wigs and wimples,
             the hosiers
are out of fishnet tights and, as members of the rugby club slip into
             baby dolls
and bras, Dirk picks up his pace and hurries home. He has already
             hacked the cables
off the TV set, eviscerated the radio, booked holiday and days ago
             laid in a stock

of books to see the crisis out – Rabelais, Rochester, Swift and a Viz
             annual or two.
He smiles with weary satisfaction and pours himself a good, stiff gin
             and tonic, knowing
his contribution’s by the radiator, under screwed up paper in a bin
             and the magnitude
of the jest will only become apparent, mid-morning, when the central
             heating’s kicked in.