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

“You’ve been watching me.”

“That’s right.”

“Sit down.” A chair leg scraped. Dankof sipped his drink.

Blanketed. On the periphery

“They say I’m mad.”

“There is madness in all genius.”

Traceries of light whipped within his skull. Imploded on the gragile shell. It had been hot that day. His eyeballs felt sunburned.

Dankof drained his glass, upturned it on the table. The stranger sat without a drink. His arms resting upon the table formica. Watching him.

“Perhaps.” It came out slurred. He said it again. “Perhaps.” The lights within his head were tiny stars, sapphire and green, that fled within electron orbits. They scorched his brain. His eyes were coloured lanterns. The light diffused both inside and out. The sounds were getting warmer. Comfortable. A massive semblance zephyred by, a waitress. He screwed his eyes. The cafe was almost empty. He guessed it was late. Odd. Behind the sheet plate window were sketches of a street. Charcoal sketches. That moved. Though not as his moved. A great Tiger Moth beat against the sketch that moved. That was odd too. “When are you leaving?” There was a grating noise. His temples throbbed. It came again.

“When are you leaving?”

“Soon.” The word slithered off his tongue without effort. Perhaps he had not said it. Though it had sounded like him. “You think ...“ he belched, “you think I’m a genius?” Glazed lanterns turned upon the stranger. In the poor light they looked like eyes.

“Yes. Everyone thinks you are a genius.”

“Though not everyone likes me.”

“That is understandable.”

‘It is.” He had meant it as a question, but his inflection was wrong. The stranger remained silent. Dankof was too weary to repeat the words. He wanted to sleep.

“Do you know what they say of me?”

No response.

“They say I am the man with the cast iron soul.” He was careful to pronounce his words slowly, deliberately. “Cast iron soul.” He put his arms across the table, lowered his head. A breeze was tugging at his shoulder. Raising his arm. “You cannot sleep here.” A monotone sound. That voice. Cannot? C-A-N-N-O-T? You mean can’t. Christ man you mean CAN’T.

The cafe was almost empty now. It gyrated by him until the door canted before his eyes, a sudden blossom, an explosion of space. It paused for a second then effloresced, swept forward, leaving him and the stranger alone in the street. It was raining. The stranger led the way, Dankof’s arm around his shoulders. Both were part of the sketch now. Black and grey. A simulacrum masterpiece. Dankof pulled from the stranger. Tottered. “No man shall lead another’s destiny,” he croaked. And giggled. For a moment the senile universe was panic stricken. Vortical. Seesawing. Dankof laughed. “It’s all right.” Eyes wet. “I’ve got you.” Choking he steadied the jogging angles. Tilted the perspective upright. They walked. Polished darkness wandered by. Shop windows without light. A long, black chitinous street like the back of a beetle. Was that where they were?

The stranger was speaking. His jaws worked like those of a praying mantis. Snap. Snap. Snap. If there were words, Dankof did not hear them. They were cut too short. Clipped too precise. They were gone before Dankof’s consciousness could grab hold of them, dissect the consonants, make sense. The black beetle seemed to rise, settle, and rise again.. Things no longer seemed odd. Except that surroundings were becoming sharp, clarified. REAL. That was odd. Dankof looked around him. “Where are we?”

“It does not matter.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a club of mine.”

Dankof washed his hands across his face. Gulped the fresh air. He felt sick.

*

She wore a mask of purple shantung, the orifices for the eyes, nose and mouth being of a subtle mauve and litmus. As they pushed through the doorway she hurried forward clucking nothing platitudes and pulling at their coats. Dankof stubbornly refused to part with his. The hostess introduced herself as Toison, new to the establishment and eager to please. Even to Dankof she made a striking figure. Clad in white marocain, adorned only by a garnet sash, the dress trailed the ground. The jet coiffure piled high clasped to the skull in jewelled bands and combs; the skin was dyed the vogue lemon/amber. Prattling pleasantries, she showed them through the high arched doorway to the gaming room and left them. The stranger and Dankof quickly found a secluded table away from the central gaming tables and the stage show. A waiter hurried forward recognising the stranger as the owner. They both ordered drinks. The stranger turned to Dankof. “Do you like girls?” The words sounded familiar. Like something out of ‘Casablanca’.

“Girls don’t interest me. I once had a dog. Once.”

“Yes?”

