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

If I should tell you Troy’s been down
    Too long to use for similes
— A one-horse, drab provincial town
    Full of preachers, whores and fleas,
Their wine too sour, their meat half-rotten,
The roads unlit, unpaved and shotten,
It’s just as well it’s been forgotten;

That Helen was a sexy bitch
    Who’d let you feel her up a while,
Then freeze, and wriggle out of reach,
    Turning off the filmstar smile:
— ‘Nobody here respects a Queen —
I shan’t be sorry if they win
And take me back to Greece again.’

What Hector and what Troilus did
    To please their girls was nothing more
Than any normal Trojan kid,
    Conforming to the peer-group’s law:
Some use a flick-knife, some a gun,
On Greek or Nigger, Jew or Hun,
— It all depends on what is done.

Hearing all this you might conclude
    (Since poets are a lazy crew)
I blamed my tools, just to avoid
    The compliments I owe to you:
‘He ought to praise my raven hair
In verses quoted everywhere!
The style, of course, is his affair.’

And since to blow a legend’s gaff
    And call the heroine a whore,
A single poem is enough:
    You write it, and can write no more.
What lies behind heroic acts
Once you decide to tell the facts
Is always greed, and pride, and sex.

A streetgang in a one-horse town,
    A pepped-up whore, is all we’ve got;
The past will let the present down
    Unless we tart it up a bit:
— Troy was as great as Manchester!
Hector and Brando were a pair!
And Helen had your raven hair!

Long live the past! The duty’s mine
    To see the blarney does not stop.
I love the tale of Troy divine
    As much as if I’d made it up.
Helen, all’s safe: there’ll always be
Women whose lust for flattery
Answers your immortality.