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

I wept for you when they brought me here.
They tied me to the bed and tortured me
with your name. For a long time I just lay
staring at the ceiling, feeling the room
shrink around me like an airless veil.
But I’m tired of dreams. I belong here.
We all do. We belong to one another.
I don’t miss anything, except the moon.
Nothing you said about the moon
could make up for it not being there,
though you were right to romanticise death,
the bathroom window where nobody sings.
I smile with black, nerveless teeth
and you wouldn’t believe the fire in my head.
Go ahead. My skin is deliciously raw,
but try not to think of me as I was before.
Memories play fireworks with our eyes.
See, I’m reborn. No kiss could awake me now.

They will not find me under my own name.
There in the light that you follow
I have lost my voice, vanished without trace.
I know what the history books will say -
how you made our love a poem and swore
we spoke in tongues we alone could understand,
how on our wedding day you woke
the sleeping blossoms with your song
and we lapped orchard dew with our tongues,
the enchanted forest of my hair.

They’ll be wrong, of course. They’ll know the words
by heart soon enough but they’ll be wrong.
It was I who brought you here, I who swam
underground rivers to tickle your feet.
I woke up in Paradise, after all.
My head supports a jungle of parasites.
That sharp stone pressed against my heart
turned out to be nothing more than a pebble
lodged in the heel of my shoe.
Now it’s you wondering who watches, waits,
whose step it is on the stairs you hear,
you, groping for the light, first this corner,
then, oh please let it be the next.

Careful, the corridors are dark.
The floor is teacherous down here,
we really should get it fixed. Funny,
that lamp you brought for our anniversary
was always more yours than mine.
Oh well, you needn’t worry about packing it.
Our curtains are closed. Don’t cry love.
I’d look awful in a pinny, hot water leaking
through the holes in my pink lurex gloves,
handles riddled with hairline cracks.
Another nail in my coffin
for every handle lost on the coffee cups.
I love you, you love me. Dishclothspeak.

Come, oblivion is what you seek,
sleep as sound as the last empty glass.
In the depths there is only one place
to go for one such as you -
with a bubble to the surface.
Reach out, we are almost one.
The faint star that draws you like a cork
was once our home. Now turn.
See my trailing finger disappear.
Forgive me if I don’t show you to the door.

*

Outside, a light assaults your eyes,
the sun rising, washing the river red.
Last calling birds haunt the air.
Leave your lyre to rust among the flowers,
push aside the brushing weeds,
part the grass bending in your honour.

My sisters are waiting.