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

Under the hands of the Roman soldiers
the land resembled a crushed towel,
dirt encrusted and diseased;
lamentation of the treadmill.
Roundness of perfection; low
white foreheads, villains arguing
in the hills and God Almighty
under corrugated iron rooftops.

The jagged and darkly spotted
tips of their teeth nibble at snails,
protrude from the soil,
mark necks and rounded forearms.
Imperfections abound.
The importance is to transform
emotion into character, overnight.
Beds so tight laced with ribbons
as to satisfy one’s lust, belly arched
legs curved backwards, fingers curled.
The figurehead on an old man-of-war.

The black looking girls in the woods.
A thousand mirrors. A repugnance for antitheses
in each facet of every leaf falling.
My dried-up body trembles
toward its own destruction, everything
pulled apart throughout its length.
So be it. This is a rose
made of leather, and this
a whore in any sort of weather.
The warm shadow in the soft red
of her mouth when she yawns
a place for my yearning tongue
in the burning bush at her thigh

I am a tall healthy gentleman
at the beautiful age of twenty eight,
in my mind at any rate.

                                        I wait
like an ox with my head on fire
my feet bound in rage like a
shoveller of snow.

                                For you I would
suck the bloody member, sprinkle it
with sawdust and let it heal, or
take hold of the toes of the corpse
and shake him like a sheet of wind.
Ask forgiveness. For a man
without a woman is not
a proper person. I ask to be forgiven,
with you I could not live, and without
you life is nothing but unpleasant.