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

At last, awake again.
And again, wind and rain and what you think you're sure of.
Night curves through the room; it is an early false spring.
What the cup holds, the hand holds in turn, just as opening your eyes
is forever slow and deceptive. Or so you say repeatedly.
No one else is so sure.
There are a great many raw materials in the weather,
and vast spaces for processing between them,
but it is early in the day and the memories are not yet leaking.
A skin of thought covers an inner meat; the world lies still to bear its
                                                                                        emptiness.
Even between numbers in sequence is a fluid cartilage which dews the
                                                                                                hand,
the brain, the stumbling eye. Nevertheless, you have learned how to
                                                                                               count,
and now how to remember, by greeting each piece of evidence
like an intimate stranger with whom you lock your step.
So now the waiting begins again, from the top down.
There is a feeling to it, but it is plain, like ice.
You hide in your skull.
Blackness awakens us to something we're never prepared for.
Or we can only guess.
Words are sacred, lying out there in frozen graves
sliced by roots and brought to air by stalks in the clean space of ideas.
But there's nothing to say now that doesn't take the form of a teardrop,
rounded softly at one end, a bladed thorn at the other.
People say they roll, but actually they launch,
and pierce or explode on the skin beneath them.
No, this is not a dream.
The ground heaves, but the houses are staked.
Twilight, and the end of the bridge. More practice looking out windows.
Soon the sheets will fold back and long naked bodies will begin to dress,
to eat, cups of water, cups of soil.
It's hard to know what we're listening to,
but it doesn't always hurt.
A blank page can just as happily be a plate of food as a knife across your
                                                                                               throat.
What's the harm in thinking about it, again?
Your time will come, and keep coming. You can go anywhere.
This is the way the world will look to the last man who dies.