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

As if where

Birth is
Pure moment

Birth is
Pure moment

Where the sunlight falls on you –
Like an absence, is being where ‘I am’

I have the remains of a voice
With the language to gather you in

Drop dead

No not that –
And it could be almost anyone
Just that it happens to be you

A first attempt
To banish someone watching,
Ink   the pens of others

Who’s writing this? Not I?
But that relief being found
Each day’s arrival with its slight reward

It’s always there
A faintly irritating sound
Like wind-chimes from a neighbour’s garden

Somebody out there
Who’s in my skin   frail perch
Outside in the restless air
 

Mask

This poor art wants to know, is the tightrope
You’re walking on actually there?
The way it makes do with particulars
It walked a line and briefly

Failed to understand
Something his life tried to do.
It was the attempt as if he were shadowy bulk,
Set against all that light.

The way a breeze introduced itself to the curtain –
Something moves out there
Like a voice playing with silence.
Mouth-heavy, she turns in her sleep

While beside her he breathes in that calm
Noticing age   Just soar
Autumn’s dwindling
Arcades of sunlight

And now there is a faint
Upheaval in the air,
Bead curtain and eye-dazzle of broken lines.
Draw back the curtain and here he is, the reader
 

Just a touch

Such magnificent horizons are like an unfinished statement                   
Left ‘hanging in the air’
And here they come with their carefully smoothed down
                                                                     poems
Multiple exchange of body fluids
That circulate in the economy of verse

An air full of broken branches
Was it meaning   that kind of
Lingering sheen on the surface of the thing?
The game it played with itself
While we stood back and watched

The aim of course it was intercourse with shades,
Here at the edge the ex-fathers
In the shadow of words.
What the words bring is relief from absence
For a moment this sense of arrival

The thing about

it simply is
Where a statue is trying to remember itself
More and more is an echo perhaps
That waited around for an answer
‘I didn’t quite catch what you said.’
A performance of self?
It’s using my words to remember the silence with
Till time walks off without me
It’s something that makes a shape to remember us by
Only this time you are the event.
In front of a gold backcloth
The performers moved, slightly.
You turned to go and
Your pose was that moment
And it was the paint again
Like the sky all over your arms