“Could do whatever I wanted with that dog. Anything. Until one day the brute bit me. So I beat it. After a time the animal began to stink so I had to bury it. I’ve never the same since.”

“You should try girls.”

“Maybe.”

A negress had left the swirls of people colour around the stage and now stood before Dankof. He noted abstractedly that she was naked. Cimmerian polished ebonite. Had the stranger signalled to her? - “Black girls can teach you strange ways. Pleasure is amorphous, faceted, hiatic. This girl can sustain, polarise, abberate pleasure. Spiral it to excruciating heights ...”

“Christ I loved that dog.”

There was a soft sigh. The negress moved her thighs, more a gesture of discomfort than an attempt at lure. One hand rested above the hollow of her rump, the other hung listlessly by her side. Dankof watched tiny nova scintillate and pulsate behind the nipples of her breasts. Corruscate about the aurora. He wondered how those heavy black breasts would look behind a crisp white bra. Attractive. The thought abiogenic. Fluttered within the libido, railering neoteric images. Something stirred between his legs. He threw back his drink. Coughed.

“I’d like another.”

“Her name is Shelia.”

Shelia sat down.

*

An oscillation was sighing through the air. A song perhaps. Grey sky pressed flat against the window pane. A 40-watt bulb burned thick orange, perhaps a nova ten billion miles away. Perhaps the moon next door. Dankof blinked. Turned upon the floor, from his stomach on to his back. Graphs ellipsed from dilating pupils to the peeling wallpaper and were lost among the crocus and hibiscus. Shelia had gone. The thought was a fragile one, somehow brittle. He mulled it carefully. Shelia had gone. The rumpled bed was a dejected shrine to the previous night. The love he had made with Shelia, or rather she with him, was theirs, yet lost. Dankof sat upon his arse, stared at his feet. The grey window was to his back. Grey held no life. Even his back smelled the lifeless pallor of the cadaver day. The stranger ... When had he left the stranger? He stirred. The stranger had had no name. Had given none. Dankof did not like that. A leftover from bygone days. All strangers were bogeys. The most infamous of whom was Billy Boo. Dankof would find Billy. And Shelia. Especially Shelia.

Dankof looked around. This was not his room. Perhaps Billy’s. Perhaps Shelia’s. Perhaps Billy and Shelia were ... Perhaps.

Dankof struggled to his feet. Shuffled toward the door. Toward the rotting stairwell and warped bannister centipede thing and stumbled. Downward.

Behind a 40-watt nova snapped out, plunging a stricken world into the pallid beige of daylight.

Asterisks arced across the sky, the play of hues synchro-tronically controlled to the highest decibels. One-armed bandits crackled and blazed in banks of neon fire and mirror chromium. Pinball machines rattle-prattled, lasers of life for a coin. Movement. Smoke. Ozone stink and polish. All razor-edged and fast, pouring through his eyes and drowning his brain. Dankof sat chasing breath. There was a Coke bottle before him and someone waiting. He struggled through his pockets, paid. Absently he drank. She had said there were many men before him. And before them many boys. And further back? She had laughed. “Before then, she had said, “I used a Coke bottle. Marvellous the things you can do with a Coke bottle.”

Dankof held the bottle gently. Caressed its length. Had lain there. She. Part of the darkness, as solid, sable upon linen snow. While his bright body eclipsed hers with muted sound. She writhed. For him. With him. Until they slept. He had dreamed and turned, his skull aflame with something new, his bowels. And in one dream - of many dreams - he had possessed a black penis, and she a white vagina. A subconscious implication. She the virgin. And he?

Seas of corrosion weathered behind his eyes, sketching within his mind new miracles of art, each flawless about its central construction, that of Shelia. Rosebud eyes flicker-flaring within parameters of darkness, wounded lips mouthing beneath his …

Dankof dropped his hands to his lap. His guts felt like broiled mince, his heart had shifted to his head, was moaning in his ears. Someone pushed by, knocked against the tripod acetal table sending the Coke bottle spangling, bouncing across the floor. It did not break. Dankof did not notice. He had fallen limp across the table, his skin pearl sheathed, his insides cycloned to his ribs. From somewhere.

Dull sound, hot, gaining momentum. A jukebox scream infiltrating consciousness. Something hung limp between his legs. A stunted scorpion sting, he thought, staggering for the stale fresh air of the passing streets. And searching.

