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

1 Longhand

I can feel my illiterate left hand
trying to take over from my right
like a faulty printer with a fuzzy font.

I can’t control the areas of my brain
that shape the letters of the alphabet
and so my longhand varies from day to day.

I need to feel a friction between pen
and paper, between pen and fingertips,
between creative chaos and poetry.

And like a child I feel a clearer hand
will make the finished work more readable
than this slow faltering scrawl across the page.


2 Flickering

My brain is flickering like a faulty neon tube.
My diminishing drunk self
is formulating each laborious word
hamfistedly from the big white alphabet
emblazoned on the blackboard in Room 2
of Victoria Primary School, 1944.
On every desk a half-filled inkwell and a dipping pen.
‘Silence! No talking. Now you can begin.’

Don’t let the small-hours’ flickering stop. Not yet.
A six-year-old boy is teaching me how to write.


3 Message and Messenger

To be the same person sober, drunk or drugged
takes years of practice and then it takes a night.

In bed I turn my deaf ear to the world.
I never know the moment I fall asleep;
it’s instantaneous as a switched-off light.

Through the pillow my fogged half-deaf left ear
hears a doorbell ring and woman’s voice
far inside my head calling my name.

I know I’m dreaming. In my dreams I’ve grown
closer to realities I can trust:
the dead are living and the living dead.
I need this relativity of dreams.

Neurotransmitters laced with alcohol
change their electro-kinetic chemistry,
change the message and the messenger.

My hallucinations are mainly auditory
and yet the cortex seems to be intact:
a surge of sound when Bach or blackbirds sing.

A simple fear: if I stop tampering
with the natural entropy of my brain,
will I forget I even knew the song?