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

So you’ll aim towards the sky
And rise you’ll rise high today
– Jason Lytle
For Dan, Sam, Rob, Nicole, Lucy, Adrian (& me)

I am sitting on a tombstone in Holy Trinity churchyard
& afterward I shall wish that time had stopped.
From Bootham Bar to the Northern Wall
they’re all
headdown together yelping on mobile ‘phones
to one another or leaving
somewhere for somewhere identical
else. Myself I’m alone
with a pretty good book & a coke & a jazz cigarette
& just for the moment it’s all alright.
Ten minutes I’m back at work.
Five hours or so & I’ll be
avoiding again the Fridaynight round
of lines hooks screws & taxis from meatracks where
the modified girls & boys are pullulating,
lookin’ good, feelin’ great
young slim & pretty at the start of the third millennium;
all this to the inaudible tune
of ‘for tonight we’ll merry merry be’
in minor keys. Tomorrow, we’ll be sober. Nine minutes
I’m back in a fug of hot computer & vast frustration
drinking ‘springwater quality’ & dry
from talking talking talking to a tide
of earless voices. Whatever it’s like out there
in here the weather’s the colour of a dead TV
& the unfitting mirrorglass scripts will hardly disguise
dreams of riverbanks open spaces & slow from a phenomenal world
invented by William Gibson.
But like, transparent no, net. You could slip through & be
medieval or 18th century
...& relax... on a settle in diamondpaned sunlight while outside
waggons rumble you never heard on cobbles you didn’t tread
between beneath a dead flood
of impressive ‘taches, periwigged gentlemen.
Yes, there is still
clack of a few lame horseshoes; on asphalt, dragging
(all gone wading in horsedung, here comes another sore throat)
damp eyes & lolling mouths, not useful things.
Yes people will pay
to gawp at tack on this broken rock surrounded by unbroken sea.
Yes, it’s high tide in the greenback pool. Yes
you can feel like a tourist at home:
the place is swimming with Americans.
The place is swarming with
arms fingers & cameras in dependent humming life.
There certainly might be a face to put with some of them.
Perhaps batrachian Lovecraft-things
which have crept from the bitter depths behind
plastic masks with metalblue eyes to stain the sweet island with sulphurous
slime. They fill
the everywhere almost identical coffee-chains cast up in the city
to remind them of home. They seem
suspiciously dry, maybe; or maybe they’ve just
been turned into leather by the UV we don’t get here. They look
really, familiar enough in kind. They even speak
something like our language & can join
all the other separate mes and usses moving
between the golden streets & the grey clouds drifting
off to the north over Haxby. And all of our fragile lives,
loaded with advertising & governmental numbers
(presenting AC 32 91 53 J,
name unnecessary, no rank to speak of)
not broken yet. Not broken yet, but all this Higher Thought,
keeps leading to the insidious boring question
‘why am I not dead yet?’ like rain
out of a sunlit sky. Down at the riverside cinema
an EXIT sign shines steadily green above
in the corner of each dark space where imaginations
slump before flickering pictures. Their bodies
glint in the darkness; we are
our own tiny jokes on the world
& it’s not that bad; our baby loves are growing beneath the sun
which is okay; we are made
of little bits of stars & that’s alright, it’s
fine. Glazed with what’s left of the rain
the pavements shine
from Fossbank up to the Micklegate Bar
and I’m
at peace in a café on Church Street where
the light is like water or time,
flooding across every surface with allloving change
riding its warmth. The heat on my arms
has turned each hair into translucent gold: I have a corona or am
part of the sun as the sun looks down at noon
on the terraces stretched from the Golden Ball to the Swan
& the Regency palaces on an avenue named for a shantytown,
or the brand new riverside flats Mr. Rowntree invented; my own
dear little home at the back end of Clifton...
far off... near at hand... far off...
so many buildings beating above their shadows
in the arms of the light, in the love of the persons that tend them,
the city a prayer to the sun. And all our fragile lives,
moving within it, listening to it moving, are starting to bear
unmuffled how not to break.
Summer is good and all the people there.