*

The sound of the snow gave him a headache. The swirl of cotton moths distracted, melting on his lips and face. Beneath the crystalline pavements grasshoppers rustled membrane upon membrane, bodies shifting.

The velocity of the sun amazed him. The black airs behind the moon dropped closer. Mica dew flailed hissing polyarcs above.

This is July, he thought.

And yet it did not seem strange.

“Where have you been?”

Dankof started. It was the stranger. Lounging against the colonnade of a polyarc. Dankof stepped within the cone of light. “I’ve been looking for you. Christ, I couldn’t find the club. I was beginning to think ...”

“You shouldn’t.” The Bogey pulled his collar around his ears. “We’d best hurry.” Bogey moved off, Dankof following. Abruptly he halted. Stared skyward. The moon breathed cold, shimmering within the black waters of space. Strange, he thought. The moon seemed..odd. He smiled. Of course. He was looking at the other side.

*

The club was as before (though Dankof could remember little of ‘before’). A bleak dreary shell choking the warmth within. Dankof noticed for the first time the small green neon sign that read ‘The Id Inn’, and noted the vast contrast between this club and the plusher neo-dens downtown with their blazing chromural s and photo-murals.

Toison the hostess clucked and fussed, succeeding this time in dragging away Dankof’s coat before showing the two to the gaming room.

Dankof sat looking about him.

“Shelia will be here later. First we drink. And then ...” The Bogey paused for cinematic emphasis. “To business.”

“Business?” From the corner of his eye Dankof caught Shelia on the stage. He turned. She moved lithe, tumbling hessian tresses belling about her dark shoulders, a vivid yellow ‘8’ swelling from oiled breasts to jewelled navel. Weals of green and purple macula

Here and there red-dragon nova flailed traces that marred and chilled the ashdust of the stars. A vast cosmic happening orchestrated behind his brain, beyond his eyes. To where the darkness blurred to attenuated feathers of light that whirlpooled beyond a non-existent periphery. A volcano of autumn leaves scratched sparks against the sky. Far.

In the distance he could see where some silly bastard had left a hole in the sky. And further still a nicotine stain where another had tried to burn down the sun.

He blinked.

A neuron whip-snap.

Oblivion.

The eyes awakened. Masturbated darkness. Fondled shape. Below teardrops of despair had crystallised a ragged Mazda echelon far out beyond the balcony edge. The sun shivered. Transmuted ad infinitum a pulped and bloody rose, a livid venereal scab, a wounded ochre Xpelair that sucked and wheezed the timeless ice and star ash and spat mucous substance to the phlegm of stillborn stars.

Dankof stirred. The experience was akin to that of a wet dream. Bogey stood picking his nose. Dankof noticed for the first time that Billy had pennies for eyes. A light drizzled had sprung up.

To Dankof’s rear, against the verandah wall, someone had pasted a yellow 40 x 30 poster. The dog—ears hung limp. It read:
AMERICAN DEMARCATION ZONE. YOU MUST NOT PASS THIS POINT. And below in shrapnel scipt: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING COMMUNIST HELD TERRITORY. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Someone, thought Dankof, had an odd sense of humour. But then the Yanks were everywhere these days. Perhaps they had been here first. Before even God.

Bogey gestured to the stacked pile at his left. There stood a full-length easel, blank canvasses bolting back the sheen of the ruptured sun, multigauge brushes, tubes of colour, a palette, varnish, copperplates, acid and etching tools.

“All you will need.” The Bogey yawned. The light drizzle spun webs across his skin. He moved to the head of the staircase. Dankof cleared his threat. “And what in hell am I supposed tn do with all this?” Billy barely paused. “Produce,” he murmured.

flashed from back and thighs, and a crimson arabesque entwined her forehead. Like the crown of Christ, thought Dankof not very piously. He turned back to Billy. “You want me to work for you?”

Billy drank, nodded.

“On what?”

The stranger shrugged. “You must see for yourself”

“Now?”

“If you like.” Bogey put down his glass. The stage music had stopped. A shadow breathed as Shelia sat down. She said nothing. To his own surprise Dankof felt acutely embarrased now that the negress was once more close by. Sheepishly, he turned to Bogey. “Where are we going?’

“To the starcase.”

Dankof smiled. “You mean the staircase.”

