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

Voices

Human silence
many birds much sea.
Nothing startles or jolts
into pleased or hostile rebound.
If a voice called
I no longer know whether
my heart would leap or sink.

Waves deep as gale blown lyres
are language now, speak to me
in special hidden tongues.
My own voice I rarely hear,
surprise myself sometimes with
snake coils of unformed soliloquy.

I catch a voice sometimes
like a near echo.
Words pass in wind
sparks from a blown bonfire
bright then nothing
just in reach as though
the excluding wound
uttered its own sounds
guttural, broken.

Recurrence

That dream again
which shakes me
to sour consciousness so many nights.
Only sea's insistent rumble
lulls me back to darkness.
Then once more to wake, arms stretched
appalled by bile erupting in my throat.

When morning comes (as it does
so many times a night) I wake
to find them gone. They waited
for pain and mania to exhaust
maybe slipped me pills or pushed
oblivion into veins then left
me bare
beneath a scrawny salt-sick tree
which leant and shook in night freshets.

I sleep I wait for them to knock the door
drinking time over, time called.
Find they have driven somewhere
or else other mornings I wake false,
with a bed companion who has my shape
but is not me and every blanket
crawls like a woodland floor.

No-one's there in such fake dawns.
I cower in ceiling corners
of unknown rooms, stuck there
attempting camouflage. When
true morning comes no difference -
same sea pushes waves of sour recall
over my spluttering mouth
drowns me dark.