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

An epileptic at traffic lights
sees needles and pins,
a queue like the road
to Damascus is brightly lit.
I stop to read poetry in
a shop window, so
unusual in this town I may
well have imagined it,
but it is as solid as belief.
I think of you, unwritten sonnets
and last nights TV,
all in a thought as long as a second.
Light fades in diamond speckles,
the cemetery which is open from
dawn until dusk will be doing
half day closing at this sombre time
of year.

Safeway is selling Christmas,
people buy trolley fulls and
order more, neatly packed
in cardboard commercialism.
School children sing carols.
                          IN OCTOBER ????…

Jesus becomes more premature each year,
soon he will not get a chance to be conceived.

The harbour is dark away from
buzz and light,
it draws me like blood.
I am bottled in my heart
                          when I am here.
Four swans swim on diesel,
no calling birds,
two are grey two white
and muscular,
reflections float on oil.
Fishermen talk under flat caps
with tobacco laced lips, stubble
slices air.
Language is not mine,
they talk in codes of hull
and stern.
Starboard lighthouse flicks green,
tide is out but port full.

In The Standard they drink pints
from soapy glasses that don’t often get
washed. Talk is seldom and
of few syllables.

A man props up the bar,
he wears a leather jacket
and frothy moustache.
Juke-box plays a soft
memory and the fruit machine
glows amber in twilight.
Water ebbs at rocks
making patterns in coal dust sand.
I dreamt I saw a man drown here,
I knew him well like the feel
of kisses.

Darkness is real but not
as I know it.
Two men come towards me,
I know their walk instinctively;
It is Spring Heeled Jack and
his brother; The Dream Team.
They smoke their way in circles
and bitter clothes stained with cider.
I lower my head, walk quickly,
scared to catch their glittering
gaze of insanity prizes.