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

On his twenty first birthday I helped him move out,
drove him to London after work. We didn’t talk much.
Arrived at midnight glad to find a parking place outside,
laboured, unloading, up and down three flights of stairs.

He slept on the couch downstairs, gave me his room
and a futon mattress I folded over to make
a minimal bed on the brown linoleum in the
corner of the white box. No curtains yet.

In the morning he brought me tea
and squatted companionably, chatting of technology
and plans for building furniture, before setting off
for work. Make yourself at home, he said. The others are all out.

Left among the jetsam of working boots, vinyl,
decks, computers, decorated with t-shirts, socks
and woolly hats, I contemplate the bare white walls
waiting for another life to write them.

Outside the window, the backs of tall brick houses,
metal fire escapes, small walled gardens, bare trees:
the once familiar common hinterland of London streets.
Behind the garden walls: a school and playground.

Go down to make more tea in the shared kitchen:
remembered clutter, the sink piled with perennial washing up,
a litter of food and nothing to eat: mixed herbs, marmite, tomato
                                                                                   ketchup,
boil in the bag rice, cereal, no milk in the fridge.

From outside the ageless babble of playtime breaks in
as sudden as a whistling kettle, the same,
no doubt, from Peckham to Peking, a boisterous
burst of energy, bracketed by bells and stillness.

Back on the mattress wrapped in his duvet
suspended weightless in unordered time,
I am not an ageing woman grown stout and mossy
and sprouting hairs on my chin. I am twenty four again

waking in just such a room on a London morning
after hitching down the Al, with ten pounds
and some phone numbers in my pocket. Is it
fear for him I feel, or envy, coming

home tonight to this space containing all he
feels essential to support a life.
Nowhere in me any more is energy to
face the weather in the streets. Instead I finish

yesterday’s Guardian crossword, collect my things
go down the silent stairs and let myself
out, to find a forty pound parking ticket,
see the notice: Permit Holders Only.