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

The water here is ever so slightly salty,
the water here won’t slake my thirst. The air is dry.

Nobody ever calls me enough.

This place is so round,
this place is round to places, seems it’s circles,
and I’m walking round those circles, lost in thought.
Nothing changes, I’m the same.

Some days I go down, supposing I’ll die.
Other days, I’ll go, get that last dark train to Deling.
Then I’ll be just a presence here, only stroke my ghost.

You’ll think you see me, you won’t see me. I’ll be
too deep. Sunk into the background, and the people, and the
                                                                                 architecture.
I’ll be rising from the drains. I’ll allow myself to be slow
in the street, seeping, sepia smoke from the drains.
Slow, the way no one else is. Rising.
Smelling of noodles, of thrown away food.

I’ve been travelling the trains. Some nights, some days.
I relax into it, growing slowly so every part of me s a
                                                                  partridge, roosting,
singing, clucking surely with the evening.

I’ll look up, and I’ll be there.
A photograph of me with a fat, guilty chin.
I’m a face hoping in the rain, parched, slow, ill.
There’s something wrong with me.

You see I’ve been hoping here sometimes,
small and smooth, a calm piece of statuary.
Sometimes I prop myself on the corner of a building, look down.

Look down, from where the high air is sweet, where
in the rook, I an a maiden, maiden, and my form is stiff, and
                                                                                    sorrowful.
Part of me is calling. Over time, the weather decays me,
makes me full and spongy, then destroys me.

Call me, I’m every thought of you, calming me.
I’m every thought of being two. Of being one calm field,
on the edge somewhere, looking out at you,
coming to me, coming here, I’ll call to you.

I’m a heart here, missing you.