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

It is my belief we have come to ingest and digest information so thoughtlessly, assimilate 'ideas' and 'facts' so painlessly, that we are not even committed to disdain. I am so disgusted by the transience of information, I use this as a fuel. 

...In my body, I am not AFFECTED at all... 

Blood, and brain, just isn't real unless it really gets splashed onto you. 

"In a train, think train, 

In a plane, think plane, 

There is no sensation without 

Those little sparks in your brain." 

A little screwdriver, harmless enough, entering circuits, bombs, or people because it's 'to hand', it hurts, huh? The damnedest strongest wall, ie. inside the police van, or the softest wall - a swimming pool; drink it, drown in it, or swim. 

Binary, single. 

Just a Joe, 

John Doe, with a numbered tag on the toe. 

In twenty years time, 

Don't you agree with me, 

The streets will look just the same? 

Sci-fi. A favourite subject of the psychopath. Constant stream of cops,cops,cops, policemen, firemen, youth workers, departments, blue uniforms, patent black, digital weapons. Legalized drinking. 16 new prisons being built? Retardation. Education is anachronism. An exponential growth of violent crime. Usurping the violence of the privileged;- history now. Not random violence. Let's plot a graph... 

Pleasure gets more expensive 

...at whose expense? 

The anti-evolutionary tactics of, not necessarily the rich, but the conspiracy of rule, those who wilfully hold us back, our enemy? The enemy. Hyperelectronic castles. Discrete Scotland Yard/ Interpol 'phone tap. M17. M20. 

I know absolutely nothing about hate or love. These were the two words principled in my nebulous thinking. These are the two words completely, utterly without any meaning whatsoever. - As in common with all words, and moreover images. - All sensory information is collated, distilled, by culture. The consensus, verifiable experiences are facts. Facts are our determinate summation of events. None of these referents, volatile however many times re-introduced or reinforced, are helpful. We don't know what its like to die until we do. I dislike the temporal, I eschew myth, employ the visceral! I only know my own breath, you were not executed or born. What's pushing your body about? Couldn't we have simple suicide or euthenasia? Is it only breath that holds you here? Success? Bah! Processing/ metabolising; shitting cash! 

Mother leaned over and fed me. 

Father hit me hard across the cheek with the back of his hand. 

But I told you I love you. 

I told you I hate you. 

I love Jews, Arabs, Christians. 

I love my neighbours. 

I care about animals. 

I dig graves. 

I'm shitting cash. 

I experiment on myself. 

I experiment on Jews, Arabs, Christians.

I make love to animals and turn off life support machines. I count numbers, bars, prisons, time, cells, blood vessels, time, rhythm, beats, hearts, chops, tails, girls. I count my family and friends. I count money 'cos I'm shitting out cash. I spend money, I spend myself. I'm spent and pent up. I'm spoon fed, misery led. I'm a milk loving baby, a self-absorbed arsehole oriented self, off to the woods to look for shit and tune into nature, about 300 yards behind the interchange to the A14. 

Enough travel! Stop it! Sit up. Pull yourself together. Control yourself. Tell us what you know; are you dis-comfited in simple situations? Forgetful? Selfish? Cowardly? Constant flight, mental lapses? Disbelief in empirical sensation/ information? Ill; repeatedly. (Anti- evolutionary newspapers, helping to keep us where we are.) Ambivalent morality, freefloating anxiety? Detumescent, nascent aggressivity? Just what are my motives? What is it that I have to live with? Have I really got to seduce myself with 'pleasure' (of the body?) Really, there is no pleasure, just relief from abscence. Relief from desire. Ephemeral wishes. Why has any society any of us find ourselves in so obdurate? Here, the state is trying so very hard to hold time, keep us down, break us. Their fervour is incessant, constant. Evolution is primarily fiscal! Nothing liberates us but our ideas! A people; nothing but meat paste! A drive to anaesthetize; catatonic, ah ugliness! The literal galaxy of the body, the most splendid god of all; circumscribed by law! Drug, sex, expressivity curtailed. Sensuality crushed, poisoned, stained. Deviations? Psychiatric concepts? Electro-shock therapy????? Well, if you've heard it all before, I urge you to look at the area where you live. What makes it what it is? Arbitrary history? All we are interested in is force. It's the one true mover, it's the aposite response to brute cunning and malice. Why then is violent crime rising? A concensus struggle of the body to exceed it's impositions? What is every scalding, burning, stabbing, beating, shooting saying to us? Well, for one, it says to me all our cultural systems are as random as molecular scatter. Loveless father/ mother can only promulgate this spiral of self hurting parent/spouse/self/other. But how could I love my child? I don't have it in me. Yet. My father was loving. I hate religion with a religious passion; the gods a tide of filth. Gods love?? Yet, here I am, desirous of all the dualities in the world I lack. There's no system that is acceptable. I frame everything through a perception which is finite, miniscule. It's the spectacle which frightens me. It's great historical lurches, with bile and torture as their fuel. It's the pogrom, the pathetic man-made gods, cops, judges, priests, servants of the state. The jailers and the jailed. The patriarchy, the father and mother. The man who can only erect himself as he crushes the skull of the other, here at last, civilisation's prime. The little men who cast off all value. And here we can start getting nearer to the nub