The Bogey said nothing.

*

The Starwell swayed; stuttered the ancient planks and bannisters, stirred bone dust that touched at the nostrils. Gossamer web pendulumed; muted whispers traced whorls within the dust. Smeared light reverberated, died without albedo, cancered foetid shadows of blood and gravesoil. The sounds of the nightclub below mutated to a backdrop grumble, to a final arc-weld with the scuttling of spider and cockroach, and the sough of a sickly yellow wind. The caricature before Dankof moved ever upward, Dankof following. After a time he paused, his heart labouring, his frame maladjusted to such strain. He farted once or twice

“How much longer?”

“One season.”

There was a bad smell in the air.

It was some time before Dankof noticed the faint oyster glow from above. He noticed also that the knotted foot planks had given way to finely wrought ironwork, curved and shelved upward to slender ivory and marble colonnades. Panting they reached the Starwell head. It was surrounded by a wrought balcony in the same style as the upper stairway. Sucking the ice air Dankof stared about. Benson & Hedges bluesmoke curlicued the stars. Toilet paper streamers whipped cobra snakes from a smashed oblated sun.

And the Bogey was gone.

*

Dankof worried his way past the piled canvas and blood copper plates. He broke open several paint tubes and smeared colour onto the palette. He picked up a fine gauge brush and scratched his ear with its tip. He stared at the canvas. He glared at the oil taints mutated beneath the light of a bludgeoned aureole.

Shades of pain telescoped behind his eyes, each pupil an iris leaf, manipulating spectrum blacks and grey. Dankof was attempting to create.

Stasis, artistically speaking, was irritating but not unusual. The condition was prevalent when Dankof was either neurotically anxious or sexually obsesses. He was both.

Dankof picked at his nose. His distraction grew. His dissatisfaction blistered. After a time he swore. In disgust he turned his back on the vast expanses and began his descent of the stairs.

*

Behind, the swollen vaginal tract tunnelling to the womb of darkness perceptibly sighed, closing upon itself secrets not to be revealed to Dankof. Nor to anyone else. Nature was a prude.

*

The Bogey sat counting Embassy coupons. His face resembled something a dog had coughed up. “You’ve finished?”

Dankof arched an eyebrow. “In twenty minutes I could barely sign my name. No. I’m afraid this commission I must return with thanks. And apologies. The task is utterly beyond me. A box-Brownie enthusiast could do better with his eye and lens than I with the finest colouring and canvas.”

The Bogey looked angry but said nothing. Dankof shuffled from one foot to the other. His hands were held behind his back resting at the base of the spine. He coughed.

“And Shelia?”

The Bogey looked up from his coupons. “Shelia is pregnant. She is at St. Helena’s Maternity Hospital. Giving birth to your child.”

Dankof stared aghast. His lower jaw sagged.

“Impossible …”

The Bogey pulled a Woodbine from a pack. “You resemble a goldfish.’

“Impossible …”

“I assure you, you do. Take a look in the mirror.”

“Pregnant ... but only last night ...”

“Two seasons,” sighed the Bogey. “One up. And one down.”

Dankof sat down. Abruptly he stood up again. An immense cymbal was thundering within his ears. It echoed like an old Vera Lynn lament.

Numbly he moved in the direction of the main entrance. Billy raised a hand. “Please.” He pointed to one side. “Tradesmen’s Entrance.” Toison whispered forward, Dankof’s coat draped across one arm. Automatically he accepted it. Shuffled by Billy. And out into the chill dawn air.

*

The swollen bruise of the sun shrugged, lurched as a diseased heart, bleeding the ugly city a cathartic rose.

A hint of crystal winter held the air. Across the pavement valley-shadow a mangy cat stirred among the rubble leftovers at a cafe’s backside. Its trembled hair erect in the soughing steam from the kitchen’s Jacksons.

The shoulder of the street was low and dark. Isolated. Dankof added to the isolation.

Somewhere, out there, he thought, lay Shelia. Dark canyon thighs in fault. She moaned. Writhed within sweat. Cursing him, Dankof. The Creative Genius. Cursing it, the dawn, and what that dawn delivered. Awaiting the countless timeless sharded seconds that stacked like cards into minutes. Awaiting the sweet silent patience of Negro night.

And giving birth.

At last.

At last.

To a tiny shiny plastic bastard.